Cast

The boy's boot slipped on the first cobblestone and his father caught his elbow without looking. They stood a moment. The water barely covered the felt soles.

"Shuffle your feet. Don't lift them."

The boy shuffled. The cobble spread in a wide apron on both sides of the channel, dry and bleached in the sun. Heat rose off the exposed stone in a faint shimmer. What water remained ran in a single thread down the center, clear enough to count every stone on the bottom.

His father carried the rod in his left hand, a nine-foot five-weight. The boy carried the net and the box of flies. They waded upstream toward a bend where cottonwoods leaned over the bank, roots exposed in a tangle above the waterline. The upper branches were bare, dead wood bleached the color of the cobble, though the lower limbs still held leaves, smaller than a child's palm. A white crust marked the rock face at the bend, a mineral line at the height of the father's chest. Below it the stone was darker, still damp in the shade. His free hand brushed the line as they passed. His fingers came away dry.

"See where it deepens past that rock? The water changes color."

The boy looked. The channel narrowed at the bend and dropped into a pool maybe fifteen feet across. The water there was green-dark, the only section where the bottom disappeared.

"That's where they hold. Current brings food to them so they don't have to work. You want to be downstream and across."

He took the fly box and opened it on his palm. His fingers moved without hesitation to a small elk-hair caddis, size sixteen, and pinched it free. He sat on the boulder and threaded the tippet through the eye of the hook. Six inches through. Five wraps around the standing line. Tag end through the small loop, then the large one. He wet the knot in his mouth, pulled it tight, clipped the tag with his teeth. His hands did all of this in the time it took the boy to set down the net.

"Your grandfather used to spit on it," he said. "Same idea."

He stood and stripped line from the reel, the click of it precise in the quiet. The river made almost no sound. A full river has a voice, the churn of riffles, the hiss of current over gravel, the deeper note of water folding into a pool. This water whispered. Between casts, nothing but the dry click of grasshoppers in the sage.

He false-cast twice, loading the rod, the line unrolling behind him and then forward in a narrow loop, the tip tracking a straight path. On the third stroke he released. The line shot out and settled on the surface above the pool, the caddis landing soft at the head of the dark water.

"Watch the fly."

The boy watched. The caddis drifted six inches before the current caught the belly of the line and began to drag.

"See that? The line's moving faster than the fly. You mend upstream." He lifted the rod tip, rolled his wrist, and laid the line back with a new curve. The caddis floated free again, riding the crease where faster water met slow.

Nothing rose.

He let the drift play out, picked up, and cast again. The same motion, the same mend. The boy stood behind him in water that reached his shins and watched the weight shift from back foot to front, the wrist stopping clean at the top of the stroke. The sun was directly overhead, the light hard and white at altitude, and the air so dry it cracked the father's lips. Sweat darkened the back of his shirt between the shoulder blades. The neoprene waders held the heat against the boy's legs, but he stood without shifting.

"You try."

The boy took the rod with both hands. Held it a moment before adjusting his grip, thumb on top of the cork, elbow close. His first cast piled the line in a heap. His second was better. By the fourth the loop was tight and the fly landed within a foot of where his father had been placing it.

"Good. Now mend."

He lifted and rolled. The line resettled. The caddis rode the seam. His jaw was set the way his father's was, and he did not look away from the fly. When the drift ended he picked up and cast again without being told.

The father stepped back onto the dry cobble and sat. The stone was hot through his waders. Downstream the exposed gravel stretched wide and white on both sides of the channel, and the cottonwoods threw thin shadows across stone that had been riverbed. A magpie called from somewhere in the sage. The sky was enormous and empty, blue so deep it pressed down on them. The light caught the boy's line at the top of each back-cast so it flashed once before unrolling forward.

His drift came up empty. He stripped the line in, lifted the caddis from the surface, and blew on it gently to dry the hackle. No one had taught him that. He false-cast, laid the line back out. The loop was clean. The fly landed soft.

"Where should I put the next one?" he asked, not turning around. As if the pool were a river with choices in it.

"Same seam," the father said. "Little closer to the rock."

The boy adjusted. The caddis landed an inch from the stone. The mend was smooth. The water carried it and carried it and nothing rose.