"Damn it", I say. "There's no way I'm going to land this fish without following him back down through all that shit. I'm going to break him off."
I hear a gasp behind me.
The three words "I'll do it!" were blurted out with a combination awestruck and desperate quality. Two days of not catching fish had taken their toll.
I thought half a second. "Great! Hand me your rod. Don't drown going through those trees. When your done catch up to me and I'll save you some good water."
We both went our separate ways. I getting the better half of the deal, I thought. The fourth rule of the Deschutes is that you almost never land a big one when they do that.
The next day I have Jay by the hand again, and we are both holding our breath because I have him in one of those classic Deschutes situations. We are whispering, hunkered down in waist deep water six inches from the bank, holding onto branches for support. Exactly nine feet upstream, just under his rod tip if Jay reaches out is a very large trout, showing his head periodically as he rolls on craneflies being swept around the tree root that acts as a break in the current. Jay's eyes are bulging out from the immediacy of it all, watching that nose, then dorsal fin, then tail, roll methodically up and down every
20 seconds. And its about to get more immediate. Jay is now afraid to make the cast. He's shaking.
I talk him through it. First one too far out. Second one ignored, wrong timing, fish wasn't ready to come up. Third one on line, floating down, the head appears, dorsal fin, fly gone.
"NOW!", I yell.
Jay sets, flounders back off balance trying to stay tight to a fish that has bolted straight back at us. I catch his shoulder to keep him out of the next six inches of water which is ten feet deep. Jay is now screaming.
"It's in my legs!" Sure enough his rod is bending in a U pointing right back at his crotch. Spin, twist,
