dorsal to belly; a bright, almost orange, buffalo- humped, hook-jawed brown. Six pounds, maybe better. Bigger than my memory of a 6 pound brown from the Bighorn river ten years ago, and that was on a #6 hopper. GODDAMN! On a #16 dry! No camera, no one about to witness it. Now I was really shaking. Now some of the odd vibrations of what I had seen in riseforms earlier began to make sense, but were still cognitively impossible for me to accept. There couldn't be more, even a lot of fish this size in this little CREEK! The next pool settled it. My fly was trashed, matted and slimey, and I discovered my fly dope was missing, gone from its shoulder pocket with a worn velcro snap. I alternately washed and dried until the fly began to float again. I turned the corner around the screening bushes and my heart stopped. The pool was long and deep, turning yet another angle in the meander. In the still water of the tailout I realized I was looking at the backs of ten or more big fish. But it was the head that caught my attention. Four HUGE browns were materializing on the surface every few seconds like spotted orange submarines pushing wakes that carried to the shoreline. HOTDAMN! Now I was really shaking again. I crawled, literally, through the grass until I was in range choosing to make a longer cast rather than risk spooking fish. My first cast over the most downstream fish put it down so I went for the honeypot, floating the fly over the center of activity. A big brown snout materialized and sucked it under. One thousand one and I tightened solidly. It surged, jumped, and streaked upstream out of the pool, ran through the riffle and into submerged trees on the near shore. Equal, to my eye, in size to the previous fish. I got back most of my leader. My god this can't be happening. As I reconstructed my leader one of the browns in the head resumed rising, but with a single cast it stopped again. Suddenly I realized I was EXHAUSTED! I had been on a progressive adrenalin high for more than ninety minutes. I was drenched with sweat and shaking as though in hypothermia. I had felt that way only once before in my life, when, after my first experience casting to pods of tarpon for two hours and landing one I pleaded with my guide to guide to take me back to bonefishing. I couldn't take it any more. I literally couldn't cast. Mercifully the river swung back to the access road leading downstream to the cabin. I decided to stop fishing, on the excuse of retrieving more fly dope, but really to calm down, process, think, integrate that past four hours with REAL LIFE. My foundations of reality had been cracked and the structure was sitting askew. It was going to get worse. A lot worse Walking back to the cabin on the road Dave and Frank pulled up. Dave started to say something, then must have seen something in my expression.
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