October

My first jones was for wild fish, as it should be. I headed south, to investigate a little wild trout stream in the Ozarks, fairly well off the beaten path. I’d never been before and had no idea what to expect, although knowing a little about most Ozark wild trout waters, I didn’t have very high expectations.

Roaming along ridges and valleys on poor little gravel backroads, I finally wound up at an old fescue pasture with an innocent-looking sign barely noticeable along the


roadway. I pulled in and strung up my rod, trudging through locusts and greenbriar, multiform rose and other assorted brambles, for a few hundred yards before it opened up to the stream.

A pretty place, I walked into a tiny, but relatively deep, run along a tall stone bluff. Upstream was a small pool, not much bigger than one of those ten-foot galvanized swimming pools you sometimes see in people’s backyards. On one side, my side, was a small rootwad from

a young sycamore. I tied on a small copper John and attached an indicator about three feet above, and tossed the rig in behind the rootwad.

The first fish which came to hand was a six-inch striped shiner, and my heart sank, figuring this stream was another dog. The second fish, though, was a healthy, lovely, six-inch rainbow.

I probably caught twenty five or so of the fish in about two-hundred yards of stream, working both nymphs and dries. The biggest was a handsome twelve-incher which exploded on a hairwing dun. All the fish were pretty, though unlike many I’d seen out west. Their flanks were more a lemon-yellow, there tops a deep olive green, and their sides bisected by a crimson band, wider in the center than at either end. Purplish-silver parr marks, orange-red fins with white tips, and comparatively few and tiny spots, hardly any lower than the lateral line. Pretty fish though, and I adored them.