“What’s this doing in here?”
I plucked the oddball fly from its slot on the backside of a swinging leaf in my nymph box, from a place reserved for trial runs and some rarely used once-or-twice-a-year kind of stuff.
Holding the flashback fly between my thumb and first two fingers, I shook my head.
“No, you didn’t quite make it into the lineup, did you bud?”
You should know, the solitude of my favorite trout river provides me the freedom to talk to myself. And it’s become a habit — not often enough to consider me too strange, I wouldn’t think, and certainly not loud enough for streamside starlings to hear me over the breaking currents. I only comment aloud on the remarkable things, and I do so somewhere above a whisper.
But I like to speak the questions. Because these thoughts seem to command more answers when they resonate aloud.
That last question needed no reply. It was obvious. And I’ve known it for a while now. The first time out, a new fly has to make a good showing. . . .