There's a Tuesday in early October that I take off work on the false pretense of illness and head south to a clearwater river of Alaska's interior.

On the weekend its banks and its campgrounds are congested by a circus of mercenaries. These people are like me - only here for the salmon, making a last go at the last run of sportfish in the Interior before a hard northern winter sets in - though I would argue that the similarities begin and end there. While they dredge the waters with heavy ballasts of metal and spinning combos and treat the whole affair like a family reunion, I dutifully prescribe to the sacrament of the well-swung fly and all of its implications - the most critical being that I fish alone.

I'm on the banks at sunrise. The air is thin, echoing, and frost-on-yer-flyline cold. The water temps are somewhere around 36.

Labrador tea and other sweet musks of the boreal hover like an inversion layer as I slip into waders. The campground around me is deserted, an almost tangible peace exuding from the gravel and the absence of recreational mammoths. Somewhere I can feel the peace in the salmon, too. They'll be badgered like a woman in a homeless camp come Friday night, but for now they can exist as they were meant to - ignored. I make a pact with myself that I'll only hook four before calling it a day. Wouldn't want to disturb them any more than that.

As I fish out a sink-tip and a tapered leader from my vest, my cell phone buzzes like an insect trapped under a foot. By reflex I worm it out and behold a work email. Someone needs something by tomorrow. I shut off the phone and smash it back into my pocket.

They'll get it tomorrow.        

Satisfied with my gear, I navigate the matted camber down to the river where the water slides by - slow and clear as bootlegged moonshine. Though I feel the cold already leaking through my triple layers, it looks like it's going to be a bluebird day. A few juncos are out and chatter like a high-school woodwinds section, the notes serene but following no real purpose. They're broken by the percussion cackles of whisky jacks.

It feels good to be out, like some natural impulse of evolution is being satisfied. The birds fly south. The salmon battle upstream. I go fishing.

 - - - -

On the pilgrimage upriver, I consider swapping to a bead and trying to nab a grayling. There are some giants in here - eighteen, nineteen, twenty-inchers - but after a brief debate I decide against it. I'm here for the cohos.

As I near my bend and my pool I can sense something is wrong. There's motion where there should be silence; a gentle, rhythmic swish-swash, its source concealed by the spruce trees. I hope it's a moose, a cow and her calf making the crossing near the shallow ford above my favored run. My steps become hesitant. Fingers crossed.

The silhouette reaches my eyes and my heart plummets. It's not a moose. It's a fisherman.

He's not seen me yet - he's in the middle of casting of a fly - but I'm relieved at least to find he is a fellow Puritan. I consider the option of fishing with him, a sin bordering on heresy, then weigh it against wading upstream a quarter mile more and trying to locate a new pool there. I'm not left thinking long when I hear his voice break.

"Howdy there." He sounds nice enough and I imagine my grandpa would've said the same thing in the same way.

"Doin' any good?" I ask.

"Oh," he says, "brought one to the net. Hooked two more but they threw it."

If he's annoyed by the lost fish, he doesn't show it. He's old, a pearly beard well-kept around beaming cheeks, not skinny but not fat, either, a checkered mackinaw under his waders and a practiced arm that makes efficient casts like a piece of honed machinery. He wears a hat that I can only think to compare to Indiana Jones.

"Been out here long?"

"Got here about eight." His lips are pursed as he rips the streamer back toward himself like the pull-string of a lawn mower. 

Eight o'clock was an hour ago. He had to have hiked up in the dark to beat me. Gotta give him credit for that. He begins double-hauling the fly and after a few beats he flings the load, the line whirling like a slinky, mercury flecks of river water sparkling away in the dawn.

"Good one," I mumble.

He either doesn't hear me or doesn't have a response. I think he knows it was a good one. He's done this awhile.

I step forward, reluctant to get too close on account of how I know I'd feel if some intruder came up on me while I was fishing alone in a honey-hole. Then again, I do feel a sense of ownership for this bend. It takes a good hike to get here, not to mention wading through a half-mile of opposing current. Most of the weekenders are too lazy to invade this run, that's for sure. But he's somehow managed it - and before me, of all things.

"Where you from?" I ask, disguising one of my encroaching steps toward him. I expect the answer will be Fairbanks. But God don't let it be Anchorage. That'd send my teeth to churning. City-fella comin' up here and stealing my spot...even if he does swing flies...

"I live just down the road," he says cheerfully, the last word enunciated in a grunt as he sets the hook into a good fish. The rod loops down, kisses the water, jars as the salmon screams away. His reel sounds old and metallic as the drag churns out line.

"There ya go." A vicarious thrill passes through me.

The fish leaps clear of the surface, its scarlet body flipping and somersaulting like an orca. The old man plays it well and soon swoops in with the net. I can see the fish is a good buck, long and broad, and he holds it just above the water as we both admire it.

"Beautiful," I say, staring at the fish's face. It's black as coal, wandering from a fearsome kype as it heats to vermillion on the flanks. These fish are doomed to die, in the next few days, in fact, but here on this Alaskan river death is sure pretty.

He lets it go without words, the lingering slap of the fish's tail around his wrist echoing over the sleepy river.

"Beautiful," I repeat.

"This is the best trip of my year," he says, washing his hands in the biting water. "My last hoorah before winter."

I nod, for I know the feeling.

The old man fishes around in his wader pocket for something.

"Seein' those red streaks of salmon drift upriver is always bittersweet," he says, pulling out a plastic turquoise bag. "The coho have arrived, but I know the end has, too. Bugler?"

He's rolled a cigarette from the pouch and offers it to me.

Normally I decline. Smoking only serves to chap the windpipe and tank the value of cars, or so I've been warned, and the wife will wonder what the hell is up with me if I come home smelling like the Navy surplus store. But here, with the old man, sending off that spectacular coho, cherishing a victory of the catch but accepting a defeat of season closure all at once, it seems right; liturgical, even, for two kindred slaves like us. 

"Sure," I nod, and I take it from him. He leans forward with a glinting Zippo.

I haven't smoked since I was a teenager, when the tobacco went in on those delinquent nights same as the alcohol did. I'm reminded of how far away those days are when I look into the old man's face. His eyes are blue, like mine, not cerulean but icy and mnemonic.

"Thanks," I say.

He lights his own.

"You'd better make a cast, son. There's a good school in there."

"I don't want to steal your spot."

The Bugler tobacco is clean, biting. Blue.

"Ain't my spot. Evidently you want it enough to hike up here on a workday," he says. "You go for it."

"Atta boy," I hear.

I play the fish with patience and let him tire out in five distant runs. One nearly takes me to the backing and I'm surprised to see the fish cartwheel across the surface fifty yards downstream. At long last I grab him by the tail and look him over. It's another buck, his face inky, his mouth rimmed with teeth ragged as a mako's. One last look of thanks and I dip him back under. He goes without fuss and I step back.

"Your turn."

The old man smiles and I feel strangely that I'd hate to be fishing alone right now.

"If you say so, kid."

We spend the next half-hour discussing our respective employment in detail just shy of taboo. I learn his origins and he learns mine. We talk of seasons past; those images that feed our day-dreams, the early mornings chasing these cohos, the ones that got away and the ones that didn't. The river glitters as we cast and hook fish, alternating when one is brought to the net or snaps off. I catch three, all handsome specimens, and I stand by my resolve to hook but one more before calling it a day. Beneath and around us in the clear water, hovering atop the pea gravel, there are cohos battling, guarding redds, pumping out eggs like a coin dispenser, prohibiting the voracious grayling from getting too near. We watch dead ones drift past us like ghosts, their flesh bleached and shredded like cotton. I wonder how many of their eggs will hatch in the commencing months, if any.

The coho is a slave to the natural law - the very same that pulls the birds south and me riverward. Bound to sacrifice, to closure, to rebirth that is hopeful but never guaranteed.

- - - - -

"You and I need these fish," the old man says near mid-morning.

"We need ‘em, huh?"

"That's right. They're the last fish before the snow flies and the mercury dips below zero. Before we can't do it anymore."

We both just stand there, two fellas hemorrhaging with unknown, the river chuckling as it rolls by.

"Elsewhere you can fish through the winter if you want." He pulls out a new fly and starts to spin a knot. "But this ain't elsewhere. This is Alaska, where winter means sunless days, where these salmon grind into the gravel like a cookie left in coffee too long, and where other fish plunge to deep ebony holes below a yard of ice. There's no compromise, no miracle hatch to fish in February. There's the closure of October - the last run of the cohos - like a door slamming so violent it shakes the house, then there's the emergence of mid-April when you become unsure of whether or not you retained your skill through the winter and start hoping the fish are still around. You almost forget the feel of waders around your legs."

Every word he says resonates so purely with me I wonder if we've met before. If he can somehow see my soul.

"And casting ain't like riding a bike," he continues, finally satisfied with the clinch he's tied and shifting his rod in hand for another cast. "When you're finally able to get back at it, it's gonna be like the creaky whine of a screen door, the months of inactivity showing themselves like the wrinkles that grow on your face. Look at ‘em all. Each year it seems crazier and crazier that a damned old man like me would struggle up this river to catch a fish I'll just release. But I have to."

And I don't need to ask why.

- - - - -

We each have a Bugler on the hike back to the campground.

Going with the water is easier, but we still go slow as if relishing the latent thrills of the day, afraid they'll dissolve if we rush. I didn't fill my quota but that is just fine. The afternoon is full and pleasant and the single digits have warmed into the thirties.

We bid our goodbyes to the salmon with a two-fingered wave - the fisherman's salute - and promise to be back for the first grayling of next May. The river will be different then, we'll be different then, but we'll be playing our game just the same. We make it to the campground where we linger for probably too long, kicking at the gravel with our boots and commenting on the quality of our fly rods.

At long last he says he ought to be getting home. Wife will be wondering where he is. I agree; mine will be wondering why I took off work on a Tuesday. The old man and I shake hands, his calloused grip leaving a phantom ache in my carpals.

"It was good fishing with you," he says. 

His words are more of a closure than the cohos.

"The same," I say, and I mean it.

He turns and trundles away toward home, fly rod in hand, boots clunking, head tipped back as if he's smelling the sweet musks of the boreal without a care in the world.

"Next time I'll beat ya there," I yell, and he waves a hand of acknowledgment, the two-fingered bid-you-adieu, and disappears around the trees.

Something plunges in my stomach once he's long gone. Something about him; my new friend; my fellow slave.