The sun was clear and late and although enough light hustled through the trees to make the idea of competent knots somewhat convincing, delivery of actual warmth was apparently less of a priority. I hate freezing my ass off in brilliant sunshine-roaming the margins of hypothermia when confronting a delightful four-day deluge on the Naknek is one thing, but this stretches the boundaries of what I consider believable. Primarily because I can't believe I'm still out here. This is day four, and it feels like I've been lied to by more than just the sun.

For starters, there are hardly any fish in the river. Historical peak or not, it appears to support little more life than my bathtub. And second, the fish that are here seem hell-bent on refuting the lessons passed along by my eighth-grade science teacher. He was by no means a rigorous scholar, and now I realize he was probably a member of the Flat Earth Society, too, but he'd been fairly convincing on the point that all living organisms eventually needed some form of sustenance to survive. That class, if I had anything to do with the textbook, would now be called Biology as a Science Unrelated to the Facts of Fishing for Steelhead.

Third, the most accomplished liars of all-other anglers-got me again. Skykomish Sunrise? Yeah, right. Babine Special? Apparently not that special. So now I'm onto Glo-Bugs, fishing with split-shot and feeling like all the ground we've traveled from silk lines and the Lady Caroline has somehow landed us back in the Stone Age. However, it's not that I deem nymphing for ocean-run rainbows an intrinsically barbaric procedure, but rather the idea that something slightly more aesthetically pleasing might help this skunking go down a little easier.

Basically, I need to come up with an explanation for myself, sort out the behavioral oddities that send me into 40-degree water on a 38-degree day to plunk lead and egg imitations towards a fish that will in all likelihood snap my tippet the second it's hooked-if hooked, that is.

All I can come up with is a calendar: It's late October, which explains both the weather and my motives. It's Alaska's most ambiguous time of year, less autumn than damp, chilly precursor to a winter that always seems about ten minutes away. And it's always about this time I come to the startled conclusion that the summer has been wasted. One minute I'm buying fireworks off some guy in a gorilla suit standing by the highway in Houston and the next I start seeing trucks heading south on the Glenn with enormous moose racks hanging out the back. No matter how much I've fished, this sudden jolt of seasonal awareness makes me realize it hasn't been enough. Plus, these are steelhead we're talking about: capricious, vexing, maybe a little evil, but steelhead. They spend half their lives or more at sea, far from any shore, roaming thousands of miles in the open waters of the North Pacific. There they must evade any number of large marine predators, including seals, sea lions, sharks, and killer whales, before eventually reaching sexual maturation and returning to their natal freshwaters to spawn. Here we fish for them, undertaking hundreds of long, wet, cold hours of toil, often punctuated by crushing moments of the darkest despair. It's never easy, and frequently hopeless. Sooner or later, during every steelhead outing, you'll have to face the notion that the next ten thousand casts will come up empty.

But then they also can grow to sizes of 20 pounds or more. They fight like crazy. And whether or not it's a good thing, steelhead are part of the small cabal of gamefish imbued with the angler's conception of high romance. Romance, as Graham Greene once noted, is capable of corrupting much more deeply, much more dangerously, than money, for "[a] man open to bribes was to be relied upon below a certain figure, but sentiment might uncoil in the heart at a name, a photograph, even a smell remembered."

That's a problem. It's why my fingers are the color of ripe pomegranate and why I haven't been able to feel my toes since daybreak. Sentiment, I suppose, can be blamed for fishing on the fourth day of this trip after a poor third. Sentiment, taken that way, surely explains why I'll make it into the water on the fifth, no matter what happens over the next two hundred casts. But as far as belief goes?

I'd be better off by believing in a flat Earth.