outdoors

FORT SMITH, MONT. - I will say more about the fishing next time, on Sunday. I am on the Bighorn River, camped here, tying on San Juan worms and drifting them through holes and eddies and riffle tails, looking for trout. The weather is cool. It has not rained. But it looks like rain. Size 18 midges tied as trailers to the worms sometimes take trout. But usually it is the larger fly, the San Juan worm.

I had received a call from a friend in Montana who said the Bighorn River was fishing well. This was Sunday night. The Bighorn is a tail water below the Yellowtail Dam at Fort Smith. This is not a tourist town and you would not come here except for the fishing. One market. A few fly shops. And drift boats.

The journey is where everything on a trip is learned. There is the beginning, the anticipation, which is almost everything. And once you arrive, there is the fishing. Or perhaps you are sightseeing or camping. Maybe hiking. Or friends or relatives, often they are the purpose of traveling. But years later, it is the in-between that you remember.

When my Montana friend called, I thought, "OK, let's fish," and I loaded the camper, stopping first in Rochester to have dinner with a friend, the Chief, who is at Mayo for a checkup.

Of course, with the Chief, there are many subjects to discuss. The economy. Politics. But as with my friend in Montana, the Chief wants primarily, always, to discuss subjects that have only indirect human dimensions. The "natural world" is one way to say this. So over dinner he and I talked about birds and fish, prospects for the migration, the hurricane, and particularly about the growing presence on world markets of crocodile skins. The Chief is from Louisiana, and that state has supplied the mostly European market for alligator skins. But now crocodile farms, propped up by African governments, are producing blemish-free skins relatively inexpensively.

"Our problem," the Chief said, "is that our long-running drought is compressing marshes in Louisiana, forcing alligators closer together. So they fight more. When they fight, they mar their skins."

It was 10 p.m. before I angled the truck from Rochester to the southwest, noticing, as I did, the still impressive rainwater gathered in road ditches and the standing water in some crop fields, their sheen glistening in the headlights. Whether pheasants, for one bird, particularly juveniles, could take that kind of pounding is a question yet to be answered. Surely if the downpours that occurred last weekend in southeast Minnesota had happened in June, the year's first crop of pheasants would have been lost. But maybe the young birds, larger and stronger now, suffered through it.

I drove until I could drive no longer, pulled into a wayside, slept and started again after the sun came up. Soon I was in South Dakota, where water, bountiful as it hasn't been the past 10 years or so, seemed a blessing.

In South Dakota there will be pheasants again this fall. The state's experts will release their population survey today. No doubt it will be encouraging. Mitchell. Kimball. Winner. Presho. Everywhere there is habitat -- lush grasses waved by prairie winds as I passed, the sky blue, an oasis between coasts of a nation otherwise distracted.

In the dark, in Montana, at Lodge Grass, about 40 miles from Sheridan, Wyo., I turned off I-90 and followed a series of back roads, all blacktopped, to Fort Smith. This was about midnight Tuesday. I found a spot at Cottonwood Camp and awoke the next morning to meet my neighbor, Don Recker, of Fort Jennings, Ohio, on the road now for seven weeks, fly rods in tow. Like my Montana friend, and like the Chief, Don wanted to talk about subjects of import, mainly fish and fishing.

Notably, Don makes his own bamboo fly rods, an artisan's undertaking, and Wednesday evening, after a day passed drifting and casting the Bighorn, he laid a few handsome rods on a picnic table, the products of highly skilled hands. One was a 3 weight that Don had fished Tuesday, landing strong trout in strong currents, his bamboo rods softer than graphite, but nonetheless smooth-casting, wonderful wands that enrich the fishing experience.

Sunday, as I said, I will talk more about fish, fishing and about the Bighorn. Also about San Juan worms and how I fished them and whether, as I hoped they would, the trout of the Bighorn were, by midafternoon, tipping up their noses for black caddis; dry flies.

The Chief would argue that understanding and appreciating matters of this type, understanding as well prospects for wildlife following welcome-and-not-so-welcome rains, and understanding also whether this insect or that is hatching on rivers near and far, are telling of just how much a person is paying attention.

This is a journey, after all, and it's on the journey everything is learned.

Dennis Anderson • danderson@startribune.com