The Risk Pool

asleep more than a few minutes when I felt the excited tugging. For some reason it was not what I had expected. The jerks came in short bursts, like a coded message to a sleepy boy: “Stay—Alert—There—Are—Fish—in—the—River.” Thirty yards downstream a fish jumped, but I didn’t immediately associate this phenomenon with my now frantic rod tip. Wussy had waded further upstream and did not hear when I shouted “Agh!” in his general direction.
    I was not at all certain I wanted to reel in the fish. Every time I tried to, he seemed to resent it and tugged even harder. When he did this, I stopped and waited apologetically for the tugging to stop. I only reeled in when I felt the line go slack. When the fish jumped, or rather flopped onto the surface, a second time, he was much closer, and my already considerable misgivings grew. I was thinking I might just let him stay where he was until Wussy came back, whenever that might be. But then I got my courage up and reeled in a little more, all the time watching the spot on the surface where my line disappeared into the stream, beads of rainbow water dancing off it with the tension.
    Then I saw the fish himself off to the side in a spot far from where I had imagined him to be. He was no longer tugging so frantically, but he darted first left, then right in the large pool ofrelatively calm water beneath my rock. Then he must have got a gander at me sitting there, because he was in full flight again. I stopped reeling and just watched his colors in the clear water. After a while he stopped trying to get away and just stayed even with the current, his tail waving gently, like a flag in the breeze. Then I looked up and Wussy was there and he had my fish out of the water and flopping in the green netting, cold water spraying on my knees. I examined the fish without pride as Wussy extracted him from the net and probed his gullet for the hook he’d practically digested.
    “Well, Sam’s Kid,” Wussy said, “you’re about the most patient fisherman I ever saw. Nobody won’t ever accuse you of not giving a trout a chance. If I was him, I’d have had about three separate heart attacks.”
    Tired of the fish’s uncooperative squirming, Wussy took out his knife and brained my trout with the handle. The fish shuddered and was still.
    “There,” Wussy said to the trout. “Now you won’t have no more heart attacks.”
    It took him a few minutes, but he finally got his hook back. Then he handed me the jar of salmon eggs, reminding me to be careful of the barb when I baited up. He slipped my fish onto his stringer next to a larger trout already dangling from it. “We got us
our
breakfast, anyhow. I guess we should catch one for the rockhead if we can.”
    He watched me while I baited my hook and released the line into the current the way he’d taught me. “You’re a fisherman,” Wussy said. “A good, patient fisherman.”
    We fished until the sun was directly overhead. I didn’t have any more luck, for which I was grateful, but Wussy’s fat worms located two more trout, and then we headed back downstream to the cabin. My father was standing in the doorway, scratching his groin. “Where’s the bacon and eggs?” he wanted to know.
    “Back in Mohawk,” Wussy said. “Your kid caught a fish.”
    “That’s good,” my father said, studying the stringer as if mine might be recognizable. “I could eat about three.”
    “So happens I got some for sale,” Wussy said. “What’s three into eighty-five?”
    “Your ass.” Then he studied me. “What’re you scratching about?”
    “Itch,” I said. I’d been scratching most of the morning, first onespot and then another. For some reason one scratch just wasn’t enough, no matter how hard. After a minute or so, the itching would be even worse.
    “You could go wash that pan in the river,” Wussy said to my father, “and keep from being
completely
worthless.”
    “I had
my
fish on the line last night,” my father said. “Cleaned him too.” But he grabbed the pan and headed for the river. I followed him.
    “Well?” he said, squatting at the water’s edge.
    I shrugged. It was his favorite question, and I never knew what he meant by it.
    “Caught a fish, huh?”
    “Wussy taught me how,” I said, suddenly full of pride about the fish, my throat full, as if there was a hook in it.
    “Wussy’s all right,” he said. “I’m the only one calls him that though. You better call him Norm.”
    I