I used to think that for every bit of bad news there was an equal and opposite bit of good news. I don’t subscribe to that anymore. It’s Nature that seeks equilibrium, not people. We generate the news, whereas Nature produces yin and yang, the mutual correlations at opposite ends of the phenomenal spectrum. Thus Monday’s rain and lowering skies chilled us to the bone – how our guide managed to tie on the almost microscopic flies remains a mystery – but we cast no shadows on the water, and the hot shower back at the lodge at the end of the day, followed by salted cashews, Jameson’s, and supper, was delightful beyond description.

The river itself flows through beds of limestone that underlie the brown prairie. Thus the yin of of sweet, alkaline water and the yang of soap that won’t rinse off, along with the slight smell of sulfur beneath the taste of Colgate at tooth-brushing time. The alkaline water, starting in early July, nourishes a massive growth of underwater weeds – some like boiled spinach, others like green hay – that in turn nurture untold gazillions of various larvae that trout graze on with only minimal discrimination; but the weeds also catch on the tiny hooks we try to drift just above them, and often provide something solid for hooked trout to get beneath to try to break themselves off.

Reportedly there are more than 7000 trout per mile in this river. I believe it; never before – except in the Arctic – have I been able to approach a pool or a rapid riffle without wondering if there were fish there. There always were, dozens of them. With the sunlight behind us, the guide could point them out, finning hungrily almost at our feet. Our job was to determine what bug was most attractive to them at that moment and present it irresistibly. The guide made it easier by using a stomach pump to find what they were eating. We changed from tiny sow bug and caddis larvae to big grasshoppers and streamer flies that we cast right up against the bank as we whizzed past.

Fort Smith (population 212 in 2000; named for C.F. Smith, a Civil War general under US Grant) sits in the middle of the Crow Indian Reservation about twenty miles north of the Wyoming border and not far south of the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument, made famous by impetuous George Custer and the 7th Cavalry. Its main business is tourists – tourists carrying fishing rod cases and credit cards. Just upstream, the Yellowtail Dam and an afterbay control dam settle out the silt from the upper river and release controlled flows of cold water from the bottom of the lake. This has created what is considered by many to be the world’s best trout fishery, and after a few days on the river, I have no cause to doubt it.

That’s the yin. The yang is that the river may someday soon be the victim of its own attractions. Our guide and my friend Baird held a lively discussion about whether, writing about it, I should even mention its name. At one point yesterday we counted fourteen drift boats up and down the river; this is not a place of solitude. But no matter how many boats were in sight, parked along the banks or within hailing distance, we were catching fish – lots of ‘em!

On the fourth day, just before lunch, Baird was enticing a couple of rising trout to a tiny caddis dry fly. I was upstream, drifting nymphs through a fast, weedy run. I hooked and lost a lusty rainbow, and decided to walk down to the boat for my lunch. But my prostheses don’t perform as well as the originals did fifty years ago. A second later I was down on hands and knees in about a foot of water with quite a bit of river running into my waders. Cursing in disgust, I got up and decided to regain my composure in an orderly fashion: dig out bandanna and wipe specs; pick up fly rod off bottom of river; walk back down to – whoops! What was this?

My left ring finger was pointing northwest, crossing the little finger. There was an unusual depression right at the bottom knuckle. “This,” I mused, “cannot be good.” I stowed my wedding band safely away and pulled and twisted the errant digit, hoping to get it relocated. No soap. The guide and I taped it to the two adjoining fingers, we all jumped into the boat, and he rowed us rapidly down the remaining distance to the takeout point. Then about forty swift miles to Hardin, where a busy clinic fitted me into its schedule and took some X-rays. Yep, broken. A doc came in, amazingly like my late friend Dudley Weider in both appearance and manner, and with a minimum of fuss pulled on the finger while a nurse pushed in the opposite direction. Ta da!

He splinted it with fiberglass, wrapped it up, and we chatted awhile. I wouldn’t be carrying any sheets of plywood or splitting wood for about a month. How was the fishing? he asked, but I could tell he probably wouldn’t have time to get to it. Told me to see an orthopedist next week to get followup pictures; and after grateful good-bys, my Medicare card and I were out of there.

There was yet more good news. The doc left me a working index finger and an opposed thumb, so I still could fish. A man I talked with later in the fly shop told me about a one-armed fly fisherman he’d met up on the Bitterroot. Now, that’s kind of an interesting image, isn’t it?