The man who approached Brad at the Glenwood Springs railroad station did not fit the picture Brad had formed of him when he’d telephoned from Washington, D.C., to hire his fishing-guide services for a weekend. Alistair Renault had a classy tone to it, unusual for the Toms and Harrys and Charlies who normally gave Brad a jingle. Over the telephone, Alistair Renault had sounded wealthy and important (which Brad’s clients weren’t) but not full of himself (as some of them were). Brad hated the kind of client who came believing he knew everything about fishing, but didn’t know diddly and left knowing less. He got the impression that this man knew a lot about the governing principles of catching trout, but he wondered why he had booked a guide now when a much-publicized sudden spike in temperature had set the heavy mountain snows on their biggest meltdown in years. May runoffs in northwestern Colorado weren’t the most comfortable time to be fishing. What puzzled him even more was why the man had hired his services at all when there was great fishing in the streams of Maryland and Virginia, not to mention the Potomac River. Why come to Colorado?

“I have a break in my schedule that I won’t have later in the spring and summer. I’ll be leaving the country in the fall and not sure when I’ll get back, so since I’ve always wanted to fish the White River, I thought I’d best do it now,” the man had explained when Brad posed the question. Brad had thought that sounded rather ominous, as if the man had doubts that he’d return at all. Renault had mentioned the ad in Field and Stream he’d read some time ago. “Sounded to me like you have the kind of feel for the place that appeals to me,” he’d said. When Brad asked how Washington was these days, his sensitive ear picked up his caller’s disinclination to discuss the subject, and so he dropped it. Give it time, and disclosures would come—about home, wife, children, girlfriends, job, colleagues, and other complaints that justified a getaway to the Rockies. They always did.