The heat creates an almost audible rhythm that throbs through the July river valley; a thick heart beat in the heavy summer air. As we come out of the trees and look across the meadow towards the river, the noon sun blinds us with an incessant piercing whine.

We break our way down a short steep slope of dry, brittle grass, weeds…and nettles. Always nettles. I grin ruefully when my young nephew curses in pain as the tiny hairs brush softly across a patch of exposed skin.

In the shade of a fallen tree on the river’s bank, we watch a brown trout lazily sip invisible insects off the surface film of the glassy water. As if keeping time with the rhythm of the heat, the trout leaves a regular series of rise forms as it feeds. It is decided the mentor will try for the rising fish first.

Entering into the stream, I am instantly up to my thighs in muck, covered by a few scant inches of crystal clear water. Turning, I struggle back to shore through the sucking mud, my trail swirling behind me; the sliding river re-deposits the disturbed sediments far downstream.

My nephew laughs, the fish disappears, and we move on.

And so we continue the hot day, what was to be our last day together. The boy’s eagerness eventually wanes, and is only then rewarded with trout caught on the fly. And with that, a spark of understanding is lit beneath his seventeen-year-old eyes. We spend the better part of an afternoon drifting bits of fur and feathers to rising trout, sometimes hooking a fish, but more often times not. It was good, and right.

On a September afternoon, in a cold, sweeping rain, I and five of the boy’s friends buried him. Far from the trout streams and grouse woods we had enjoyed together, his body now rests on a hill beneath a pine tree. A 17-year-old’s life is filled with many things; I had perhaps naïvely hoped to add enough as an uncle and friend to help him avoid life's malignant black under-tow that took him. I miss you, Sam.(October, 2000)