The salmon fly hatch comes in June and early July and those who know they are stoneflies still call them "salmon flies," for the Westerners have used that name for a long time. Burly salmon flies are worthy of a four-pound brown trout's attention but when they are gone, commemorated only by their weathered husks on brush and rocks, the big browns lose interest in flies and the bits of hair and feathers that represent them.

Oh, the fishing can be fine on those big Western rivers that gather snowwater from a thousand mountain brooks, but a two-pounder is a prize and a four-pounder is an object of awe. It is the smaller fish that take the drys, usually big 12s or 10s, chugging them or taking them in graceful rolls at the edges where fast and slow flows meet, or at the final inches between current and bank. Even the big imitation grasshoppers of August bring few of the real giants, and fly casters sometimes think of heavier rods and the great streamers of October.

It is the spawning urge, of course, that stirs the brown trout in fall, but the fishermen who abandon the rivers by late August do not see the fishes' subtle change from more muted shades to the brilliance of mating colors. Sometime in September the change begins to show.

The first signs of the new season are sparse, but I note them with relish--the increase in the number of gadwalls preening themselves in quiet ponds and the occasional visits by blue-winged teal that sweep down and away from the pool where I would be satisfied with a 12-inch rainbow. The willows are changing, and there is a reddish tinge to the lower mountain slopes, although the aspen patches are still only a slightly lighter shade than the surrounding pines. It rains in the valley and snows on the peaks. At the local store there is more attention to the gun rack and a little less to the fly display.

Suddenly the catch at the spring creeks changes a little. There are more browns mixed with the cutthroats and rainbow. The browns are getting colorful and move more for little mayflies and nymphs. The little seepy leak in my waders has become important and must be fixed, for the river water is getting cold. And people call me from great distances and ask if it is time, even though they know as well as I do that if there is to be a time this year on a given river it is near at hand. I put together my steelhead tackle.

"The thing wrong with this fishing," my friend says logically, "is that we're using steelhead tackle for 3-pound trout. I've caught 30-pound salmon on this stuff; this is like hitting a bug with a mallet."

As he says it he shrugs deeper into his down jacket and teeters a little in the heavy water, watching it lap dangerously at his wader tops. A chill wind comes down the river from some high mountain canyon and there is a snowflake or two. My friend knows that this kind of fishing is uncomfortable folly for he has been doing it for 20 years. He picks up the heavy shooting-taper, makes a false cast, and fires out across the current that is swift enough to stand visibly above the slower water. The monofilament shooting line that has been riding below him near the surface picks up with a barely audible swish and a loop leaves from his hand and two more from his mouth.

"The fish are overmatched," he says. "This tackle is too heavy. And now the damned gravel is moving on me."

As his cleated wader soles slip ominously, he longingly eyes the solid shoreline, feeling the water gouging gravel from beneath his feet, and he gropes for better footing but decides to make one more cast before finding a safer spot.

The tackle got heavier gradually. It was many years ago that fishermen who had been using their dry-fly rods for streamers began to believe something heavier would be a bit better in big water and with big flies. They brought their bass-bugging rods that took weight-forward floating lines and needed what would now be called an 8-weight line. The big rods fished better than the small ones when the cottonwoods turned color. Then the Muddler Minnow came along, looking more like a cottus or "bullhead" the deeper it was fished, and finally some infidel brought a sinking line and went down to the river's floor where the bullheads truly lived.

At first the sinking line was classified with live bait but it seemed to catch more fish and, after all, the tournament distance casters used shooting-tapers and running line, and the steelheaders (often the same people who fish the fall browns) were the real pros with it. And along came the fellow who fondled a four-weight bamboo in August but confessed that he did better with a ten-weight rod and a 330-grain fast sinking line in early October. Names for some of the heavy sinking lines sounded like terms borrowed from Army Ordnance.

The leaves turn fast and the aspen patches are gaudy yellow splotches on the mountain shoulders. The cottonwoods change to wondrous colors and they bring down the cattle from the high pastures. There are men in chaps and big hats, and you now know that it's really the West. The muskrats are getting bold, storing up important stuff for the winter and resenting having to turn out to pass your waders in the small creeks. A few touring fishermen arrive with down clothing, hoping the snow will hold off.

The Muddler is not necessarily the only or best fly for the chill depths of autumn, but it became a standby at about the time anglers took serious aim at the violent spawning brown trout. At one time it was used a great deal as a dry fly in summer, usually in smaller sizes than the fall giants. It looks remarkably like a grasshopper when floated past grassy sweepers, and once drag sets in, it can become a streamer at the caster's will. But it reached its pinnacle of performance when it was yanked down to the bottom and whipped wildly about on a taut leader.

The natural brown Muddler was much like a bullhead, they said, but then came a white Missoulian Spook, the name coming from master angler Vince Hamlin, whose prehistoric comic-strip character, Alley Oop, met a more modern type from Missoula, Montana. Anyway, the Muddler caught fish and looked like a dull-colored bullhead not at all. I have heard that in a small size the white Muddler is the world's greatest all-around trout fly. Maybe so.

The fall browns wanted something big, but they chose streamers that often resembled nothing found in their native waters--or anywhere else. The Muddler was crossed with the Spruce Fly and became the Spuddler and some careful tiers built entire boxes of variations, sometimes getting so carried away that what began as a coarse attractor turned into delicate workmanship reminiscent of traditional Atlantic salmon flies.

But this is only an exercise in the art and there is no proof that a hook-jawed brown trout stud prefers feathers from distant lands or delicately blended colors. Hell! Give him something that moves, that's big enough to be worth his while, and that invades his personal territory.

Since I knew no one who had fished the big rivers long without picking his own stream variation, I cast about for something different to throw myself and got it by accident. It was a big Silver Doctor that had been fiddled with a bit because whoever built it had run a little short of something and stuck in something else. The thing had caught fish ranging from tarpon to grindle and looked good to me, whereupon I tried it on the fall browns.

Not only did I catch the biggest brown trout I'd ever hooked but through the years it has been just a little more effective for me than anything else I've tried. There may be a little extra confidence when I have it knotted on but I believe I've given the favorites a fair go against it. When a connoisseur of exact fly patterns snorted that it was not a true Silver Doctor, my wife and I named it the Silver Outcast, which it has remained.

I believe it is testimony to my degraded status among trout anglers that I have been unable to sell it to them despite more than 15 years of writing about it. For that matter, I have been unable to get any interest from saltwater fishermen or black-bass anglers. They don't even try it, despite carefully composed color photographs and construction details in numerous books and magazines. It has become something of a holy quest of mine, and I even give away free Silver Outcasts at intervals. Maybe its name is wrong. Maybe my name is wrong.

Although the sinking line probes the depths, the streamers seldom actually reach the gravel, but when the big rod works properly there's one other type of fly that gets down all the way. It's an enormous nymph of some kind that runs deeper than even the streamers. The big nymphs came on slowly with the fly fishing elite because for a long time they (the flies) were called Woolly Worms and Woolly Worms were not socially acceptable until they were slightly changed and called "nymphs." There is the Bitch Creek and its cousin the Girdle Bug, really corpulent Woolly Worms--with rubber legs, for heaven's sake!

Nearly all of the brown trout streams of the West have their fall period when the big streamers work, although we usually think of big rivers like the Yellowstone, the Missouri, and the North Platte.

There was the chill evening when I hiked back from a noisy river, tired and a little chilled from stumbling over deep boulders and slamming big Spuddlers and Silver Outcasts into a valley wind that carried the promise of whitened slopes for the next morning. I had to cross a tinkly spring creek that caters to #20 Quill Gordons, Blue Duns, and Light Cahills, and I got there as an icy mountain moon peeked through a gap in the clouds and touched up a distant snowcap.

The big rod was in my hand, its gross lure plastered clammily next to the keeper ring, and I stood briefly on the bank, peering through the half light for the crossover. I had not previously seen the creek at that time of night because its hatches usually keep banker's hours.

With the compulsion of a small boy raking a picket fence with a stick, I flopped my feathered obscenity across a gentle pool and watched the vee made by the heavy line as the big streamer swung down and around. The result, of course, is predictable in literature such as this, and when I had landed the big fish I left the scene stealthily, feeling that I had violated some angling propriety. But a spawning brown trout is a spawning brown trout at nightfall, even though he may watch sunlit #20 Light Cahills all day. And perhaps he had only recently left the big river pool where I had been double-hauling all evening. I felt it was none of my business and I put him back anyway.

Evening is almost always the best time, and big brown trout have always moved with approaching darkness. Even in midsummer they make wakes in the tails of pools at dusk. In fall, most of the streamer throwers make special efforts to be at a favorite spot when the shadows reach midstream, and there have been several places where my evening presence has become a ritual.

Many years ago my favorite ritual haunt was on the Missouri near Helena, Montana, and I am sure the mallards that hissed through that canyon daily just before dusk regarded me as some permanent growth upstream of the big boulder. When the mountain's shadow had crossed the river, I would check my knots and almost exactly at that time I would invariably hear the thudding splash of a brown trout leaping free somewhere in midstream, a signal that the time had come. There have been similar gauges of the magic hour on other rivers for a season or two.

There is the way of fishing a big streamer in big water. First, you must wade pretty deeply and depth becomes a part of the ritual. There have been a few callow souls who have carefully worked their streamers with short casts from strategic spots along the shore, but although they sometimes catch plenty of fish they seldom get in over their waders and the truth is that they are not actually in the spirit of the thing.

Ray Donnersberger, who had just come from some far place in Canada where he had caught giant steelhead and lunging silver salmon, stood in the Yellowstone, only the upper third of his six-feet-and-considerable showing, and rollcast a mighty shooting-taper into the air.

"These fish sure aren't as big as those steelhead," he commented, following the sweeping current with his rod tip, "but these big fall rivers are a tour de force."

The time begins in September in most of the Rocky Mountain rivers, and perhaps the best period comes between September 15 and October 10. Fishing can be good in late October but the weather is risky for tourist planning, and along in early November there comes a time when I can feel the streamer season fading. There is ice along the river edge and there's a spear of Canada geese rising toward the pass, evidently serious about this trip. Echoed from no telling how far is the dull boom of some deer hunter's rifle up in the canyons and the cottonwoods are almost bare. Things seem to have slowed.