Begin a long way back in a Midwest summer, make it southeastern Kansas in the evening when the cicadas are calling. Six weeks to frost, the old-timers would say, but probably the "locusts" didn't know about that at all. There would be a hum of insects and the thunderheads would pile high, too far away to bring needed rain, but there would be flashes of lightning somewhere within them, showing the enormous clouds in brilliant detail and dark silhouette.

The "railroad ponds" were old even then. They marked "tank towns," or possibly just a home or two, and although the little prairie lakes had been missed by poets and songwriters who dwelt persistently on the even older millponds of rougher landscapes, the railroad pond had its own romance and still has for the few who even recognize it today.

From the day the pond was built it began to change its form. At first it would be quite deep at the end where the railroad embankment made the dam and where the tank and pump house stood, but it gradually filled in and shallowed, first well up the draw where there had been a wet-weather creek before the dam, and later all the way to the rails themselves.

And the largemouth bass followed where the railroads went for a hundred years, carried in buckets by train crews and passengers and showered down as sparkling fry thrown from a thousand trestles into a thousand creeks across America, others more carefully placed in as many tank ponds.

You went to the pond after work on a hot day. You put on old pants and tennis shoes and you had the bugs stuck in your hat for you might go in clear to your neck. The rod was bamboo and nine feet long. "Antique," somebody called mine the other day, and it is a bit on the slow side and heavy, but it would throw the big bugs, big ones designed for fish rather than for casting. The line was weight-forward, GBF, and it was made of silk demanding lots of care. The leaders were gut, of course, and short, not quite as long as the rod. The reel I used was a Bristol.

The water was only a little cool as you walked into it, sinking in mud in some places and sometimes releasing the odor of rotting vegetation. A barred owl would check his range and pitch in some distant elms and roost-bound crows would break their wing beats to inspect a wader moving slowly beneath them.

Some of the bugs were different then, but the strategy was the same as today, the procedure that is obviously best but so often ignored.

You made the cast fairly short against the lily pads or into the thin part of the emergent grass, and you let the bug lie for awhile as its little wavelets spread and receded. You visualized the bass you thought was beneath it.

You visualized the bass, and if it did not strike as the bug landed, it was because he was a little startled by the landing and turned away. Then the bass turned toward the bug again, and when you made that first dainty twitch it flashed toward the bug and struck, mouth wide, with a popping splash. But if the fish did not strike on the first twitch you paused a little and twitched the bug a little harder, then pulled it a foot along the surface without a pop--and then came the loud, chugging plunks so beloved by ad writers. If the fish didn't take them (and it may have scared him out of his wits) you picked up and tried for another real or imaginary bass a few feet away.

All the time you knew that what brought the bass bristling one day might scare him off the next and that the only way was to start gentle and quiet and end the retrieve rough and noisy--the total repertoire of retrieves on a single cast.

On the bank you carefully dressed the line, but after an hour's casting it sank slowly because it had picked up a coating of things from the fertile water and the Mucilin was almost entirely gone. Then when you tried to pick up the big bug it often dove after the sinking line and broke your cast with a sodden glug.

By then it was very nearly dark and the bullbats and real bats were busy. If you caught bass they were either released or fastened to a stringer attached to your belt loop. And if there were no bass strikes there were reasonable facsimiles from large-mouthed green sunfish, which we called black perch in those days.

My bugs were mainly of three types then, and two of them are still in use although they are formed in sleeker designs now. The one I do not use today is the "Dragon Fly," a miserable thing to cast, even with the big bamboo pole. It was a small cork body with a tail and deerhair wings sticking out at right angles. It tended to twist the leader in the air and it traveled with a soft swish, but its very twisting sometimes abetted its efficiency, for after it struck the water it was likely to do gentle barrel rolls by itself, the stiff gut unwinding slowly, and some of the strikes were frightening.

Then there were the Callmac bass bugs and those very similar to them, poppers with silhouettes something like beetles, but with the hair wings mounted at a slight angle from the cork or balsa body. Russell Francis, who had a fly-tying business in Pittsburg, Kansas, built some of them to heroic proportions, as heavy as some modern spinning lures. The bigger bugs were just for his friends.

The powder puffs or hair mice were called "Buck Hair Floaters" by Francis, and although they did not have the perfection in detail I find in some tied by Tap Tapply or Roy Berry, they came in many sizes and worked on bass from coast to coast.

I went back to some of the old tank ponds many years later and most of them had silted into shallow mudholes, even the old pumphouses gone, long after the tanks themselves had disappeared with the steam boilers that had fostered them.

Although people have fished with bugs for bass for something like 100 years (precise history of the event seems too trivial for researchers), the fly rod has had ups and downs in bass fishing, and even today it comes as a surprise to some. On a California impoundment I cast cautiously over some basslike movements at the edge of a weedbed and heard conversation from another boat.

"Maybe we ought to tell him there's no trout in here," the man said, "but I guess he's having fun."

It was after they had moved on that the largemouth came boiling out of the tules and struck the yellow bug hard, causing a great blue heron to croak in surprise, and I clawed nervously at my slack line. The fish sounded much like the largemouth that took the bug at the edge of a log in Lake Shasta, much like the smallmouth at the edge of the riffle in an Ozark river, and almost exactly like a fish that lived in a shoreline pocket of a railroad pond near Cherokee, Kansas, so many years ago.

But it is just as exciting when the bug disappears almost silently in a bulging swirl and you hear only a trace of a sucking sound.