If you are one of those anglers who has given himself to steelhead fishing the way converts give themselves to the Church, then Hodson's camp on the Dean River in British Columbia is where you want to be in mid-September. A trip to the Dean is a pilgrimage, almost, and the people who come here are virtually all repeaters. They have been coming, year after year, during "their week," some of them for as long as the camp has been open. Coming back for 20 years now, to fish for steelhead on the Dean.

If, for some reason (business failure, say, or a heart transplant) you cannot make it during "your week," then you arrange for someone else to take your place. You don't cancel, because if you do, you lose "your week." Perhaps forever. In which case, you might as well bag the heart transplant and die, because once you have fished the Dean, life without steelhead wouldn't be worth living.

The steelhead is a migratory rainbow trout, a fish that leaves the river where it was born and spends several months in the big water. The months and miles--one tagged fish swam more than 2,200 miles to spawn in its parent stream--make the steelhead very strong, and the fight upstream in the big, surging rivers where it goes to spawn makes it tough.

Before I made my first trip to the Dean, I spoke to John Merwin, who is a neighbor and one of America's finest angling writers. "You know," Merwin said, "how most fish, when you hook up, act like they are startled? Or alarmed. Or frightened. Something like that?"

"Yes."

"Well those fish, those Dean River steelhead, seem mad. I can't describe it any other way. You'll see. Those are the toughest fish in the world."

You start out at Vancouver and change to a smaller plane in a town called Bella Coola. This flight ends on an insignificant and badly surfaced little strip next to Kimsquit Bay, one of the innumerable estuaries along the coast. There is no hangar, no terminal. The plane had brought four anglers in and was taking a few more out. We loaded our gear on trucks and started for the river, where we climbed into long, gracefully tapered boats and started upstream for camp.

This valley was logged once, but some of the original trees remain along the river bank. Big, imposing, daunting trees. Cedar, spruce, and fir. Straight and thick, and more than 100 feet tall. There is a solemn, grave, and haunting quality to those trees and to the forests that are made up of them. The mountains that define the valley of the Dean are equally imposing. Sheer rock, severely carved by glaciers which you can see, here and there, as deep blue patches in the deeper folds of the mountains.

At two in the afternoon, after eating lunch and filling out the paperwork for a license, it is time to go fishing. There are two boats leaving the camp, each carrying three anglers and a guide. One guide is Bob Hall. The other is his wife Jill. She is the daughter of Darryl Hodson. She is in her young 20s. She is pretty without having to work at it, and she has a smile that could melt granite. I am in her boat.

Jill runs downstream a mile or so, and at a long, rocky point, she beaches the boat and says to me, "You can start at this pool."

I climb out, rig a fly that she says looks good--a feathery purple leech--and begin stripping line.

"Straight across," she says, "then mend your line and let it quarter downstream. Strip, then pick up and shoot a little more line and do the same thing again. Once you have as much line out as you can handle, take a step or two downstream and start again. You want to cover as much of the pool as possible."

"Okay."

I shoot a little more line on my next cast. She watches. "Not quite so much downstream. Try to get it straight across."

I do what she tells me, or try to. I imagine that any angler would. You couldn't stand to disappoint her.

ALL AFTERNOON I FISHED. Stopped casting only to change flies, check for wind knots, or move to another pool. I never had a strike. A good day on the Dean is four fish. One fish is just fine. You can live with no fish and no strikes. If you can't, you should leave steelheading alone.

While I worked one pool, Jill stood at my elbow, watching the water and talking cheerfully while I cast. And cast again. We talked about the fishing a little. And, then, about her family.

Her father, she said, had built the camp before she was born. He'd been guiding at the only other camp on the river, Stuart's, which is just upstream a little. Stuart's was new then--the river had just opened up--and was doing a robust business. They needed a new guide.

"So they hired an inexperienced man," Jill says, "and paid him $800 for the season. My Dad had been there for a couple of years, and he was making only $500. So he protested. The man who owned the camp was my mother's cousin. And my mother was cooking there. But he said, 'A deal is a deal. Five hundred dollars.'

"My Dad said, 'Then I'll quit and start my own camp.'

"'That's fine,' Stuart said, 'you do what you have to. A little competition will probably be good for both of us.' In a way, he was doing my Dad a favor. He was too ambitious to just be a guide for someone else. He had so much energy."

Which came in handy because he and his wife, Nancy, had no money. They had to build the camp, attract clients, and hire guides. Darryl also had to learn how to fly a float plane so he could supply the camp. And, they were raising a family. Jill has a brother and a sister.

"How in the world did they manage?" I ask, shooting another cast.

"I don't know," Jill laughs. "I wasn't around for that."

When the sun dropped behind a long line of cold, blue mountains, we quit. It was a clear evening, with a moon. The snow on the mountains looked white as cotton, and the blue glacier ice gleamed like sapphires. There was a chill, and I built a fire in the woodstove before I got into bed. I went to sleep quickly. Lulled by the sound of the river and the remembered rhythm of casting and casting again.

THE NEXT DAY, IT RAINED. One of the other anglers caught a fish early in the morning. From where I was, I could see the fish jump several times. It appeared as a flash of silver over the lead-colored surface of the water, and there was something undeniably dramatic and powerful about the fish. Something wild that, even from 200 yards away, got my blood pumping and raised my sodden spirits.

I went back to casting. Making sure my loops were tight and my mends were clean.

While I worked a small pool, after lunch, Jill talked brightly. Trying, I suppose, to keep my spirits up. It was unnecessary, but considerate. She had spent her summers at the camp, on the river, she said, and she loved it. "It was the greatest childhood."

When the children grew older, they began to take on some responsibilities. Jill started out helping her mother, in the kitchen, but what she liked to do was...fish.

"Dad taught me. And one year, when we were temporarily short of a guide for some reason, he told me I had to take clients out. I was terrified, but he told me not to worry, that I was good and I could do it."

She became a guide, and met her husband on the river.

"Bob was guiding at Stuart's, and after we had taken our clients in at the end of the day, we would meet back out on the river and go fishing. When we had a day off, Dad would take us over to the Kitlope in the plane. He was building a new camp over there, and was learning the country. He was really excited about it. To him, it was sort of the next frontier.

"So that's how Bob and I dated. Fishing on the Dean after work, or flying into the Kitlope with my Dad on our days off."

I had never, I thought, had a conversation quite like this one with a fishing guide. But I wouldn't have minded if it had gone on all afternoon. But Jill had to check on her other two clients. I moved to another pool and began resolutely casting. And then casting again.

LATE IN THE AFTERNOON, when I had almost worked myself into a trance, I got my first strike. Surprised almost to the point of disbelief, I raised the rod to set the hook.

The fish turned instantly and ran. There was so much speed and so much power in that first surge that I reacted like a spectator instead of a player. I raised my arm, but the tension in the long graphite rod didn't restrain the fish any more than a willow switch, and the line peeled off the reel, followed by the backing, so fast and so smoothly that my first entirely clear thought was that if I kept on standing there admiring the magnificence of the fish, it was going to spool me.

So I ran down the rock and gravel bank, in my waders, with the rod held over my head, figuring that if I fell, I would certainly break the rod and probably knock a couple of my teeth out. An acceptable risk for a fish like that.

Just before it reached the heavy water, the fish jumped. A big jump with its heavy body bent like a strung bow. There was a huge belly in the line, and I reeled furiously to bring the line tight. The fish jumped again when the line was taut, and I bowed to throw a little slack so the leaping fish would not snap the leader.

I gained a little line. The fish ran again. And jumped again.

Jill had caught up with me by now.

"Keep him out of the heavy water," she said.

I said I'd do what I could.

It was about 20 minutes, I suppose, from the time that fish startled me out of my damp, listless state until Jill slipped a hand under its belly and held it out of the water for me to admire. It was easily the strongest fish that I have ever caught. Strong from cruising the ocean and then from fighting its way up river. Far stronger than the salmon that swim the same ocean and fight their way up the same rivers but are coming home to die and so, perhaps, figure at some point, "What the hell." The steelhead is no fatalist. It may be coming home to spawn but dying is not on its agenda. With luck, it will go back to the ocean another three or four times.

I imagined I had been able to feel the force of that migratory urge in my rod hand.

The fish, Jill said, was 36 inches. Old-time Dean River anglers come back hoping for their 40-inch fish. I felt fortunate and humble. Felt a kind of glow in spite of the cold rain and the steady wind. I watched Jill release the fish and thanked her.

I now believed everything I'd ever read or been told about steelhead, and I would have been content to stand hip-deep in any pool on the Dean, casting and casting again, until the week was over and it was time to go home. But I got a better offer.

Dan Hodson, Darryl's son, asked if I would like to spend a couple of days in the Kitlope, the place his father had thought of as the next frontier. He couldn't promise any steelhead, Dan said. There were salmon and lots of them. Some of the rivers probably held steelhead, but they were still exploring. What he could promise was big, wild, remote country. Which sounded good to me.

We left the Dean, in the morning, in his two-seater Robinson 22 helicopter. Flew down the Dean and then up another river.

"We'll see some bears on this river," Dan's voice came through my headset. I stepped on the push-to-talk switch and said, "Grizzlies?"

"That's right. This river is full of salmon. They've come down to feed."

A minute later, he said, "There's a griz."

We saw a dozen bears on the banks of the river. In ten minutes. One large boar looked up at us with a 10-pound salmon flopping in its mouth.

"Do we fish this river?" I said.

"You can," he said. "If you want to."

I told him I wanted to.

"Okay," he said. "We'll float it in a couple of days."

WE FLEW UP A LONG MOUNTAIN PASS and across a wide, fractured glacier and down into the next valley. "Couple of goats," Dan said. "Just off to the right, in that little meadow." I looked and saw the shaggy white goats, grazing. Dan Hodson flew in an effortless way, and he didn't seem to miss anything. He guided hunters in these mountains, after fishing season, and you knew right way that he was good at it. Solid and competent. Very competent.

A few minutes later we were down in the valley, just above a strong, green river, coming into a small camp. The only camp in the Kitlope wilderness which, at more than three-quarters of a million acres, is the largest remaining intact coastal temperate watershed in the world. Darryl Hodson, who was passionate about everything, was in love with this country. He was building this camp the summer he was killed.

It is two or three small, clean cabins with woodstoves and outhouses, a main building where Dan's wife D'Arcy and their three young boys live and where everyone eats, and a tent where Darryl's brother, Randy, lives. During the season, he works for Dan as a guide. He is building a cabin so he can move out of the tent.

Dan leaves me and my gear and flies back to the Dean. After I have moved my gear into the cabin, I play with the boys. An hour or so later, when Dan returns in the helicopter, we fly off into the Kitlope.

In three days, we went to half a dozen different rivers. Some were small and slow, shaded by trees that grew tight and close right down to the bank. There was something serene and restful about them.

There were also big rivers with lots of water where you couldn't wade more than a few feet and then had to brace yourself against the strong current while you would cast and retrieve. I had a strong strike in one of those rivers from a fish that ran me down to the backing, and Dan said it could have been a steelhead. It was the only time I thought I might have been into one. But all the rivers were full of salmon.

There was a pool in one of those rivers that curled around the base of a tall--maybe 500- or 600-foot--rock face that looked like the kind of thing climbers dream about. That cliff caught the breezes that moved down the valley of the river, forcing them up in a column that the eagles rode. I counted 18 eagles soaring on those thermals. Now and then, one of them would come down to the river to gorge. There were dead, dying, exhausted, and spent salmon everywhere. The river smelled of them. So strongly that you imagined the stink would get in your waders and never come out. But, oddly, strong as it was, the smell was not repellent.

"Bears think it is perfume," Dan said. "They'll find a nasty old salmon, up on the beach, all full of maggots, and they'll roll around in it to get it all over their bodies."

"Sounds exactly like my bird dog," I said.

We didn't see any bears on that river. Just tracks and salmon that they had taken one bite from before moving on. Perhaps to find another that was not so fresh.

We floated one river in a rubber raft, stopping at the likely pools where we caught coho salmon and small cutthroat trout. Some of the coho were fresh with bright silver sides, and some had been in the river long enough for their bodies to turn dark and their jaws to develop the pronounced, brutal hook that makes you think of an old boxer who has taken too many to the nose.

I floated that river with Randy Hodson, who talked to me about his brother.

"Darryl was really excited about this place," he said. "He loved the Dean and steelhead but it was getting...oh, I guess you'd call it predictable. This was new, and there was so much to it, that you'd never learn it all. He was building this camp. The idea was that he'd let Nancy and the kids run the other place, over on the Dean, while he'd concentrate on running this one. Bring in people who weren't hung up on just catching steelhead and were interested in doing a little exploring. You know. Maybe they'd catch a steelhead. Probably they'd catch salmon. Could be, they wouldn't catch anything. But they would sure see some country. It would be an adventure."

I didn't ask, but he told me how Darryl was killed.

He'd just bought a new chopper. A four-seater Robinson 44, which he believed he would need to move people efficiently around the Kitlope. He'd been flying all day, and he had just landed on the smooth gravel shoreline of a river to pick up an angler he'd dropped off earlier. He cut the engine but before the rotor had stopped moving, he reached out of the bubble, maybe to clear something from the glass. The blade caught him in the head.

"It was the last week of the season. The Mounties went over to the other camp to tell everybody. And the people up at Stuart's came down to help out. Nobody could believe it. Not Darryl."

The camp on the Dean opened the next year, but the camp in the Kitlope was closed while Dan learned to fly a chopper. Last season, with only a two-seater chopper, Dan Hodson brought a few people into the Kitlope just to get a feel for how the camp will run. This summer he will have a four-seater chopper, and he plans to be running full camps.

"There is a lot of Darryl in him," Randy says.

We have killed one of the fresh coho, and when we are back at the camp, we build a fire of aspen logs. While we wait for it to burn down to coals, we sip whiskey poured over ice from the glacier where Dan landed earlier in the day. The ice pops as it melts, and the salmon sizzles on the grill as its stored fat drips onto the hot aspen coals.

It is easy to understand what Darryl Hodson saw, and what his son continues to see in this place. It would be nice if they found some steelhead, but it isn't necessary. In fact, it is a place that stands pretty much on its own. On my last day, when we floated the grizzly river, I came within 50 or 60 feet of a 600-pound boar grizzly before it winded me and ducked into the willows.

It was neat but it wasn't the high point. This place is too good for that.