What's to do in May? John Gierach's call solved that problem. The bluegills had moved to the beds about a week earlier, and the fishing was hotter than a pistol. Gierach is 600 miles south of me, in the formerly great state of Colorado, its former greatness somewhat attenuated by an influx of yuppies that threatens to sink the mile-high state a good yard or so from the sheer weight of them all, if not slide its eastern half into Kansas. For the record, Gierach remains steadfastly antediluvian in the face of an encroaching sea of Beamers and Reebok cross trainers. He's into guns.

Of course, by the time I got down there things could easily change. Snow. Rain. Wind. Cold weather might move the fish off their nuptial beds and back to deep water to pout. My ailing Toyota, always questionable on long trips, might pull up lame in Wyoming. It had happened before.

FOR AT LEAST A FEW HOURS OF THE MORNING after my arrival, however, the air was washed with sunlight, the cottonwoods and black locusts around Gierach's place were budding, and the green grass grew all around, all around. Gierach loaned me a float tube and fins and off we went. Halfway to a pond he had lined up, I remembered I'd left my fly rod in my truck. "You are an idiot," he said, not reflectively. I looked to see if he was smiling.

Our destination was a series of reclaimed gravel pits familiar from the years I had lived in the area prior to my move north. Just west of the parking lot, my young springer had once flushed a rabbit, which had shot away and disappeared, leaving the electrified puppy wriggling in knots in an attempt to work out the scent trail. I recalled the surge of adrenaline I'd felt upon seeing a smallish largemouth bass that day, tilting ever so slightly upward, suspended beneath a moss clump. I'd nearly torpedoed it with a plastic worm before it had sunk from sight. But I'd never thought to fish the place for bluegills.

Gierach had. He'd fished every pond in the area, and though they all looked more or less the same to me, this, he assured me, was not the case. Some had bluegills, some had pumpkinseeds, and some had catfish and bass. Some had this or that. Some even had snapping turtles, of which I had unpleasant, distant memories. Once, as I had sat on the bank with my bare, schoolboy feet dangling just inches from a stringer of bullheads in an Iowa farm pond, a behemoth turtle the size of a lawn mower had drifted in and eaten my fish, one by one. It could have been my toes. "Which ones have snappers?" I asked.

"They all have snappers."

"Oh," I said.

By now, the sun had ducked behind a growing bank of clouds and the temperature had dropped ten degrees. A breeze skittered damp leaves across the parking lot, and I tugged up the zipper on my vest. We slung our tubes over our heads and waddled off, our fly rods in our hands.

BLUEGILLS AREN'T THE HARDEST FISH in the world to catch, but they won't hurl themselves into your lap, either. Water temperatures must remain consistently temperate for several days before they will move out of the depths and into the shallows to spawn. There they scrape out elephant-foot-sized spawning beds, after which the males spend most of their time diddling their girlfriends and beating up on each other, like males everywhere. They'll sock you good if you get too close.

There's usually plenty of leeway for casting, since, if you can't walk to the beds, you can always tube to them. Long, extremely expensive rods work best, but short, cheap rods also work. As do fat rods, thin rods, spinning rods, and downriggers. Bluegills aren't particular; drag something through their bedroom and they're goddamned upset.

Surprisingly, however, the fish weren't on, so we spent the next half hour "trolling," awkwardly finning backwards in our tubes, bucking a growing wind, and letting our lines trail out behind us. Now and then a stray bluegill or tiny bass would tighten my line, and after a brief tussle, I'd slip the fly from its jaw and turn it loose. Carty the Beneficent. Gierach finally suggested we pack up and move to the next pond over, a short hike of a few hundred yards.

Once there, I immediately hooked a hog pumpkinseed, a fish all of five inches long. Pumpkinseeds may be the most gorgeous panfish in America. A starburst of robin's egg blue and orange tendrils fade from their eyes to their butterscotch bellies, the scarlet tab on their gill covers bold counterpoint to it all. Over the next hour, we hooked perhaps two dozen. Like bluegills, they're hard fighters, boring to the bottom in loops and figure eights. I wondered what a two-pound pumpkinseed, if there was such a thing, would be like on the whippy four-weight I'd left at home.

Sadly, also left at home was the patch kit for my aging neoprenes, which were trickling icy water into my crotch. I sloshed to the bank, dropped my float tube and then my waders around my ankles, and peered inside my jeans. Looked all right down there, by God, if a bit pallid. I remembered the snappers and zipped her right back up.

The next day, Gierach and I fished a pond on the outskirts of Boulder, a city I had lived in for 10 years prior to my move to Montana. The morning again dawned sunny and bright, promising warmer temperatures by noon. We arrived with the windows of Gierach's pickup rolled down, the flute-like paean of meadowlarks drifting through the cab.

I was amazed that I had biked, hiked, walked, and jogged all around the pond before me now without ever having seen it, a completely hidden gem of perhaps five acres that held some of the largest bluegills I've seen.

Gierach produced a collection of bass and bluegill bugs, beautifully hand-tied cork and deerhair poppers in a rainbow of colors. I dutifully took pictures. Afterwards, he tied on a soft hackle hare's ear of his own creation, perhaps the drabbest fly of the lot. Gierach's soft hackle hare's ears have evolved into bona fide, if-you-only-had-one-fly creations. They've caught everything from brook trout to bass and have proved effective in lakes, streams, and rivers from sea to shining sea. I tied one on too. I figured he knew what he was doing.

UNLIKE MOST, THE OWNERS OF THIS POND didn't want their bluegills thinned out, and we were to return all we caught to the water. Bluegills, of course, rapidly overpopulate, and thinning the ranks from time to time creates bigger, healthier fish, a fact belied by the big, healthy fish we were catching that hadn't been thinned in years. As a Midwest kid just learning to fly fish, I'd got in the habit of tossing all the bluegills I'd caught on the bank, where they'd flopped this way and that, desperately thrashing out their tiny lives. I'm sorry I did it.

Gierach paddled off to a far corner and a few minutes later whistled for my attention, then held up a two-pound bass, a true lunker. But I was perfectly happy cruising the shoreline and casting my hare's ear to the spawning hordes. A twitch of the line meant a take, and soon another palm-sized bluegill would be hoisted tubeside, spinning in circles and flashing metallically in the sun. Eventually we paddled within talking distance.

"Pretty nice place you got here," I said.

"I thought you'd like it."

"You bring beer?"

"Nope."

Pause. "None?"

Gierach shook his head.

And so we returned to the fishing. Two hours later I caught an eight-incher, as large a bluegill as any I've taken. Might have been top fish for the day, at that. I searched for Gierach but he was across the pond, his back toward me, casting. Well. I slipped the hook from its jaw and watched it hesitate before darting away. Back to the deep you go, my friend. Tell your buddies Carty sent you.