At the old Wookey's Resort on the Kispiox the campers and travel trailers nosed up to the river about the same every fall--with careful regard for the automatic caste system in effect there.

On the highest part of the grassy campground the regulars could sit at a picnic table and look down the high bank at the Kispiox herself. For years the residents of the high flat had figured prominently in Field & Stream's contest with the largest fly-caught steelhead, grudgingly passing the championship back and forth among themselves and a few other elitists.

At the other end of Wookey's waterfront the ground was considerably lower, although still well above the river. That was where we set up our tent the first year, having been gently steered away from the elite quarters without knowing what was going on.

But when our wall tent was up and I strolled naively to the higher group for a social call I quickly found my place in the pecking order. I introduced myself and was duly noted by each of the fishermen seated at the picnic table, but I made the mistake of exhibiting a new model fly reel, perhaps with presumptive authority. Everyone got up and left, leaving me alone at the table with my new reel and several pairs of drying waders.

NO BIOLOGIST WILL EXPLAIN exactly why most of the largest steelhead come from British Columbia's Skeena watershed or why their waters are even further restricted, mainly to the Babine and Kispiox, short rivers with little distinction except that they are the routes of the greatest steelhead--200 miles of water from the Pacific.

It is the same ocean for all, but there are certain strains of steelhead that grow larger and have kept their superiority through the years. For a time virtually all of the annual Field & Stream winners came from the Kispiox, for more fly fishermen went there and stayed with it through the wet, cold fall. Then more anglers came to the less accessible Babine, only a few miles away, and by the late sixties those fish were showing on the lists--and the Kispiox veterans saw ruefully that the Babine's fish were just as large and that there would be new competition. During one 15-year period, only two first-place winners had come from anywhere but the Kispiox.

A river's size is small indication of the weighty of its steelhead. A few miles from the Kispiox, the Bulkley, another part of the Skeena, carrying much more water and altogether more impressive in its gleaming rapids and deep, sliding pools, holds smaller fish in clearer water. There are many rivers where the fish are more plentiful than in the Kispiox--or the Babine for that matter--but if your steelhead must go more than 20 pounds it is hard to ignore statistics.

The Kispiox must be right for fly fishing--a condition which may not occur for long periods in each fall, and watching a muddy river is not soothing for everyone. As your allotted fishing time melts away like the early snows on the nearby mountains (which cause your problem in the first place) you might consider carving a ship in a bottle. But if it's late enough in the season you can always gun for the ruffed grouse ("willow grouse" to the natives) that often roar off at your feet as you approach a named and famous "drift."

The official measuring gauge was there at Wookey's, and when the river was too high and dirty you might visit it several times a day. But that was not enough--you could make an accurate check there but it was better to watch the river down from the nearby ridges. You could watch a stone or stick that was already there, but placing your own little pile of stones in the shallows, possibly with a stick projecting from the top, was more personal.

Looking at that, you could tell the level had gone down an inch--but after I had watched my own first gauge for a day or two it occurred to me that I really didn't know how the river should look when ready for fly fishing. I'd still have to ask the veterans.

The Kispiox I fished was always a little murky. It changed not by the day but by the hour. It comes only a short way and the beginnings are hidden in timbered mountains. At the peak of the fall steelhead run, temperatures would be so near freezing much of the time that a break in cloud cover could quickly send down rivulets of dirty snow water, staining the river from top condition to barely fishable--to impossible.

But although I watched my personal river gauge meticulously and talked incessantly of the river's color and height to other fishermen, it was not really necessary, for all a Kispiox freshman need do was keep track of the residents on the high end of the campground.

The river would be falling and clearing, and the hill dwellers would sit at a picnic table or stay in their campers and trailers. They might be fiddling with tackle or patching waders and for the most part they accepted the Kispiox vagaries calmly. They usually spent most of the fall right there, and if the river did not reach proper level today it might tomorrow or the day after. And when it was dirty there was a truce in the competition.

In any event, the magic moment of "fly fishing water" would come almost with secrecy. The "drift fishermen" with their casting lures would have been busy for a day or two--highly skilled in their own right--watching and feeling the sensitive tips of their long casting rods to read the tap and slide the pencil sinkers that carried lures along just above the bottom--sinkers trimmed constantly to match the current and to keep moving at the right speed. Although these casters, most of them using free-spooling plugging reels--trained thumb on the spool, sensitive hand on the rod grip, and eyes on the tip and the line's course--catch just as many or more fish and catch fish just as large as do the fly casters, they have little chance of winning a contest on the Kispiox. The reason is that their steelhead must compete with resident rainbows trolled from deep lakes where fly fishermen have little chance. It is the fly fishermen who compete for biggest fish of the year in their own division.

I sat in front of our wall tent and glared at the Kispiox going by--hardly muddy but certainly not clear. In the shallow tail of the deep pool by camp there was a hesitant wake. It had showed over the rapids, moving behind protective rocks and far to one side out of the main current, and it paused a little at the quietest edge of the shallows but continued up near shore. I saw a white spot beneath it, the relentless fungus growing on the back of a dying salmon. A salmon late for its rendezvous on the spawning gravels and probably never to reach them, but swimming upstream with its final fading strength. In fall the dead salmon littler banks of the Kispiox and collect silt in the backwaters to be found by bears and birds. You become accustomed to occasional whiffs of their odor and take it without revulsion.

Then I noticed there was no one sitting at the picnic table at the high end and that some of the cars were gone. There were no hanging waders and no sign of life about the trailers. The regulars had gone fishing. Within 10 minutes, so had we, for the all-knowing ones had judged the river ready.

I ONCE SAID THE KISPIOX EXPERTS were such a secretive and conniving cult that they used disguises and underground tunnels, but it was sour grapes. There are only so many good "drifts" for steelhead, and if the competitors were not free with information they could not be blamed--more than a thousand miles from home with the biggest steelhead of the year a brooding passion, despite any careless outward attitude. The mountains are beautiful, the river sings through its riffles and roars through its rapids, but, by God, the great steelhead is there.

There are rivers where steelhead take dry flies all summer long, furious fish which have come home early to live for nearly a year in the surroundings of their youth before spawning. And there are bright steelhead on the coast that may, at times, strike almost anything--but the great trophy fish of the chosen rivers are generally near the bottom, and the fly caster must accept those terms.

To get a fly to the bottom takes a sinking line, and for most of the drifts the faster it sinks the better. On deep, swift rivers some fishermen have gone from high-density lines to lead core--no tool for casters likely to hit their ears or necks, but efficient in experienced hands. And as sinking lines were once not considered "fly fishing," so the lead core has its detractors.

"The use of a lead core line is not ethical in steelhead fishing," pontificated the operator of one classic steelhead resort. And the highly successful user of lead core did not argue, for his were very nearly the only fish that had been taken that week. But a few hours later, the accusation evidently weighing persistently on his mind, he made his only defense.

"I put all of them back anyway," he said.

If you rake the bottom with a heavy sinking line, lead core or not, you acquire a fanciful opinion of what is going on down there. Where the current is heavy and you must cast straight across or a little upstream to get down far enough, you visualize your fly bumping seductively along ahead of your short leader, followed by an orderly line. It was disillusioning the first time I looked down from a bluff over clear water and saw the fly coming somewhat behind the heavy shooting head, which drifted in festoons, sliding over and around submerged rocks, far from the neat presentation I had imagined. It's not always so, but long casts have a way of being crumpled by varying current speeds.

In a river like the Kispiox you feel the tics and pauses of line or hook as they are washed over or about the rounded bottom stones in the heavier runs, and 100 times you strike at a tentative tug which may or may not be a fish. If the heavy-hooked fly survives for long, its point will be blunted and you feel for the hone or the file. Eventually, the barb may be almost gone and the fly discarded, but more often my fly has hung impossibly in an inaccessible torrent, and I lose it.

In other circumstances, a steelhead's strike is often a sudden yank and an immediate leap, but in much of the trophy water the strike is only another stop by the fly. You set hard as you have against 100 rocks, and then you tensely eye where your running line enters the water, and the nerves of your rod hand dart to its palm to test the slightest motion from the other end.

The thing moves.

And although battles with fish become the most boring parts of outdoor literature, you are compelled to relate the ones with big steelhead. Where a fish might weigh 30 pounds or more and the average is about 15, the first move is likely to be a surly surge, so strong as to feel invincible, and I have hooked few enough such fish to sense a moment of panic. Just hang on, I tell myself foolishly. For the moment, I feel that the fish is the aggressor instead of just a rainbow trout trying to escape an unrecognized problem.

If he does not jump or run immediately you suspect it may be just a heavy, spent salmon of some kind after all. Perhaps he will go a bit sidewise in the current to pause in the pocket beneath a submerged boulder and tug tentatively. But then the real business begins and the gleaming leap of a 20-pounder is actually less disconcerting to me than the heavy chug of a surface splash made by a fish still unseen, for where a steelhead might weigh 40 pounds my imagination is irresponsible.

Two hundred miles from the Pacific there can be great variety in the vitality of individual fish. A steelhead freshly arrived in the short rivers may be tired, even though silvery. Later, between his arrival and spawning time, he may have regained power, even though the broad red stripe has returned to his side. But most fights with large steelhead hooked on the bottom with flies begin slowly and deceptively.

My wife Debie hooked her first big Kispiox fish only 20 minutes after she began working a well-known drift very near camp. It moved sluggishly where the cloudy water was deep.

"Big spent salmon," she announced. "I'll horse him in to that bar."

I went over there to help and she pumped and reeled as hard as the gear would stand. The fish came slowly, swinging slightly downstream like a sunken log, and was hauled into a quiet eddy on 10 feet of line. I can still see the great, red band on its side when it suddenly came to life with a burst of speed and leaped high in our faces to break the leader. It could not possibly have been as large as it looked.

"I guess it was a steelhead," Debie mentioned unnecessarily.

There was the unsympathetic story by the steelheader who watched a woman land a prize winner she was forced to follow downstream for a great distance.

"She wouldn't have landed it at all if it wasn't for the guy with the chainsaw who cleared off the bank ahead of her," he grumbled.

The first steelhead I caught over 20 pounds came in a floundering, fumbling foul-up that lasted about 45 minutes, and although it was low comedy I still don't know how I could have done it differently.

He took my Skykomish Sunrise at the foot of a smashing rapids with foamy rocks and some deep, steep runs between, and when he began a series of spectacular, smashing jumps against the heaviest flow I smirked to myself and held just hard enough to keep him from climbing out on the upper side. Let him wear himself out in that current and I'd then pull him downhill to the bank and beach him.

But when he tired he came straight downstream into deep, slow water and went on past where I stood as far out as I could wade, holding as hard as I dared, the reel paying out slowly but steadily, and I followed wildly, bruising my way precariously through downed timber that projected into the long pool. Several times I worked him almost within my reach but he simply swam away. It was more luck than management that allowed me to collar him in three feet of water nearly a quarter of a mile downstream, terrifyingly near another roaring rapids I couldn't possibly have navigated. It is hard to tell the story calmly.

I played the hero on another and larger fish hooked in quieter water. He made his runs upstream and I led him into shallows where dexterous Sam Langlois grabbed him. During that fight, another Sam with the last name of Olsson crouched much of the time against an old tree lodged at the head of a rapids, ready to attempt scaring the fish to safer water if he showed signs of dropping down. That steelhead never jumped and I was mentally composing a description of the relentless pressure I had applied to tire him before he really got excited when a lady spectator, who has caught many more steelhead than I have, remarked that the fish must have been sick. Fame flees.

THE BIG STEELHEAD OF THE KISPIOX take simple flies, some of them merely yarn--and it must be confessed that many of them are tied to represent salmon eggs that are cast by "drifters" with free-spool reels.

When asked what one of his favorite flies represented, Karl Mausser, who has caught more than his share of contest winners, eyed the questioner levelly and replied, "A Cherry Bobber." Some of the best flies represent nothing a steelhead is supposed to feed on--if he really feeds at this upstream stage--and some of the all-black ones like the McLeod Ugly are leaders in the running. It's human nature to make a "fly" look like an insect, but it's not necessary.

There was one year when we went to the Kispiox to do a story for Field & Stream for it was their contest that had done so much to draw it into prominence, and back in the devious curvatures of my brain was the formless hope that I just might get the big one myself, the only time I have coveted a contest. It was a bit early, for most of the biggest fish are a compound of earlier runs, and as the season draws into the sleet, rain, and snow of October there are more fish to cast to.

My fish was a male that weighed 26 pounds and as was customary at Wookey's at the time, it was barbecued for the entire camp--first big male of the season. It was a moment of glory, and that fish was big enough to have won handily the year before. Karl Mausser sat beside me with a glass of wine he'd brought from his trailer, and a pretty lady from the Seattle Steelheaders wore a hostess gown amid the woolly, goosedowny crowd you'd expect on a British Columbia river in fall.

Days later I telephoned John Walker of Great Falls, Montana, to tell him of the trip, and Walker, a frequent winner, was ruefully glad for me. He was going much later that year, he said, but it looked as if I might have the big fish.

But there are years of big fish, years when the age class is just right, and years when deep in the Pacific the food is perfect for rainbow trout far from home--and that year 26 pounds just wouldn't do it. All of the winners were just a little bigger and my fish didn't even make the top four, as I learned weeks later when I called Walker to find how the late season had gone.

"I guess I got the big fish this year," he said.

THE STEELHEAD RUN IS AN UNCERTAIN THING and hook-and-line anglers are returning much more of their catch. Indian netting is "uncontrollable" and on a trip to British Columbia I was told that a certain village of Indians was "unfriendly." It sounded like something from another century, but when I started to photograph a totem pole near that settlement I was summarily driven off.

The resort isn't run by Wookey's anymore and I hear they have hot showers there now. The exclusive corps of contestants is broken up, some of them no longer making the annual trip and others scattered through various campgrounds. I have heard that many of the big catches aren't even entered in the contest these days.

But deep in the heavy, often murky runs, the giants meet the current as they always have.