My Cow Creek, which ran through part of southeastern Kansas (but only during wet weather), had no Atlantic salmon at all, so I got a late start. My creek was big on green sunfish and bullheads.

At that time I could not imagine a more aristocratic fish than the black bass, and when I read that the hired help of colonial New England were fed so much salmon that they insisted on special contracts to avoid it, I could not believe salmon were "such a much." There are also stories of Atlantic salmon being shoveled out of rivers with pitchforks and then loaded into wagons. This was not too exclusive either.

"Not all Atlantic salmon anglers are alike," Chuck Schilling reported to me years ago. "Some of them use double-hooked flies and some use single-hooked flies. This, of course, is what Atlantic salmon fishermen talk about when they hang up their Leonard rods and their English waders and are sitting in front of a fireplace half boiled on expensive whiskey."

Of course it isn't like that at all in most salmon lodges, but Chuck recognized a naive and easy target for his barbed rhetoric. It was Chuck who talked me into throwing away a tackle box full of bass plugs because he said over-equipage was the curse of true sportsmen. I still don't know what that meant, but for some years I was victimized by Chuck's experimental pronouncements.

And although I have liked almost all of the Atlantic salmon fishermen I have met, a few have given me pause. Like the one who was visiting the Florida Keys and became bored after failing to hook a bonefish the first day out.

"I don't believe this is worthwhile," he said. "Trout are just very small relatives of salmon. Bonefish do not jump and tarpon flies are crude. I own an Atlantic salmon lodge. The salmon is the greatest fish of all and most anglers work up to it. I already have it and I see no purpose in running down the scale."

I don't think I liked him very much.

I WAS PROPERLY AWED BY STORIES of the married wings and exotic feathers used in salmon flies, which cost two or three dollars at a time when trout flies cost around 35 cents. A friend lost a little box of salmon flies on a trip to Scotland and announced sadly that they could not be replaced, and that he'd spent $250 collecting them originally. Since I'd read that salmon do not take real flies for food, I wondered why a salmon insisted on things gathered from the ends of the earth, but I kept quiet about it.

At this point I'd like to explain that I am not debunking salmon fishing, which remains one of the top fly games in the world. However, while I detail some of my experiences, I may convey the opinion that it is a rather strange business. It is.

I read a great deal about salmon fishing, and when I came to the "greased line" method I became a student of the technique. You showed the fly to the fish broadside rather than end-on, you gave it some natural drift and you mended your line enough to give the fish a variety of impressions. I practiced it religiously on late-fall brown trout who took it with enthusiasm, not knowing they were part of a larger experiment. And when I went to Newfoundland I took the method with me.

I also took some salmon flies I ordered from Orvis. I noted with joy that some of them were single-hooked and some of them were double-hooked, a judicious compromise in case my hosts were firmly in favor of one or the other. I noted that they were beautifully tied to feathers I didn't recognize.

THE NEWFOUNDLAND STREAMS WERE LOW AND CLEAR and the guide was quick to assert that he was a coarse fellow raised in the bush and knew little of the fine points of fly casting for salmon. When he had deftly poled the canoe to the right bank he pointed toward an area where he said salmon often held. The river was broad and shallow and I waded well out and stripped off line for more distance, my eyes glued to what looked to me like a logical lie near the opposite bank.

As my cast curled out, looking pretty good, I asked the guide, standing on the bank, if I had reached the holding water.

"Ye've reached it," he said. "Ye're standing in it."

He was not complimentary of my casts and after a day's fishing I realized that he thought my mending motions (in getting the broadside float) were the inept moves of a novice. It was difficult to explain the finer points to him, for while I labored carefully with my new salmon flies and my scientific presentations, he was flipping about with a nondescript fly he had tied himself, idling behind me after showing me where to cast. He also caught three salmon. I did not raise one.

As the days went by and I caught nothing he adopted the practice of catching a single salmon or grilse and then putting up his rod, obviously to avoid embarrassing me further. Then came the day we found some 30 salmon of assorted sizes in very shallow water and in very plain sight, seeming to pay no attention to my casts. After hundreds of attempts I moved closer and found they didn't care where I stood as long as I didn't cut them off from deep water. Twenty-foot casts if I preferred.

That was when I went to a big bushy dry fly, to the obvious chagrin of my guide who was getting pretty desperate by this time. He'd caught his single fish early and glumly watched from shore. It was after I had tried most of my big dries that a vagrant twist of breeze brought a twig from a high branch. The stick struck the water with considerable splash and a salmon struck it savagely. I had no fly representing a twig but I slapped something else there and caught a fish. My guide relaxed.

My point is that while I don't know what salmon are looking for, I am sure they don't know either. This obscures the issue. If it is not scientific and delicate, what is it that creates salmon addicts? I suspect that it is the mystery of the whole thing--plus the fact that salmon tend to be pretty expensive.

IT WAS A LONG TIME BEFORE I WAS CONVINCED that most of the time most salmon prefer a fly simply swinging across stream--downstream from the fisherman. The object seems to be to make it look exactly like what it is--some feathers hung on a leader. To make it appear alive, or even free of the line, just won't get strikes. The "Portland hitch" or "riffle hitch," with the fly's nose causing special surface disturbance, will work but I don't know of anything that swims that way.

Not that there is no expertise involved. Salmon fishing skill to me has ever seemed a tour into the occult. I stood deep in the Miramichi one day, above a trace of riffle clogged with fish. A man next to me had caught three salmon, as we cozily covered the same water through a brief and friendly suspension of salmon-fishing formality. The fish would follow my fly but they would take his--of the same pattern.

"There is something wrong with your fly," he said sympathetically.

"What is it?" I asked naively.

"Who knows?" he said, deftly hooking a grilse on the exact same pattern I was using. "Change the fly."

I changed it several times and got nothing more than silent bulges as it swung past the holding place. Then my friend gave up on that spot and moved to another. I could still detect occasional fish movement in the curling break of the river's surface. All of the fish there had been small, mostly grilse, but I wasn't particular about size.

There was a special movement in the hotspot, evidently a larger fish. By that time I was back to my original fly, so I swung it part way past the hold. The salmon took hard and ran fast upstream, made one flashing jump against a backdrop of green Canadian hills and then dropped back past me. The sun was shining. I was an expert now.

IN NEW BRUNSWICK THERE WAS THIS LAW that nonresident anglers must have guides, no more than two fishermen to one guide, and there I learned that not all salmon guiding was laborious. I suspected it as soon as I waded into the river where my guide had indicated and noted that he had taken a folding lawn chair from the bushes and was shifting into a napping formation. His name was Nathan and he was quite youthful, confiding that this was his first tour of duty. To reach our spot on an island he had paddled a canoe for 30 yards and then immediately prepared to rest up for the return trip that evening. His rest was improved by a straw sombrero which he could use Mexican fashion for lengthy siestas.

Although he tended to be noncommittal about fly selection or approach to the various flies, his use of the landing net was a jealously guarded duty, his attitude being that once a fish was hooked the chips were down.

Now for some reason I find that salmon fishermen tend to play their fish lightly, even when using pretty sturdy leaders. I suspect this comes from the salmon's habit of preferring open water, without the obstacles that are part of the game with large brown trout or saltwater snook. Anyway, I have seen salmon anglers hurrying along a rocky shore at risk of life and limb, in pursuit of a four-pound grilse attached to a nine-pound leader. In a few cases I have noted that the guide gets out there with his net when the fish is still pretty busy, the angler certainly not forcing the issue. All of this is fine, though, and if a little more pressure might land a few more fish, it might also lose a few others.

USE OF THE NET WAS A CHALLENGE TO NATHAN, who could leap wildly from the soundest sleep at the squeal of a reel or the chug of a jumping fish. His eyes would have a wild look and he would be beyond reason for the moment. A hooked salmon, or even a grilse, was an emergency of crisis stature, causing him to babble incoherently. The net he used was of heroic proportions on a very long handle, and I morosely contemplated the thought that eventually he would probably get both me and the fish on one of his charges. It was entertaining to see Nathan pursuing a hooked fish in three feet of water with both scooping and swatting motions, except when it was my fish that he seemed determined to knock off.

On one occasion my friend Ray Donnersberger was present when I hooked one of my fish, and when Nathan learned of the situation and came out of his sleep with a leap, charging with his great net, Ray spoke to him consolingly and actually held him off exactly the way a blocker might hold a defensive rusher out of a quarterback's pocket. I hesitate to tell that part because it comes on as exaggeration or downright lying. It is neither.

Anyway, the fish weren't that big and there was a perfect place to beach them on a gently sloping bar. I did it twice, sliding the fish right up to my feet and releasing them. It was no big deal, although being fresh from fly fishing for snook, where the whole game is between you and him, a mangrove stump, and your leader knots, it may be I was a mite heavy-handed. I did this when Ray was holding Nathan off or when Nathan was helping Ray or when I got so far up the bar Nathan couldn't hear the reel or the fish. But finally everything worked out wrong.

I had moved down along the bar's edge until I was only about 75 yards from Nathan and perhaps he wasn't sleeping soundly. After all, he'd finished his comic book the day before and had been tossing and turning restlessly ever since ten o'clock that morning.

The fish took quietly out there past the big rock and swept across the river, turned upstream, and then dropped down. I was leaning on him, guiltily aware that I was using more leader than some of the old hands.

He was almost done but still managed a floundering jump in midstream. I reeled hard, pumped a little, and snubbed him short, backing up slightly in anticipation of beaching him. Nathan heard the leap and sprang upright from his lawn chair, clawing wildly for his net. The fish was coming in and when I heard the thump of Nathan's feet I hurried.

YOU COULD HEAR NATHAN FOR SOME DISTANCE. He wore knee boots over a pair of stockingfoot waders, and even on dry ground he was noisy. If the knee boots were nearly filled with water, as they would be any time he went in after a fish, his progress sounded like the drowning of a water buffalo. I heard him coming and swore urgently to myself. The salmon had reached a shelf where it became so shallow he turned partly on his side.

And then the rod tip kicked as the hook snapped out. I'd pulled too hard and I stood stupidly and watched the fish right himself, turn, and head back for deep water, gaining speed as it recovered. That was when the scene was obscured by Nathan's geysers of water as he smashed toward where my line had pointed. There was a sound of mighty swishing and more splashes and Nathan waded toward me, the salmon in his net.

"Sir," he said, examining the fish's mouth with care, "where is the leader?"

After that I was careful not to complain about Nathan's method or madness. By the way, was that a legal catch?

At a pool in evening I am awed by the salmon. They have waited outside the river's mouth, the guide tells me, for a long while, waiting for this fresh, cool water from upstream rains. And now, in a strange land a long way from Cow Creek, I wade to the top of my waders and cast across and downstream, the long shadows of conifer forest darkening the tail of the big pool.

I stand there until it is almost dark, the sun just down, and throw the fly mechanically, thinking of great fish homing to this river from some foreign depths. As I start to reel in, planning my wader's route to shore, a single salmon leaps, no more than 20 feet from me, sea-bright and seemingly oblivious to my presence. Long at sea but back in its home river after those years, it would be almost a shame to have it caught by a decorative bit of feather and tinsel cast by a sunfisherman from Cow Creek.