This is the second part of Ted Kerasote's story of his quest for trout in the Himalaya.

At this point--to give you the full, frustrating details of wetting a line in the Himalaya--I might tell you how my friend Larry MacDonnel tried for two days to telephone Delhi so as to change his international air flight and come trout fishing with me. Though he tried booking both an "urgent" call and a "lightning" connection, which costs $20 for three minutes, he was unable to get through.

And so my friend Paul Clark, who lives on the Thompson River in the Bitterroot Mountains of Montana, came instead. I might also tell you how our houseboat proprietor, Rasheed, a sincere and helpful man in his thirties, his teeth stained with nicotine and his hair grey from the two wives he had, tried to arrange a posh trek for us. Emptying his cigarette of tobacco and priming it with hashish, an act he contrived to do about eight times a day while lounging on the divan of his houseboat's porch, he said, "You can have a cook and a cookboy, wonderful curries and biriyanis every night, ponies to carry everything--even your cameras--tents, a guide, an assistant guide, and two horse handlers."

We had had a similar retinue on the mountain and wanted nothing so much as to get away from the grand excursion in the style of the old sahibs. But Rasheed, more used to tourists than mountaineers, couldn't understand our desire to rough it. And explaining what we enjoyed about hunting and fishing on our own in the Rockies was like explaining the act of love to a virgin.

"You have to do it, Rasheed," I said.

At the speed at which Mr. Raza had issued my fishing license, Paul and I negotiated with our kind and slothful houseboat owner, finally agreeing that he would do no more than hire us a taxi to the roadhead and procure us a brace of ponies.

"Remember," I said on the evening before we departed, "we need those horses."

"No problem," said Rasheed. "Trust me."

As we drove up the Sind Valley the next morning, having paid 10 times the fare of the public bus, which took all day to make the two-hour taxi journey, I thought that, if I caught only one eight-ounce trout on this, my third Himalayan trek, such a small amount of salmonid flesh would have cost approximately $18,000 a pound and would have exacted enough energy that, had it been exerted in some place like Argentina or New Zealand, might have earned me a place in the record books. We all have our own grails.

We reached the village of Naranag, high in the pines by the clear and fast Wangat River. Rasheed, looking out of place in his grey town slacks and sandals, disappeared behind a gate while the taxi driver inspected his chassis. Paul and I waited. Ten minutes later Rasheed appeared, a hashish cigarette smoking between his fingers. "There are no ponies," he said.

In India one learns to take such news in stride. Resigned to our fate, Paul and I emptied our food bags of cabbages, carrots and onions. We each left a parka and our extra underwear. I took out my second camera body and two long lenses. Still, I was not happy when I put on my pack. Paul, shouldering his, said, "Ugh."

"What did you say?" said Rasheed, extending his hand.

"Ugh."

"Do you have a gun," he asked, shaking my hand.

"Why?"

"The bears."

"Bah," I said.

"What?" said Rasheed.

"Bah-humbug," I said distinctly.

"Be careful of the Gujars, too," he mentioned.

"The shepherds?" asked Paul.

"Bad men," said Rasheed, getting into the taxi. Sticking his head out the window, he added, "Leave nothing unattended. They'll steal it all. Have a good time." Spinning his tires, the taxi driver left in a billow of dust.

It was a 4,000-foot climb and 13-mile hike to the first lake. The trail took us through a forest of long-needle pines, over a loamy trail scented heavy with resin, and above the silver flumes of the vanishing Wangat River. It wound up toward parks of new green sedge rising toward broken grey mountains and glaciers. This was ibex country, the home of bharal sheep and snow leopards, and because of one P.J. Mitchell, Lt. Col., ret., it had trout. White queen to black queen 8. Check.

There are places in every nation of the planet, places just beyond the last road, places that still lie within the jurisdiction of the men with their blue stamps and ledgers, but, in reality, belong to none of us and all of us. One only needs perseverance to get there. We climbed. And the packs hurt.

Not much to do about that. Going slow, we ascended through cow parsnip, over fallen pine cones thick as your arm, and out of the swaying tall trees at what my altimeter called 10,800 feet. But I hadn't calibrated the instrument at a known elevation for days and so 10,800 was at best a good guess. Here, cows and horses grazed on long slopes of bright turf, and in the distance, where the trail undulated across two ridges, a man in a turban and a woman in a burgundy shawl led some goats. Forget-me-nots grew in pods, and yellow avens ran in fields toward a spring where miner's lettuce clung to the damp rocks. Above our water stop, from a pile of boulders, a marmot raised a shriek and leapt from sight.

We drank and then followed the trail across the ridge where the shepherds had disappeared, only to find another and another ridge stretching before us. The redstarts, tail feathers bursting like maroon kaleidoscopes, clipped neatly around us as we stopped and gazed at the route. We didn't pull out a map. It seemed pointless. One of the two we had, from a Japanese trekking book, showed the Himalaya from Pakistan to Nepal. Another, without contours or shaded relief, had the half dozen lakes for which we aimed placed beneath a stylized peak called Harmuk, and this was about equidistant between the road we had left and the one we hoped to exit on.

Trying to follow a route on these sheets was somewhat like trying to find a lake in the middle of Maine with a map that showed all of New England--a map which, it might be added, had been drawn by a German who had spoken to a Chinaman who had visited the area a half dozen years before with a guide who spoke only Urdu. We knew one thing, though--the lakes lay west.

We hiked; we stopped; we ate some of the brown bread we had bought in Srinigar. To the southwest a glaciated peak had risen above the ridge system we traversed, and we assumed that this was Harmuk, and where its glaciers fell--behind a dark emerald hogback, behind which the sun was also setting--we would find the lakes.

Back in the 1800s this sort of hit-or-miss travel was common. In fact, in pursuit of the greatest unsolved problem of Asian geography--the location of the headwaters of the Indus, Sutlej, Ganga, and Tsangpo-Brahmaputra rivers--the Royal Geographic Society, the Indian Survey, and the British Army sent out numerous explorers, fakirs, and officers on lengthy missions from which some never returned.

Sven Hedin, the Swedish explorer who spent a good part of his adult life in the Tibetan highlands, devoted himself to finding this navel of the world where the four great rivers met. On the way, not a few ibex, Marco Polo sheep, Tibetan antelope, and wild yaks were killed and eaten by these explorers, who thought nothing of living off the land for a couple of years.

The most fascinating aspect of this exploration was that everyone involved was aware of its utter commercial uselessness. Unlike Magellan's circumnavigation, Columbus's crossing of the Atlantic, Lewis and Clark's march across the North American continent, or the winning of spheres of influence in Central Asia during the Great Game between Britain and Russia, the placing on the map of Mt. Kalias, from whose four slopes the four sacred rivers of Asia flowed, served no purpose other than to satisfy an eccentric geographic curiosity.

For me, to catch one trout that lived in the Himalaya, the abode of the snow, had become such a quest. And topography was not going to make the last bit easy. Losing the sunlight, we climbed along a streambed that roared between boulders. The tundra rose in steps before us. We surmounted what seemed to be a last flat ridge, which had a depression behind it. Here, we had to crane our heads back to see Harmuk's sharp summit.

We met the sun again, and in its last light came over a rise and saw that the depression was occupied by a lake. A glacier and waterfall fell into its far end, another waterfall plunged from the ridge that formed the opposite shore, while a broad clear stream left the bank on which we stood. The tarn was perhaps a mile across and on its calm surface lay the rings of feeding trout.

We walked along the shore and put down our packs on a flat spot. Pablo climbed a nearby hill as I assembled my spinning rod. In a few minutes I walked out on an archipelago of stones, made a long cast, turned the handle, and was fast to a trout. He made three darting runs, then came in splashing and cartwheeling. I picked him up, gave him a blow to the head, and laid him on the grass, the fruit of three circumnavigations of the globe, 350 miles of walking, and 93 days of camping out. He was 10 inches long.

A sudden medley of bleating made me look up. Several hundred sheep had surrounded our gear. They ate my map case, pulled apart Pablo's clothes, nibbled our pads, and peered stupidly at the stove. I ran up to the flock, shouting and waving my arms while a Gujar shepherd boy in rags tittered and squealed at my antics. I waved a hand at him, and, still laughing, he began to toss rocks at his sheep. When we had cleared the campsite he sat on a rock and watched me catch another 10-incher, which I also kept. Then Paul took over the rod and released a dozen fish, all clones.

The sun had set. The Gujar boy had taken his sheep over the ridge. I sat on my pad, lit the stove, made some tea, and as Pablo and I drank our evening brew, I dropped some butter into the skillet and began to fry the trout.

"May I see your fishing license," said a slim young man who had walked up to us in the dusk. He had a full head of black curly hair, a black moustache, and wore a khaki shirt and trousers. Except for his plastic sandals, he looked official.

"Are you a warden?" I asked.

"I am a warden."

I rummaged through my books and maps and produced the sheaf of papers. The warden sat on the grass by our stove and studied the documents.

"This is July 10th," he said.

"I know."

"Your license..." He pointed to the documents. "The 11th."

"No!" I exclaimed. "At the fisheries office I asked for the 10th." This was a lie. But who, coming upon a lake filled with rising trout after he has traveled for years to see the sight, would have resisted?

"No problem," he said good naturedly, though it sounded like he wasn't quite sure if "no problem" was the correct English idiom. Then he studied the papers again and said, "This is not Gangabal Lake. Gangabal is up there." He pointed to the waterfall on the opposite shore.

"Oh, really."

"Yes. But no problem."

This was a warden after my own heart. He now looked down at my rod, lying on the grass.

"This is a spinning rod," he said.

"Yes. That is a spinning rod."

"Spinning rods are not allowed."

"Really?"

"Yes. It says on your license." He pointed to the back of the document, which I hadn't bothered to read. It read, in English almost as plain as day: "Use of spinning rods, spinners, or spinning real [sic ] is strictly prohibited."

This was a calamitous turn of events. I had been caught fishing on the wrong day in the wrong lake with the wrong tackle. Of course I wanted to continue to fish tomorrow.

I had only one recourse--to use a variation of Rasheed's nonplused defense, "There are no ponies." With a deadpan, Asian face, I said, "I didn't know."

"Only flies are allowed," he replied.

"I have only a spinning rod," I said.

He looked at the rod. He looked at the evidence, the two brown trout frying in the skillet. He looked at the poacher.

"What country?" he asked.

"America," I said.

"Where are you going?"

"Erin. Other side of range."

"You have only a spinning rod?"

"I have only a spinning rod."

"Sure?"

"Positive."

He looked at the fish again; at the rod; at me. "No problem," he said and handed back my license.

White Bishop to Black Queen 8. Mate.

"Want some trout?" I asked, proffering the skillet.

"Never eat fish," said the warden with a smile.