On this, my third trip to the Himalaya, I learned to play chess, which was more by default than desire. On my two previous treks I had entertained the thought of trout fishing. After all, the Himalaya, stretching from Bhutan in the east to the Khyber Pass in the west, is dotted with high lakes as well as being the birthplace of streams so numerous that many remain unnamed, at least on published maps.

The names of the great rivers--Imja Kola, Kali Gandaki, Dras, and Braldu--come off the tongue with a sweet sound, like mantras recalling your footsteps long after you have walked up their valleys. I had even gone so far, while looking at maps and planning my treks, to pack in my bags, among the ropes, crampons, and ice climbing tools, my rod and reel and a box of lures.

All told, on these first two Himalayan walks, I camped out for 12 weeks. I went up rivers and down rivers, crossing them on flimsy plank bridges and also wading them, thigh-deep, with my boots tied around my neck. I climbed up to 12,000-foot lakes, to 14,000-foot lakes, to 17,000-foot lakes where there were no lakes at all, only ice. And everywhere I went not a trout rose.

Frequently this was because the rivers ran heavy with glacial silt. But often the absence of trout was a circumstance of geography, of remoteness. No one had ever made the effort to put trout in most of the eastern Himalaya, an oversight for which the first explorers may be forgiven. When a lake is a 20-day walk from the roadhead, when the odd helicopter is used to pluck some broken mountaineer from a glacier, when the mountain people carry lowland rice and oranges for a week, on their backs over steep, slippery trails, stocking trout takes on a low priority in the round of daily concerns.

Yet, like a man who refuses to believe that the beautiful woman he loves really has no heart, I kept searching--up remote cirques to gaze at perfect tarns, through high valleys with bouldery streams, down in the rain forest where waterfalls dropped into granite pools. None had any trout. A state of affairs which left nothing to do with the hours that remained after I had reached camp.

I learned how to play chess. Interesting, but a poor ersatz.

So on my third Himalayan trip, among the ice screws, pitons, and magnetic chess board, I tucked a small rod and spinning reel. I still had hope, for this time we were going to Kashmir, the northernmost sporting grounds of the old British Raj, a place to which one thoughtful, diligent Victorian, P.J. Mitchell, Lt. Col., ret., had brought the ova of Salmo trutta , the brown trout, in 1901. As an opening, it proved a deep move.

One I almost missed. Everything that could have gone wrong did go wrong. We got bumped off our connecting flight from Delhi to Srinigar and spent three frustrating days in the sweltering Indian capital, arguing with airline officials while the thermometer maxed out at 113 degrees F. We had altercations with our trekking company, misunderstandings with our liaison officer, bargaining hassles with the porters, and endless confabulations among ourselves.

When we finally placed a camp at 18,000 feet on the Czech Ridge of Nun Kun and were set to go to its 23,400-foot summit in two grand pushes, it snowed. It didn't snow for five hours or 12 hours or 15 hours. It snowed for 22 hours. And when it stopped snowing, the mountain began to avalanche. And when the avalanches stopped, the wind kicked up and blew the snow that had fallen in one place to another place, where it accumulated deeper and began to avalanche all over again. Then it snowed for another day, and as we moved up in a whiteout, a slope fractured beneath us but didn't slide.

We ran out of time; we ran out of energy; we ran out of courage--just about in that order--and beat a retreat to Srinigar. Hot showers, chicken curry, and moonlight floats on Dal Lake, where the lotus flowers bloom. The balm lasted a day. Everyone wanted to go home. Even I, having seen some color posters in the tourist office, showing a fisherman holding a large brown trout, wanted to go home. Big mountains do that to you. A big mountain on which you've almost bought the farm does that to you even more.

Feeling played out by a long afternoon during which we had argued the merits of returning to the United States or staying for a fishing trek, I left the lunch table and walked back through the houseboat to our room to face my dusty backpacks full of smelly clothes and crumpled candy bar wrappers. Sticking from the bottom of the pile was also my rod and reel, which seemed forlorn and misplaced. Looking at the mess, I felt that there was only one thing in the world sadder than a pile of worn and dirty gear in a hotel room 12,000 miles from home--it's that same pile of gear lying on your living room floor with nothing but failure locked behind its zippers. I took a shower, got a shikara boy to row me into town, and walked through the bazaar to the fisheries office.

Moving a pawn into enemy territory, I walked under a dull brass plaque that said, "Licences Fisheries Department." To the left of the entry two men--one in a black astrakhan, the other in a white Muslim skull cap--slept on each side of a table that held an antique Remington typewriter. The walls were yellowed and two bare bulbs hung from the ceiling among the tangled tentacles of electric wires. In front of the room, at a desk whose varnish was peeling, sat a swarthy man in a cool, algae-green cotton shirt. Behind him stood filing cabinets, piled high with ledgers, and to his side a swiveling fan lifted the papers on which he worked.

Mr. Darya Ali Raza, the licensing director, reached for one of the armory of stamps by his elbow and struck the document before him with a large blue rectangle of wet ink. He then plucked a smaller stamp from the line waiting at his elbow and inserted its cachet in the center of the stamp. He passed the license over a marble inkstand to the small man in front of his desk, who bobbed his head and rushed out.

"Yes," said Darya Ali Raza to the blond man and woman seated at the table in the opposite corner of the room from the sleeping hangers-on. Between them they had a fair cherub of a son. Their Indian booking agent, a thin, voluble man, escorted them to the desk and said that his clients, from the American Foreign Service in Algeria, would like a trout beat.

Mr. Raza extended a smooth arm to the row of chairs before his desk, shook hands with the couple--dressed in matching khaki culotte and Bermuda shorts--chucked their young son under the chin and took from atop his file cabinet a book the size of the Gutenberg Bible. He placed the tome on his desk with all the ceremony due its dimensions, opened it, and ran a finger down its many columns.

"There are no beats left," he announced.

"None?" cried the agent.

"None," said Mr. Raza.

"Not a one?" said the man.

"None," repeated Mr. Raza. "It's high season, you know."

"I find this difficult to believe," said the booking agent.

"Ah," said Mr. Raza, turning one of the heavy pages. "Perhaps a beat off the beaten track might be available." He smiled at his pun.

I half closed my eyes, sunk deeper into my chair at the very back of the hot little room, and stared at three terrible paintings above the licensing director's head, which showed mountains in golden romantic light and the same angler in each scene, landing a flopping trout while his wife and children beamed at him from the shore.

Before Mr. Raza could continue looking through his beat book, a man in a blue pastel suit, his shirt collar opened, walked in and went directly to the licensing director's desk. Darya Ali Raza pushed back his chair, shook hands, gave the man a hug, then chatted affably with him for several minutes while the Americans and their booking agent cooled their heels.

The man in the pastel suit produced several hundred rupees and with an absolutely fluid gesture slipped the folded wad into Mr. Raza's coat pocket. Shortly thereafter, Mr. Raza returned to his desk, said, "Excuse me" to the Americans and filled out the licensing forms for the briber. When the man had left, he returned to his beat book, going down the columns, and sighing.

"Not a good one left," he said. "All taken, except the distant ones, of course."

The Americans, still unable to take his hint, sat silently as a bedraggled-looking messenger slunk through the door and laid a document by Raza's elbow. Continuing his charade at the beat book, the licensing director ignored the piece of paper. The messenger, however, gathered his courage and pushed the note a centimeter closer. It touched the director's arm and he started as if seeing the it for the first time.

"Out!" he thundered.

The messenger scuttled to the verandah like a crab.

"Is it always like this?" said the foreign service wife to the booking agent.

"It is high season, you know," he replied.

The foreign service husband leaned toward the booking agent and whispered in his ear. The booking agent shut his eyes with relief and leaned across the desk, while his hand moved deftly from his pocket to the licensing director's hand.

"Ah," said Mr. Raza, sliding his hand from his desktop into his pocket and back to the beat book where he pointed to the bottom of the page. "Right here." He beamed a lavish smile. "A fine beat indeed. Missed it completely."

The couple signed their forms. The booking agent paid the fees. They stood and left. Mr. Raza, the fan blowing his hair, turned to me and said, "May I help you?"

"Perhaps," said I, taking a deep breath. Then I told him that I wanted no well known beat--not the Phalgam, Sind, or Lidder rivers. Nor did I want to stay in a lodge. Most of all, I didn't need a guide or gillie. All I wanted, I said, was to fish some high lakes in the northern Kashmir Himal, the most distant of distant beats.

"A fine choice," he said in a friendly tone, which made me wary. "Please fill out this form."

While I wrote in my passport number, Indian tourist visa number, place of issue, date of expiration, foreign and local addresses, father's surname and address, mother's name and address, and my intended departure from the subcontinent, as well the lakes where I wanted to fish, another booking agent came in and sat down next to me. Mr. Raza ignored me until he finished chatting with him. Then he looked at the application that I had been holding out and said, "But what days do you want to fish each lake?"

"I don't know," I said. "Whenever I get there."

"This will never do," he said. "You must stipulate the day you will fish each beat and, if you put down two lakes for the same day, as you've done here and here, you must pay the appropriate licensing fee for each one. In other words double price each day."

At this point the booking agent, a sharp little man who needed a shave, said, "And you'll never get up to Gangabal that way. It's too steep."

"Really?"

"Yes," he said, adding, "With which group are you?"

"I'm alone."

"Do you know there are bears up there."

"So I've heard."

"I suggest that you go with a group or cancel your plans," the booking agent said firmly, and Mr. Raza handed me back my application.

Right below my feet, on the first floor of the tourist complex, was the office of Indian Airlines. If there hadn't been a two hour wait there, and if I hadn't known that getting out of Srinigar in the next week by air was virtually impossible, and that getting out overland was absolutely impossible because of the Sikh uprisings in the Punjab, I would have walked out the door and left for home without a backward glance. But sometimes you have only one move.

I took back my application, scratched out a lake on each of my "double" days, and handed it to Mr. Raza. Knight to Queen Bishop 3. "The route stays," I said.

"As you wish," said Mr. Raza, beginning to scribble impatiently on the red licensing documents. He made out a copy for each lake, banged in the appropriate stamps, and handed them across the desk for my signature. I passed him several hundred rupees, and as I signed my name on the documents the booking agent said, "You should reconsider." Ignoring him, I folded the papers, placed them in my breast pocket and walked out without reading them. This was an oversight.

Tomorrow, Part Two of Ted Kerasote's story.