They are the symbolic fish of the north country, these odd fish with the dorsal by Dali.

Grayling! The name conjures images of yellowed old men's magazines from a time when the centerfold, if any, was of an angler landing a fish. Zane Grey was writing then, and Rex Beach and Ray Bergman.

Up there, above the 54th parallel where air conditioning is courtesy of God, that's the domain of the grayling, now a fish of legend down where most of us live.

Save for its bizarre dorsal fin, a grayling is not remarkable. It is a contradiction, living in fiercely cold water, where the current is strongest, yet weak, prone to hysterical fight for a few seconds, then meek surrender. It is leaden in color, save for the startling blue spots to the rear of that fan-like dorsal.

Compared to any trout, the grayling is a pantywaist...yet it lives in legend and its unique profile conjures a land of pine and birch bark.

True, you can catch grayling in Montana, but they aren't Arctic grayling. You have to go north until the cities fall away and there are no yard lights in the night and then go north some more and maybe you'll be close enough to the northern lights to catch grayling.

Once there were grayling in Michigan where there is a town named for the fish. But grayling were extinct in Grayling by the 1930s, and for practical purposes were gone by 1900.

Charles Hallock, editor of Forest and Stream, one of the early outdoor magazines, was a pioneer sport angler for North American grayling (the fish exist widely in Europe). First evidence that the fish existed here was in 1865. A few years later, Hallock and old-time fishing writer Fred Mather went to Michigan on what then was a backwoods pilgrimage where they first caught, then wrote about the fish.

"As a consequence, the fish has been nearly exterminated by vandals who fish for count, and the waters where we fished at first are nearly barren," Mather wrote guiltily less than 20 years later.

George Fleming is determined that won't happen on his fly-in rivers in northeast Saskatchewan. He'll let you catch grayling, eat them as a shore lunch, even keep one if you really have to. One, but that's all. The rest go back.

Anglers fish for five species from Fleming's Hatchet Lake Lodge--walleye, northern pike, lake trout, whitefish, and grayling, but it is a leaping grayling that adorns the Lodge logo.

Fleming, who hacked the lodge complex from the wilderness with his bare hands and a D-7 Caterpillar, driven across the ice in the gut of winter, has an affinity for the fish. Both he and the grayling couldn't exist other than in this harsh, clean land.

The Lodge is 30 miles from the nearest roadhead, 200 miles from the nearest town, La Ronge, and nearly 500 miles north of Saskatoon, the nearest city.

That's about right for Fleming, an expatriate Scot who emigrated when he was 16 to work for the Hudson's Bay Company. He is uncomfortable in crowds, not given to small talk. He and the reclusive grayling are a pair.

Fleming was making a lordly $325 monthly when he realized that a fellow worker with 16 years seniority was making only $60 a month more. He decided to go to New Zealand. "But Pat Campling, who owns La Ronge Aviation, told me about this island camp."

The two bought a rough fishing camp on a 200-acre island in 128,000-acre Hatchet Lake in 1964. Fleming bought out his partner in 1970. Now the lodge complex is host to 500-700 anglers per year and there is a guide force of nearly 30.

I'd have to go to a place like Hatchet Lake if I were to bring grayling off the pages of the old books and magazines of my childhood. It is a series of airplane hops, St. Louis to Minneapolis, to Regina, to Saskatoon, then into the bush.

I shut my eyes to a sere landscape below and fell asleep. When I woke some time later, the world had changed dramatically. Now we overflew dark green forest, laced with countless rivers and lakes. Wind tickled the lake surfaces far below and turned them to silver filigreed artwork.

We flew through broken clouds, a couple thousand feet over northeast Saskatchewan. "Sparsely settled" say the aeronautical maps euphemistically. "Unsettled" is more like it (like my stomach). There may be a few Chippewayan Indians in the black spruce forest that stretches to the horizon in any direction, but they aren't visible.

The airplanes got progressively older and smaller the closer I got to Hatchet Lake. The sleek 727 that carried me to Regina gave way to an aged Convair that lumbered down the runway like a pregnant musk ox, wings streaked with rust (but so far as I could tell by continual panicky observation, not oil). Next was a twin-engine Cessna, tossed around the sky by Canada's powerful autumn winds until I was so airsick I didn't care if we crashed in the endless black spruce. Anything to end the air sickness.

It had been 90 degrees in Regina; it was 30 at Hatchet Lake.

The next morning, I was in a single engine Otter headed for Durrant Lake into which a broad river spills...and the pocket water among the river rocks is the home of the Arctic grayling.

The Otter is the pack mule of the north country. It looks like a refugee from an aeronautical museum, but is sturdy as a Percheron. Ours grumbled and rumbled through the morning sunshine at a thumping 80 miles per hour, like the turtle of tortoise-and-hare fame.

The river was a 10-mile lake boat ride from the landing site. A pair of juvenile bald eagles breakfasted on something in a nest 30 feet above us at one stop.

A loon lamented down lake from us. It takes a remote granite-ribbed north country lake, clad in aromatic conifers to inspire the loon to dazed soliloquy. Loons laugh loudly in the intense silence of the northland, like the mentally-disturbed, lost in their fevered world.

Also symbolic of the north was my Cree guide, Cornelius Ratt. "The Man of the North, that's what I call myself," Corny said, with a Copenhagen-stained grin.

"Why?"

"I dunno." Corny, good-humored and pedal-to-the-metal when it comes to lake crossing, has a one-joke routine. Every time he releases a fish, he shouts after it, "Go home and get yo' momma!"

Corny didn't understand fly fishing. He regarded my black Woolly Worm with suspicion.

"Is that the only fly you got?" he asked.

"What should I use?" I asked, figuring he would give me the Cree lowdown on local flies. He shrugged.

"Keep tryin' 'em. You'll know when you find it," he said.

When confronted with unfamiliar water, the unrepentant fly angler invariably dredges through the fly box for a Woolly Worm. The old-time writers claimed a small dark fly was appropriate for grayling. Mather opted for a yellow-bodied fly with brown wings.

The first grayling was almost anticlimactic. It struck on my first cast. Grayling aren't trout, even if they're lumped with their more colorful cousins. They hit hard and fight hard...for about 15 seconds. Then they slide in, asking forgiveness with big, expressive eyes, like misbehaving puppies. It's easy to release a grayling--you feel sorry for it.

So, I'd caught an Arctic grayling, 1,500 miles north of and 50 degrees Fahrenheit below my Missouri home.

I forgot to smell the fish. Only with grayling (so they say) do you expect anything other than fish smell.

Grayling are reputed to smell like the herb thyme. The Latin species name "Thymallus" reflects that and writers have commented on it as far back as Aeolian (A. D. 170-230). But T.E. Pritt, in the 1880s, said he could smell only fish and it wasn't that pleasant.

However, no one disagrees that grayling are as edible as any fish that swims. Chances are, you could pull a rock out of Canada's cold, clean water and it would taste pretty good, but grayling filets dusted with seasoned flour and toasted in a black old fry pan over a shoreline campfire are incomparable.

I stretched my legs while the guides sliced potatoes and set up lunch and found a carpet of blueberries, the plants only two or three inches high, and gathered enough for a few mouthfuls of sweet, wild fruit.

Then I ate my grayling. Blueberries and grayling on a lichen-stained granite shelf above a lake clean enough to drink from.

And now I am back in the land of soybeans and pigs and all that remains is whatever tiny part of that grayling became part of me...and the unfading memory of another land, another world.