Kirk Wallace Johnson was waist high in New Mexico’s Red River fishing for trout when he first heard the bizarre story at the heart of this unusual and engrossing page-turner. He was using off-the-shelf flies: hooks wrapped in various materials to mimic the often-drab aquatic insects that trout feed on. His guide, Spencer Seim, showed him a home-made salmon fly, ‘one of the most strangely beautiful things I’d ever seen … It bore the feathers of a dozen different birds, flashing crimson and canary yellow, turquoise and setting-sun orange.’

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