I don’t recall the year, but it’s been several since that day. A steamy, late summer afternoon found me waist deep in the cool waters of the Illinois Bayou somewhere north of Hector, Arkansas. Cicadas buzzed in the hardwoods and the barbaric cackle of a pileated woodpecker occasionally echoed through the hollow. Sol was still an hour away from sinking below the hills, and the theory of an inverse relationship between sunlight and bass fishing was again proving true. As light waned fishing success waxed.

I was talking to the editor of a fly fishing magazine the other day, and he mentioned that he was going to do a story on a fellow who had an awfully large fly collection. The exact number didn’t stick in my head, but it seems to me that it was somewhere along the lines of 73,000 flies. Good Lord, assuming that you could only fish a couple at a time, where would you ever start?