His voice rolled like the surface of the mountains draped around them, mingling with the water's churning. The late morning sun warmed the back of her neck. She could have stood there all day, leaning against him, listening to his easy-going voice. She cast and recast until the hook reached the other side. She looked back at him, and he nodded. “That's better.” The rod trembled and arched, and Caleb helped her slowly reel in a rainbow, kneeling beside the water to wait until the fish stilled. He lifted the fish, gently slipping the hook from its soft mouth, threading a slip of rope through its gills. He eased the fish back into the pool in the crevice beside them, securing the end of the rope beneath a heavy rock.
        Emma gave Caleb the rod, and he walked over to the river bank to cast out a few more times. She squatted on the rock, studying her fish. Its back was green with black spots, and its sides shimmered silver and rose. Its ghostly fins moved steadily beneath its body. It was so beautiful that Emma imagined it must be female. Another rainbow swam up beside her fish. Darker and greener, its sides were scarred white. It held itself beside Emma's captive fish, its gills moving as though it were talking, and Emma imagined it must be the mate. Icy water splashed over the rocks, soaking her boots, and she hopped from foot to foot until her frozen toes stung from the blood rushing back into them. She pulled her fish from the pool and went over to where Caleb was kneeling, cleaning and wrapping his three trout in water-soaked rhododendron leaves, slipping them into a woven creel. Emma looked down at her fish. It was dead. She shivered as Caleb wrapped it in the wet leaves, slipped it into the dark hole of the creel. She wished she'd let the fish go.
        Caleb took off his wool sweater, gave it to her, and it smelled of his sweet tobacco as she pulled it over her head. He unjointed the fly rod, reeling the line through the guides. Hoisting the creel, he picked up the rod and headed along the uphill path toward the tree line.
        “Let's walk for a while,” he said. “I want to show you something.”
        The river path was steep, bordered by limestone bluffs and laurel. Pines grew sideways out of the rocks, bowing across the river, and the big native trout swam in the black pools beneath the cascades. Emma and Caleb climbed, stepping over roots and high blocks of limestone, until she tired and asked him to stop. Sitting on a fern-softened rock before a cave, she let the cave air breath softly over her neck and shoulders. While Caleb jointed the fly rod and cast into the pool, she watched his long arms and graceful movements, deciding that he was handsome. The hiking had made her warm and drowsy, but she kept his sweater on, breathing his scent of tobacco and trout, wondering if he loved her, and why.
        Emma was not beautiful. Once, she'd dared to ask her mother if she were pretty, and her mother replied, “Your hair is your one beauty. Don't ever cut it.” Her father had joked gently that she was built like a farm hand. Dark-skinned and broad shouldered, she'd carried two buckets of water from the coal camp pump for her mother to do every laundry day. She'd scrubbed floors and cooked for three brothers and her father since she was seven. Once, her father had come home with two coal pails full of blackberries he'd picked while out roaming the mountainside, giving the fruit to her mother before he went back to work a second shift in the mine. Emma knew that her mother was more nervous than angry with her father for taking an extra shift, that it was more dangerous for him to go back underground when he was already tired. Her mother had turned away from her father, briskly ordering Emma to wash out the mason jars so they could can the fruit right away.

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