"Thank you," he replied.
"Fixing to shoot the rainbow that won't jump in your creel?" I said.
"Cougars come down through the trees at night. They get into the cat bowls and such."
"It's not night," I said.
He grinned at nothing and looked in his daughter's direction. She was a junior in high school, her blond hair cropped short on the back of her neck, her denim shirt tight across her waist when she lifted her rod above her head and pulled her line dripping from under the river's surface and false-cast the dry fly on the tippet in a figure eight.
Doc kept touching his jawbone with his thumb, as though he had an impacted wisdom tooth.
"What are you studying on?" I asked.
"Me?"
"No. T
he rock you're leaning against."
"The country's going to hell," he said.
"People have been saying that for two hundred years."
"You've been here eleven hours and you've got it all figured out. I wish I had them kind of smarts," he replied.
He left his food uneaten and walked upstream with his fly rod, his long, ash-blond hair blowing in the wind, his shoulders stooped like an ancient hunter's.
Fifteen minutes later I followed his daughter up to the log house that was planted with roses and hung with wind chimes. She stood at the sink, ripping the intestines from a rainbow trout, the water from the tap splashing on her wrists. Her eyebrows were drawn together as though she were trying to see through a skein of tangled thoughts just in front of her face.
"What's the problem with your old man?" I asked.
"Midlife crisis," she answered, feigning a smile, suddenly knowledgeable about the psychological metabolism of people thirty years her senior.
"Why's he carrying a revolver?"
"Somebody shot into our house down in Deaf Smith yesterday. It was probably a drunk hunter. Dad thinks it's the militia or these people dumping cyanide into the Blackfoot. He treats me like a child," she said, her face growing darker with her own rhetoric.
"Excuse me?" I said, trying to follow the progression of her logic.
"I'm almost seventeen. He doesn't get it."
"What militia?"
"They're down in the Bitterroot Valley. A bunch of crazy people who think it's patriotic not to pay their bills. Dad writes letters to the newspaper about them. It's stupid."
"Who's putting cyanide in the water?"
"Ask him. Or his friends who think they're environmentalists because they drink in bars that have logs in the walls."
"Your old man's a good guy. Why not give him a break?"
She scraped the dark and clotted blood away from the trout's vertebrae with her thumbnail, then washed her hands under the tap and dried them on her rump.
"The only person he ever listened to was my mom. I'm not my mom," she said. She walked out the back door with a bag of fish guts for the cats.
I found Doc beyond a wooded bend in the river. He was false-casting his line on a white, pebbled stretch of beach, then dropping his fly as softly as a moth in the middle of an undulating riffle. The light and water on his nylon tippet looked like liquid glass as it cut through the air over his head.
"What's going on with you guys?" I said.