His name was Dave Farkus, and he'd recently taken up fly-fishing as a way to meet girls. So far, it hadn't worked out very well.
It was late October, one of those wild fall days containing a fifty-five-degree swing from dawn to dusk, and Farkus stood mid-thigh in waders in the Twelve Sleep River that coursed through the town of Saddlestring, Wyoming. River cottonwoods were so drunk with color the leaves hurt his eyes.
Farkus was short and wiry, with muttonchop sideburns and a slack expression on his face. He'd parked his pickup under the bridge and waded out into the river at midmorning just as a late-fall Trico hatch created clouds of insects that billowed like terrestrial clouds along the surface of the water. A few trout were rising for them, slurping them down, but he hadn't hooked one yet. Trico flies were not only tiny and hard to tie on his line, they were difficult to see on the water.
He was at wits’ end since he’d relocated to the Twelve Sleep Valley from southern Wyoming. He’d landed in Saddlestring with no job, and he didn’t intend to look for one, except the damned natural-gas pipeline company was challenging his disability payments, claiming he’d never really been injured. And his ex-wife, Ardith, had contacted a lawyer about several missed alimony payments and was threatening to take him back to court.
Farkus was intently aware of each car that sizzled by on the bridge over his shoulder. When he heard a car slow down to look at him, he made a long useless cast that, he hoped, looked practiced and elegant, as though he was Brad Pitt’s double in the movie A River Runs Through It. He wondered how long it would be before a pretty doe-eyed twentysomething tourist would come down to the river and ask for a lesson. But he was starting to believe it would never happen.
He tied on a new fly—something puffy and white that he could see on the water—and felt the power of the current push against his legs.
That’s when he heard, upriver, the distinctive hollow pock sound of a drift boat striking a rock.
He barely looked up, so intent was he on tying the nearly invisible thin tippet through the loop of his fly. Drift boats filled with fishermen were common on the river. There were several commercial guide operations in town, and it seemed like every other home in Saddlestring had a drift boat on a trailer parked in front of it. The river was shallow because it was late fall and water was at a premium, and it wasn’t unusual for guides to miscalculate and hit a rock.
But when he heard a series of mishaps—pock-pock-pock, rock-rock-rock—he glanced up from his knot.
The white fiberglass drift boat was coming right at him, sidewise, bumping along the river rocks in a shallow current. No one was at the oars. In fact, no one seemed to be in the boat at all.
Farkus squinted and cursed. If the boat continued on its path it would hit him, maybe knock him right off his feet.