Our days were spent surrounded by old growth spruce and devil’s club and ferns and fireweed, in rivers thick with fish, from the salt to our feet and on to its glacial headwaters. Pinks and chum and dollies, but pinks mostly. Humpies. Angry, bright, toothy, headlong-in-leopard-spot haymakers on almost every cast. Fish six-to-eight pounds and the occasional humped male pushing weight to double digits. So many you could feel the hit on your swung fly and bury a fair-hooked solid strip-set before they hit your swung fly. So many that you let even shitty casts drift. So many that we made things more challenging by throwing dry flies – pink gurglers the size of hummingbirds—just to watch them rise and blindly fumble around after the fly behind those un-earthly kyped beaks. We imagined them with a voice like Barney Gumble, while our own voices, hollering Humpaaaayyy!!! echoed up and down the river like kids with a new cuss word on the playground.