Lesioned Steel

They are coming in now, grifting the roe of skunk chinook, muscling in with the dying kings to eat their children. The line stopped and I set the hook deep. The chrome was intact and the shimmering blue-red band confirmed his steelhead status. He'd taken the last egg in the row from a deep part of the hole where the gravel incline fades into mud. He rolled and ran upstream, drifted here and there, shook his head so that my rod waved back and forth. The 12'6 8# Eurospey held its own and brought him to papa. And, as I plucked him from the oak leaf rimed edge of the river, in the feral soup of rotting skunk carcases, a great meaty pustule could be seen square in the arc of its back. The corrugated steel drainpipe drizzled a sulphurous rust brown soup of minerals and chemicals into the pool where I landed him. In the foetid pool, plastic bottles mixed with the plucked out heads of picked over chinook. And there, right there, the lesion on the back of the steelhead. My first Kletzsch Park steelhead of the season.