ON BRULE RIVER, Wis. _ It was almost as if the ancient white pines knew. As sure as their spent needles were piling up beneath outreached boughs, anglers would be coming.
It was a glorious September morning, finally almost crisp after several days of rain and thick air.
Yes, the river was running a little high from that spate of precipitation. And, yeah, it might be carrying a little more color than a trout or salmon angler really would have liked.
But there are days _ and every Brule angler knows it _ when you wake up, smell the air and say, "I'm going."
Unlike in spring, when the river is all about the steelhead run _ the big rainbows coming in from Lake Superior to spawn _ the river offers a smorgasbord in late September. The fall-run steelhead could be coming in, although it's a bit early yet. But the river could also hold brown trout, coho salmon and a few king salmon, also there to spawn.
Any one of them could give you a fierce tussle. A friend of mine had tied into a 36-inch king just a few days earlier _ and managed to land it. It was his biggest river fish ever, and he's been at it for several decades.
"You should have been here the other day when an 8-year-old boy was in here with a huge coho," said the clerk at the convenience store in Brule. "His first time fishing the river."
It could happen to anyone.
