For Father's Day, my younger daughter, Sara, gave me Howell Raines's new book, The One that Got Away. Raines enjoyed, if that's the word, a short and stormy stint as editor of the New York Times, a duty he was relieved of after the "reporter" Jason Blair (whose hiring and oversight was none of Raines's doing) was exposed as a fabulist. Now all that Raines has left in life are writing and fishing, poor fellow. Fortunately for him, he writes well. As an angler, he seems to be the middling sort that you or I (certainly I) would be comfortable with. His fish tales, woven into a larger autobiographical tapestry, often highlight his own ineptitude, and The One that Got Away, as the title suggests, describes in detail some of Raines's most memorable angling agonies. At the outset Raines quotes Lord Gray of Fallodin's 1899 book, Fly Fishing: "It is our lost fish that I believe stay longest in memory..." I think the good lord got that right, and in my own memory bank I have retained not only scenes of fish that I have lost but fish that my companions have lost.

One of my own unerasable memories replays a hot midsummer day on South Pond in Warren, Maine, when Freddie Monroe and I, both about 14 or 15, were casting plugs toward a weedbed. As I was retrieving my lure I felt it snag on an immovable object, probably a sunken log, I thought. My next thought was to pull a fast one on Freddie, so I hauled back on the rod and made it bend and thrash from side to side, yelling, "Freddie! I got a big one!" Just as Freddie turned to look, a massive largemouth bass launched itself out of water, spat out my plug, and crashed back into the pond, sending spray flying for fifteen feet.

A couple of years later, the Old Man and the Bro and I drove Downeast in search of trout. We were on Route One, which crosses the Narraguagus, a legendary Atlantic salmon river in earlier days, and when we came to the river we stopped for a stretch and to throw a line in, not really expecting anything. I was using a baitcasting rod, and to the end of the line I had attached a very ugly lavender-purple jointed plug, translucent, with flecks of silvery metal embedded in the plastic. I was casting somewhat gingerly, due to a painfully swollen finger, the result of mishandling a lobster. I lobbed the purple plug out about 40 feet and began winding it in. A fish -- or torpedo, or submerged locomotive -- grabbed the plug and headed for the Atlantic at about a million miles an hour. When I tried to get control of the furiously spinning reel handle, all I got for my trouble was about thirty fast whacks on my infected finger, which was certainly no more painful than pulling the nail out with pliers would have been. The line screamed out all the way down to the spool, there was a mighty final tug, and the line went limp. When I had reeled in all the line, my ugly plug was still attached, but the hook had been straightened out to resemble a tiny harpoon. I am positive that was my one, and so far only, encounter with an Atlantic salmon.

One evening the Bro and I were casting flies to rising fish on the Androscoggin. He was about 30 yards downstream from me. I heard the sudden splash of a take, and looked downstream to see the Bro's rod bending and his line hissing rapidly upstream. Now the Bro is a really good flyfisherman, and I had never seen him rattled when a fish was on. Nor does he whoop or holler or utter any sound at all when he hooks a fish; if I don't happen to see him with a fish on, I might never know about it. But in that instant he had that look which is a combination of surprise, astonishment and panic and comes with the recognition that things have suddenly gone out of control, and he yelled "Jeezus!" just as a huge rainbow erupted from the water almost in front of me, shook his head, snapped the tippet and was gone.

They got away. But they never, ever go away.