It was a pretty good weekend at the Pool, despite the vagaries of wind and weather, which brought a full menu of finger-numbing cold, gales which flung a cast back into the angler's face, fog, mist, pelting rain, and sultry, humid, sweaty hours that felt more like August than late September. The leaves on the hardwoods are cooperating nicely, providing their annual Technicolor extravaganza for the tour buses. The waters coming through the dam are cooling degree by degree, invigorating the trout and salmon that course through the currents and eddies of the Pool. Charlie the Damkeeper, on his daily orders from the dam owners, is keeping the flow at a thousand cubic feet per second, two roaring, frothing plumes of Mooselookmeguntic water competing side by side in the race to the sea. Anglers fishing from the piers of the dam have been doing well, dangling nymphs into the feeding troughs below the spillways. And so have anglers in just about every station around the Pool. On Friday a guide showed up with two clients whom he stationed atop the Big Rock at the southwest corner, and on his instructions the sports lobbed their flies into the broad slick below the rock, let them drift down a ways, then hauled them in as fast as they could. Salmon can't seem to resist a fast-moving target in their neighborhoods, and the sports caught -- and released -- a fair number of fish. They had their fun.

On the opposite side of the pool, a determined chap in Neoprene waders had risked total immersion to station himself twenty yards offshore above a boulder we call Cable Rock. Anchored to that spot, he made cast after cast, retrieve after retrieve, over and over, like an assembly line worker at an auto plant. It seemed a joyless exercise, repetitive, dogged. I saw him catch and release a salmon, and resume his casting, always to the same place, and his retrieves, always at the same, unvarying pace. Finally he got what he had come for. A fish struck his fly, and I could tell by his reaction that he knew he had a very large fish on. Holding his rod high, and his line to the fish tight, he struggled sideways through the current towards shore, at one point up to his armpits in the swirling water and a whisker from being swept downstream. He reached shallower waters, and made his way to a tiny gravel beach, horsing the big fish towards him, inch by inch, foot by foot.

At last the fish tired, and rolled onto its side. The angler slid the fish into the shoal, then seized the line and dragged the exhausted animal out of the water onto the shore. It was a male brook trout in all its autumnal magnificence -- sunset-orange flanks, silver belly, porcelain-edged fins. It probably measured twenty-four inches from its broad square tail to the lip of its great hooked jaw. I reached the little beach just at the moment when the angler grasped the great fish's head in his right hand and bent the head backward until the neck snapped and the trout lay inert on the gravel. I heard the snap, and saw the grotesque disfigurement of the dead trout, and felt like an eyewitness to a murder.

The angler was fairly trembling with excitement. "Beautiful, huh?" he said. "This one's going on my wall." He picked up the carcass by the lower jaw. "I'm outta here," he said, and headed up the path towards the road where his car was parked beyond the gate.

Why did I feel so bad about the death of a trout? I, who has killed and eaten hundreds of trout and has on his own wall a twenty-inch brook trout mounted by the master, Dave Footer? I have not knowingly killed a fish in years, and I think it is because of a growing awareness of the scarcity and preciousness of all the wonders of the natural world, and how we have slaughtered and squandered these creatures, plant and animal alike, in some cases to extinction. I look at old photographs of the sports who came to the Maine mountains in the 19th Century and killed every fish they caught and posed proudly for the camera with a day's take of thirty or fifty big trout, and I wonder, Why did they have to kill them all? Did they think it could last forever, this orgy of fish-killing?

It could not and did not last, because the trout populations diminished and collapsed, and despite our best efforts at resource management today, the survival of the fishery seems a touch-and-go proposition. And that is why the death of a trout diminishes me.