So they're not lice. They're Black Spots. Readers who are better websearchers than I found apophallus brevis on the Maine Inland Fisheries and Wildlife site (FishLab), and apophallus brevis is what I found on the trout I caught at Quimby Pond last week. The state's Fish Health Laboratory in Augusta says the black spots on the fish are "usually caused by a small immature larval trematode parasite," the aformentioned a.brevis.

Parasites have developed the most amazing survival strategies, and this one is no exception. The life cycle of a. brevis involves the fish-eating Common Loon, whose mouth plays unwitting host to the adult worm, which lays eggs which pass through the loon into the water where the eggs hatch into an intermediate stage, which finds a mollusc to live in (and sponge off) until it develops into something called a redia, which produces another Latin name, cercariae, and that Latin name goes out and catches a fish. And then it's heigh-ho the derry-oh, the loon takes a fish, and do you begin to detect a circular pattern here?

The fish scientists also tell us that a. brevis does not infect humans, that cooking the fish kills the parasite, and that if enough of the little buggers latch onto a trout they can kill it. As the trout I caught were fairly covered with black spots, and still fought like tigers, I assume they had not been attacked by enough parasites to cause mortal injury. But they were not a pretty sight. You would not take a fish like that to the prom.

With deep gratitude to the late Abby Holman, who recommended me for a fellowship, I'm off to Montana tomorrow to participate in a "High Country Expedition" as a Fellow of the Institutes for Journalism and Natural Resources (IJNR). I'll be staying on a few extra days to fish. I probably won't get a chance to post a new entry until I'm back home in mid-June, but then I'll have plenty to say.

For those who followed the story of my Weegar canoe, in part the story of the untimely deaths of two remarkable people two years apart -- Andrew Weegar and his wife Abby Holman -- on Memorial Day I delivered the canoe to their daughter, eight-year-old Molly Weegar, on the Fayette farm where she grew up and now lives with her aunt Sarah and uncle Harold. Under the big maples in front of the house we ate a lovely picnic lunch, topped off with rhubarb pie baked by Andrew's mother, Nancy. Molly gave me a collage she had made, featuring her sitting in the canoe, and a beautiful handwritten letter of thanks; I will treasure both. Then Jeff Timm, who had planned to marry Abby in June, helped me lift the canoe off my truck. Jeff and Harold set the boat into a canvas cradle. I lifted Molly, a little blonde lightning-bolt of a girl, into the canoe that her father had built, and she sat on the cane seat which had been woven by her grandmother, and she smiled a smile that paid for the canoe many times over.

On my way into Rangeley Wednesday to pick up some hardware for my new camp shower, I stopped in to have a squint at Quimby Pond. This nice little trout pond, once off the beaten track and home to the late, lamented Quimby Pond Camps, an old-style Maine sporting camp, now is the beaten track. A suburban subdivision has mushroomed three quarters of the way around the pond. Despite that, it remains a nice trout pond, with abundant food and a healthy brook trout population, which winters over and grows fat.

Healthy except for the lice.

When I stopped by, the winds were calm and there was a good deal of slick black water to scan. This was around noon, on a fine day in May. Lo and behold, a rise! And another. Trout were cruising just under the surface picking off nymphs as the bugs were trying to emerge. No splashy takes, just quiet rise rings and now and again the glimpse of a dorsal fin. I continued on my errand, returned to camp and retrieved my fishing gear and headed back to Quimby.

By then, naturally, a breeze had come up, the pond's surface was rough and rippled, and no rises were to be seen. I toured the pond, alone on a weekday afternoon, dropping the hook here and there to practice my casting. At around five o'clock I heard the sounds of someone launching a tin boat, and watched as a gent slowly rowed (it's a no-motors pond, may their numbers increase!) along the shoreline and dropped anchor maybe fifty yards from shore. He commenced to cast and retrieve, in the manner of a nympher. He caught a fish, and a nice one. He whacked it and kept it. He caught another, and released it. Hmmm.

I anchored a discreet fifty yards from him, and began my own exploration of the waters with a Maple Syrup fly. Strike! Battle. Fish in the net. It was a hefty brookie, handsome save for the fact that he had a severe case of blackheads. A second trout was similarly afflicted.

I am told these black spots are a kind of lice. A couple of days later at another pond I mentioned these lice-infested trout to another angler, who told me he had recently read about the condition and learned that it is strictly cosmetic -- it doesn't look good, but it is not harmful to the trout or to a trout consumer, such as the gent in the tin boat who was obviously going to broil his catch for dinner.

Can anyone enlighten me further on this subject? The state fisheries website talks about sea lice, an apparently unrelated phenomenon.

When I was a boy, back in the early Pleistocene Era, Legal Sea Foods was one of those hole-in-the-wall joints where you ordered at a counter, paid in advance, and ate your lunch off a Formica-topped table. Your reward for tolerating the downmarket ambience was the best fish dinner in Greater Boston. The place was so named because it was across the street from the Middlesex County Courthouse in Cambridge and at noon the place was packed with lawyers, judges, sheriffs and probably defendants. Having been brought up on fish sticks, despite the fact that the Old Man was a commercial fisherman (he caught redfish, now marketed as ocean perch, which no one in Maine thought of as anything but lobster bait) my first visit to Legal was one of those Wow! events. So this is what the seafood thing is all about. Legal, of course, got all fancy and is no longer a seafood joint but a multi-city upscale dining experience, but the fish is still good.

All this just to tell you that on Sunday night I ate bluefish in a Boston restaurant that was not Legal, but it was so good that I was reminded of those dear old days, and also of the fact that -- and here's the real point -- the big schools of stripers and blues are galloping northward through the ocean, soon to arrive at a charcoal grill near you. I confirmed this with Martha's Vineyard pal John Verret, who said the fish had arrived there for the summer, just yards ahead of the hedge-fund managers. And while today I am headed away from the salt, toward the tumbling waters of Upper Dam to seek the speckled trout and the landlocked salmon, it's good to know that the blues and stripers are on the way and that fresh bluefish cooked over (or under) an open flame is still great eating.

So far this spring I haven't been within a hundred miles of the East Outlet, where a good portion of the Kennebec River pours out of Moosehead Lake. But I can see it in my mind's eye and I know that to step into the river today would be sort of like going over Niagara Falls in a barrel. I know that because 10,023 cubic feet of very cold water is roaring through the dam every second. And I know that because I called 1-800-557-FLOW, a touch-tone service of FPL Energy, Maine Hydro and the Kennebec Water Power Company, the people who control the flows on the Androscoggin, Kennebec and Dead river systems. When I hear that ten-thousand cubes are coming out of Moosehead I feel like putting on a lifejacket here at home.

The service also informed me that at Upper Dam, my home pool, the flow is 2,700 cfs, a couple thousand above prime fishing level, give or take a couple hundred cubes, and the same for Middle Dam at the head of the fabled Rapid. The Magalloway, coming out of Aziscohos, is only 1,330, but that's still too high for comfort on that river.

And so we wait, and we dial, hoping to hear the magic numbers that mean the rivers are wadeable, fishable.

The recorded voice on the line notes that even when the flow is to your liking, it is "subject to change without notice," like gasoline prices. I discovered this one day on the Androscoggin when my canoe, beached high and dry on exposed rocks while I fished a riffle, went off on its own when the river stealthily rose a few inches while I wasn't paying attention. I was stranded in mid-river for an hour, trapped between two deep channels, before ignominious rescue arrived and I recovered my boat, which, fortunately, had not gone all the way to Rumford.

On Monday the ice still lay on Mooselook and Rangeley and Richardson, and the road to camp was still closed. The Bro and I had to look for open water farther south. We headed into the White Mountain National Forest to try our luck at Broken Bridge Pond, where we had found good May fishing in past years. The road into the pond was dry and hard, but the forest ranger hadn't been around to unlock the gate, so we were shut out and had to come up with a Plan B. We studied the DeLorme's for awhile and found a place that looked promising. By the time we got there, the midday wind was putting a chop on the water. The water itself was cold -- well below the comfort zone of brook trout. But the pond was pretty, and the shoreline looked fishy, so we circumnavigated, alternately paddling and casting. We anchored and ate lunch in a lee cove, where the Bro spotted a big trout. Dead, lying on the bottom in about four feet of the pond's clear waters. It had been a nice fish -- fifteen inches, we guesstimated -- and what killed it we couldn't tell. It was the only fish we saw.

Towards sunset, two other anglers came down and made their own tour of the shoreline, but they didn't catch anything, either. The breeze died, the pond flattened out, but there wasn't a rise to be seen. The Bro and I packed up and left, having a longish drive home. Back out on the main road, heading east, we drove by a pond that snuggled right up to the road -- not the kind of place we normally fish. The setting sun was casting shades of orange on the glassy surface of the pond, and -- wasn't that a rise? Yes! And another, and another. Trout were dimpling the water in a classic evening rise. We pulled off the road at a turnout where a guy was sitting on the rocky bank watching two bobbers he'd lobbed out with his two spincasting rods. As we chatted with him, one of the bobbers bobbed and he reeled in a 10-inch brook trout. On the darkening surface of the pond, other fish continued to make rings as they cruised along languidly, munching on something just under the surface.

We looked at the rises. We thought about how long it would take us to launch the boat and rig the rods. We did neither. We sat and watched and wondered if the same thing were happening on the pond we had left earlier, a pond known to harbor some big brookies. Had we left too soon? Probably.

The incident reminded me of another night, when I had left a pond at sunset to go back to camp and have a drink and dinner. The Bro had stayed on the pond. He stayed so late I began to worry something had gone wrong, but just as I set out to go look for him he pulled into the drive. "You left too soon," he said. "Just after you hauled out, fish started coming up all over the pond!"

What's the expression? "Stay the course." Not good advice if you're heading for a waterfall, but in angling, patience is often rewarded.

Afghanistan and flyfishing are not often linked in the same sentence. Afghanistan is not a destination touted by the outfitters who fly anglers to the exotic last-best-place-on-earth spots such as Russia's Kamchatka or Tierra del Fuego. But in the 1980s, when I was working with the Afghan Resistance in Peshawar, Pakistan, I heard stories about a "crazy doctor" who managed to sneak into the north of Afghanistan every year, escorted by an armed band of Afghan mujaheddin, to flyfish for brown trout. I ascertained that there were indeed brown trout, introduced in the 19th century by the British, in the cold streams of the mountains north of the Panjshir Valley where the Soviet occupiers had only minimal command and control. The doctor didn't sound too crazy to me. I had to try it.

On my next trip to Peshawar I brought a flyrod and a minimalist kit of accessories. A group of friends and I organized an expedition to the north. In our 4WD Toyotas we set out from Peshawar for Chitral, 225 miles away over bad roads. Did I say roads? Much of the way the trail didn't qualify as a road. Some of the hairpin bends on the more mountainous sections had to be negotiated as three-point turns. At a turbulent river crossing, fed by a melting glacier, some enterprising Pakistani men were winching vehicles across for a fee. We stopped for a cold lunch at the top of the nearly 10,000 foot high Lowari Pass, guarded -- against what?, we wondered -- by a ragtag police detachment, before descending into the Chitral Valley. The trip took 14 hours.

Chitral is a lovely town, watched over by the snowy magnificence of Tirich Mir, the highest peak in the Hindu Kush at just over 25,000 feet. We put up at the Rose Hotel, where I took out my flyrod and practiced casting on the lawn. We spent several days exploring, which included a trip to the fabled Kalash Valley, where the blue eyes and blondish hair of Alexander's legions still swim in the gene pool of the isolated tribe of animists -- kaffirs, or "unbelievers" as the Muslims call them -- whose women wear elaborate cowrie-shell headdresses and kiss men on both cheeks when they meet on the path.

Finally, spurred on by my nagging, we mounted up and our little two vehicle caravan headed north, following the Kunar River, heading for Garam Chashma, which means hot springs. It was there that the crazy doctor reportedly crossed into Badakshan Province, the source of much of Afghanistan's famous blue lapis, and the home of now-native Afghan brown trout. At times the road was the river bed; at times the trail, barely the width of one vehicle, climbed and clung precariously to the mountainside, and we had to hug the left, uphill side so our right wheels wouldn't go over the edge. After proceeding this way for hours, we rounded a curve and saw vehicles stopped ahead of us. Trucks, aimed in both directions. We pulled in behind the northbound truck and got out to see what the matter was. The matter was a landslide, which had completely blocked the skinny road. To the left of the slide was the impossibly steep rocky hillside, and to the right was the abyss. The truckers were clawing at the rocks and loose earth with bare hands, but we could see that it would require many hours of manual labor to clear the road. We decided after much debate and some digging alongside the truckers to turn back. I looked at my aluminum rod tube, which had come all the way from Maine to this remote valley of the Hindu Kush -- for nothing. We had to back the vehicles for a quarter mile or so to find a spot wide enough to turn around, and we headed south, toward Chitral. Not this day, maybe not ever, would I fish for Afghan trout.