By September the sockeye are done, and what is left of them lines the gravel bars of the Naknek River in every stage of falling apart. It smells exactly like you think it does. Gulls work the shallows, the tundra behind the bank has gone orange and rust, and somewhere out in that cold green water are the rainbow trout that the whole Alaskan territory quietly builds its reputation on. They are there for one reason. The salmon are spawning, eggs are getting loose in the current, and a Bristol Bay rainbow spends the fall eating the way a person eats at a wedding.
The tackle for this is faintly ridiculous, and our crew felt obligated to complain about it before it worked. You peg a plastic bead the size of a pea a couple of inches above a bare hook, and you drift it along the bottom in the seam below spawning fish. That is it. That is the entire rig. It looks like a loose salmon egg rolling downstream, because that is precisely what it is imitating, and a trout that has been eating nothing but loose salmon eggs for six weeks is not interested in your opinion about aesthetics. Everybody complains about beads for exactly one morning.
The guide out of King Salmon who ran our boat had a beat aluminum skiff, a stove-in cooler she used as a seat, and an approach to the weather that we found instructive. It rained sideways for two hours. She did not mention it. When one of us finally said something about the wind, she looked up the river, considered the question seriously, and said, "This is the good part of September." Then she moved us thirty feet upstream, which was, as usual, where the fish had been the whole time.
A bead take is not much. The drift stops. That is the whole signal, and half the time it is the bottom, so you set the hook on everything and you feel foolish about eighty percent of the day. The other twenty percent, the river stands up. A big Naknek rainbow does not run downstream so much as commandeer the current and go, and it jumps early, which is when you find out what you have. Ours came out twice before anybody got a look at it, and when it finally came into the shallows it was a fish nobody in the boat had a category for. Thick across the shoulders like something that eats meat, olive on the back, and covered in heavy black spots all the way down onto the tail. They call them leopard rainbows up there. The name undersells it.
We measured that fish against a mark on the net handle, took one bad photograph in the rain, and let it swim off between two dead salmon without any ceremony at all. Nobody ever forgets the Alaskan territory in September, and the trout have made sure of it. We caught eleven more before the light went, complained about the beads exactly zero additional times, and got back to the lodge with our hands too cold to work a zipper. Out there the ugliest month of the year holds all the best fish in it, and the trout have known that longer than we have.