As for water temperature, the brown is Siberian in taste. It thrives in colder waters. As the water warms, it becomes melancholy, dives deeper in search of colder pockets and currents, lies in dark, deep shady pools where sunlight manages to warm only the surface of the water. Browns avoid direct sunlight and its detailed shadows, preferring instead to move about at dusk and at night or under cover of dark, thick clouds, somber days, rain-filled days, times when the light is dull and uncertain, opaque, as though the creek were one dark pool with a finish like boot black.

Browns are usually more democratic than other trout, at least in their eating and living habits. They tend to adapt and accept a wider range of environmental changes than other trout. Like their brethren, they are carnivorous and will eat just about anything they can catch.

In a family of truly handsome fish, the brown's beauty is dark, almost mercurial, an ironic beauty that is at once muted and splashed with touches of brilliant color. There are deep black, bulbous eyes set high on a head often as blunt as a stump. In body, browns are long and stout, with the dorsal fin delicately marked by between ten and thirteen unobtrusive rays and the anal fin by nine or ten. As with the rainbow, the brown's coloring is various, often changing dramatically, depending on the environment it inhabits. The most common color is a warm honey-brown body with large bronze, dun-brown, or ebony-black spots along its back, flanks, and dorsal fin, ragged spots that flash in the light, almost glow. The larger spots seem to radiate a halo of darker colors, faded golds and sober browns and blacks, which make the fish look as though it has been dragged through a slime of brooding color and light. Along the brown's sides are more spots, often irregular, of red or olive-yellow or mellow orange, explosions of colors like old stars bursting in the melanotic darkness of space, colors so sudden that they seem pure and perfect. These same starbursts of crimson and burnt orange mark the brown's dorsal and adipose fins, fringe the upper back, and seem to slide like thick runs of paint along the spine. The backs of the browns up on Slickrock Creek are the deep red of old blood, blood clotted about a wound. Often I have taken Slickrock browns that even have a smear of shallow red on their bellies, but commonly the belly of a brown is jaundice or fallow-yellow, though I have seen many Smoky Mountain brown trout whose bellies were white as the smooth gut of an oyster shell. Shades of yellow also fleck the edges of a brown's venal, anal, and pectoral fins.

Browns are persistent hunters, skilled predators, and well equipped for killing with double zigzagging rows of vomerine teeth. The only other North American trout to pack such hardware is the landlocked salmon, and even its dentistry is not quite so impressive as that of the brown trout. Brown trout are patient, obdurate, intransigent, brutish, explosive, and, when striking, mercifully quick. In high country streams, browns feed mostly on insects, both aquatic and terrestrial, as well as on crawfish, even small birds and rodents, should they fall into the water. Browns delight in swarms of stone flies, caddis flies, and mayflies and will gorge themselves shamelessly, even gulping down an occasional relative, especially a competitive brother or sister.

When it comes to tales and stories of size, browns are the stuff of legend as well as fact. Some of these piscine potbellies can easily tip the scales at thirty pounds or more. At any weight, though, they are leviathans, fierce paunchy behemoths that strike out of hell's own darkness, bending your rod down on itself and threatening to drag you down into the cold water, down under some cold dark stone while chewing on your fly with a grizzled, primeval smile, their eyes as cold and black as the sprawl of the universe. The rainbow leaps—a gymnast arched between water and sky, glinting silver, its bowed back dingy green—but the brown dives deep, down where the light fades, breaks up, dissolves, down where darkness knows no definition, a topography of blackness where it twists and turns as though the dark had an edge sharp enough to cut the nagging line, dislodge the pinching hook.

Browns started showing up in the southern highlands about 1900. While rainbow trout of say a foot to eighteen inches are considered fish of character and respect, especially in the national park's trout waters, browns, by comparison, can grow to mammoth size. I have heard stories of twenty-pound browns, as well as the reverent, almost biblical tale of the sixteen-pound brown caught in park waters, where browns started showing up in numbers in the early 1960s. Browns of two to four pounds can be common, and on one raw October day on the upper reaches of Slickrock Creek I took and released a brown the color of dull copper that went over eight pounds. I remember telling Tewksbury about the fish.

He stepped closer toward me, looking down into my eyes. His Adam's apple twitched nervously. He had on a gray basque shirt, a blue-and-white cardigan sweater, tan riding pants, and high-topped leather boots, a black seaman's jacket, and a red Balmoral cap. I noticed his eyes were laced with motes of morning light, tiny starbursts spreading slowly as quicksilver across his cornea.

"And just how'd you know this guy weighed eight pounds? Sure it wasn't maybe seven or nine?" He threw the question down like an inquisition, a gauntlet.

I shrugged my shoulders."It felt like eight pounds or so," I said.

Tewksbury smiled. "It's hard to argue with such precision. Sounds like a valid weigh-in to me," he said. "An eight-pounder it was, then."

That afternoon Tewksbury took a nine-inch rainbow farther down the creek, scooped the small trout up with his landing net, called me near. He said, "The bastard's small but chunky. Feels like all of six pounds to me." And he sunk the net back down into the cold, fast current, and the rainbow slipped out, moving toward an arch of black stones and deeper water, and all the time Tewksbury was laughing long and hard.

Most rainbows spawn in the spring. Browns spawn in the fall, when the water is constantly cool and the light is flat and shadows are deep. Fall is the time for browns, at least for me. Fall, as brittle leaves fill the wind and the light is thin and faded and the browns are edgy and temperamental and completely absorbing, like the season itself.