My Dodge window van, 1975 model, was loaded with family, relatives, and a native guide to fishing holes near Lakeville, New Brunswick. Vacation was exotic, sweeping, new as dawn. I was bent on fishing after driving here and there for seven days, and was guaranteed a day to contemplate beside a stream, a pool of promise, the phantom trout awaiting.

I should have been worn out with pleasure. The night before, in Woodstock’s Community Center, we had heard 22 fiddlers, some having driven 100 miles for the get-together, play along with a single violin and a piano for more than two solid hours, folks of the 200 plus audience dancing in the aisles at times. I was spellbound, but felt I needed contemplation beside an idyllic stream. Fishing was my great relaxation.

I drove, at direction of the guide, a relative, for more than three hours, visiting fishing sites, sweet locations, yet feeling that I could not abandon the drive to please myself; we were seeing the inside of Canada.

Impelled, we kept moving, and I was charting a map in my mind for the future.

“One last place I’ll show you,” the guide said, smiling, knowing my mind and taste I fully believed.

We passed by more potato fields, past more stone walls, sudden tree lines, small copses of trees, then hit a thicker forest for a torturous few miles on a trail that I’d never find in a hundred years.

In one turn of a tough road I saw Paradise, Nirvana, a beautiful stream unwinding out of a thicker growth of trees hanging like umbrellas over the lead-in to a clear banking and a pool with glassy water. I was mesmerized.

And then I saw a figure, moving shakily, duck for a moment behind a tree. An old man presented himself as he stepped from behind the tree. He was ancient but amiable-looking, though his movements were slow, doddering. A thin sweater draped itself on his shoulders on this warm day.

He brought a smile to my face, as did a jumper up-stream behind him, a trout with my name on it, the rainbow colors streaming off its bottom side. Then another. I saw them. I heard them. And the old man, possibly deaf, did not turn to note any action behind him, but looking intently at me and the other invaders.

“Good morning,” he said, with a sort of phony smile, and then I saw the handle of his bamboo fly rod standing against the tree he had tried to hide it behind.

“Good morning, sir,” I said, in a most gracious manner I could muster while the excitement was still alive in me. “How’s the fishing here?”

In a remarkably-told white lie, his face locked into honesty itself, eyes suddenly alive with friendliness, disguise hidden, he replied, “Oh, there’s no fish in here.”

He was the Old Man of the Mountain, the Old Man of the Stream.

His mouth hung open; I imagined his heart almost stopping for a moment, waiting for my response.

I shifted into first gear, a true fisherman making headway.

Possession, the lawyers say, and old fishermen, is nine-tenths of the law.