She pushed off and took the oars, nosing the bow of the fishing raft into the current. We say that we sleep in December.” Still, any chance to be on the water put her in a good mood. “The nights are just naps and the days are just packed.

“It’s almost Angry August, when all the guides get a little twitchy,” she told me. Her summer fishing season in western Montana is brief, which means frenetic, and by late July her voice, lightly scuffed at the best of times, sounded as if it were being played through old speakers. Hilary Hutcheson is a fly-fishing guide and climate activist who speaks to audiences across the nation. On a warming midsummer morning, the waters curled like a cat around the shins of a short woman wearing polarized sunglasses and a trucker’s hat pincushioned with fishing flies. For dozens of miles it rolls through green wilderness, taking in the snowmelt from Muskrat Pass and Slippery Bill Mountain and a half dozen creeks as it grows into one of the beloved waterways of the American West. The Middle Fork of the Flathead River is born in the high, rocky country of western Montana, near the roof ridge of North America.

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