- The next morning, Nick gets up with the sun. He’s super excited to hit the river, but first he catches a bottle full of grasshoppers for bait in a nearby meadow.
- Nick’s breakfast of champions consists of some pancakes. He gets some lunch together, downs his coffee, and congratulates himself on a camp well made.
- Next it’s time to get all the fishing gear together. Nick straps everything on and is all ready to go.
- In the river, Nick opens his bottle of grasshoppers. One poor bloke jumps out and into the river, where he is immediately eaten by a trout. Nick pulls out a second one and puts him on his hook.
- There’s a tug on the line and Nick pulls in a trout, but he puts it back in the stream. He’s careful not to touch the trout with a dry hand because that causes a fungus to grow on them. Thinking about how he’d seen dead trout with the fungus when he’d fished crowded rivers (gross), Nick thinks that it’s better to fish alone.
- Nick doesn’t want to waste his time with small fry: he wants the real thing. So he wades deeper into the river.
- He re-baits his hook and feels something big and heavy tug on it. Nick has to let the line run out because the rod might break. He sees the trout leap out of the water, and it’s huge. But it ends up being too big: the leader breaks and Nick loses it.
- Nick is strangely agitated after he loses the fish, and he climbs onto the bank to smoke a cigarette.
- Once he calms down, he re-baits his hook and wades into a shallow part of the river, near an uprooted elm tree. Nick hooks a fish there and brings him in. He puts the live fish in a bag that hangs in the water.
- Next Nick heads for the banks, where the trout would be resting in the shade (because trout like shade, too). There is a beech tree where there would certainly be fish, but Nick is worried about getting hooked in the branches.
- Nick casts a line into the shadows of a tree, and a fish bites, but then the line is caught and the fish gets away. Oh well.
- Then Nick sees a hollow log, and he casts his line into it. He hooks a fish and, just when he thinks he’s lost him, he draws him against the current and catches him in his net.
- Now Nick has two trout in his bag, and two are plenty. He pulls himself onto the log and eats lunch.
- Ahead the river runs into a swamp dense with trees and low branches. Nick doesn’t feel like going into the swamp, not liking how deep and impossible and sad the fishing would be in a place like that.
- Instead, Nick kills and guts the two trout he has and washes them in the stream, where they look as though they are still alive.
- Leaving the river, Nick knows that there will be plenty of days ahead when he can fish in the swamp.