The Nom is the river you fish when you want to remember why you started doing this in the first place. It's small — small enough that the far bank is sometimes your own bank a few yards upstream — and it holds wild brown trout that have never seen a stocked fish and don't want to. You'll kneel more than you cast. You'll curse the overhanging branches. And somewhere around mid-morning, if the light is right and the olives are coming off, you'll drop a size 16 into the right seam and watch a six-inch trout materialise from a slick of water you'd have sworn was empty. Short rods, long leaders, light tippet — nothing else will fit. Spring snowmelt keeps it running cold into June, and by July the low-water trout become properly suspicious, which is, of course, the point.

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