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Call it fear, if you'd like, of a muscle-bound Russian, or call it compassion for a man who'd gone on a vodka barrage the previous night and now seemed in total disrepair. The Russian's head had started on my neck and shoulder, then burrowed into my chest like a marsupial searching for its mother's pouch and now slid down my arm, speedily south toward my lap...and mortification.

I was sardined in an MI-8 helicopter with 20 other men, on the beginning of our journeys home after a week on Russia's distant Kola Peninsula fishing for Atlantic salmon. I wasn't feeling well myself, as I'd had my share of vodka shots the night before, and what I needed, more than anything else, was a tall drink of water. If I didn't get that Russian off my lap and my hands on a Nalgene, it was likely I would contaminate a three-foot-high stack of luggage that separated one of the helicopter's bench seats from the other. If my hour-old breakfast made an unwelcome appearance, a chain reaction might occur. And nobody wanted that.

The entire affair began just over a year ago when Ponoi River Company's manager, Will Casella, invited me to Russia, as a guest. At the time, mid-January, we were fishing steelhead on eastern Washington's Grande Ronde River and enduring 10-degree nights around an enormous campfire. In the mornings, we drove to Bogan's Oasis to thaw and order greasy-spoon breakfasts while waiting for the temperature to rise above freezing and the river's slush ice to dissipate. We had plenty of time to rib each other, which is how Casella and I often communicate. It was a sign of bad read more » Read more – offline – from the current issue; subscribe to FRR.