There’s something about flowing water that I find liberating, metaphorical to human thought and emotion — be it the rattle or roar, foaming riffles descending into roily runs and step pools, the gentle swirl of frothy eddies.

All of the above are likely spots for lurking trout when you understand water and know how to use the natural flow to trigger aggressive strikes by dead-drifting lively bait through the fish’s feeding lair in a natural, drag-free presentation. Yes, mountain streams produce a certain damp, shady, wild solitude that places me in the grip of nature, away from it all, governed by forest law.

When teaching youngsters to fasten a pair of hip boots through their belts for fish-hunting on such a stream, it’s important to start small on manageable water you can hop across in spots yet holds all the components of larger streams that will eventually be mastered using small-stream skills honed by trial and error. Fact is, once you understand flowing water and how fish feed in it, the same rules apply everywhere, big or small. But there’s always one key difference pertaining to large, deep streams, such as the Deerfield or Millers rivers, which become much easier to read and fish once they’ve settled down to their summer level. Then the runs, riffles, eddies and corner pools with overhanging roots become accessible in chest waders.

The natural evolution of an angler typically starts with live bait and a closed-face, push-button reel before advancing to open-face spinning tackle and delicate pendulum casts, long-casting of lures and spinners, flyfishing with dry and wet flies and weighted nymphs, plus streamers bright and drab that simulate bait fish.

One of the first little trout streams I learned to fish flowed out of Clapp’s Pond in the forest off Stage Road in Deerfield, feeding the Connecticut River just upstream of the Hillside/River roads intersection. There it crossed under River Road near the gate to what we originally called Kahle’s, then University Pasture, before racing through a steep ravine on the other side to a polluted Connecticut. We’d start at River Road, fish our favorite pools upstream, then pick away at the entire brook on the way back out, focusing on all the sites where we had rolled little pan trout that escaped. We’d fill a couple of fern-lined wicker creels, flea-market collectors’ items today, and bring them home for a sweet, tasty breakfast, the fingerling brookies battered and pan-fried in hot, spitting bacon fat that quickly curled up the tails in a black Griswold skillet.

Once we had it down on that little stream meandering through a steep hollow carved into the southeast terminus of Deerfield Mountain, we graduated to bigger streams like Mill River on the other side of town and Whately’s West Brook, which led us straight to the old Northampton reservoir near the chapel snuggled up to the earthen dike. There, many a large squaretail in the two- to three-pound class were caught — ah, how clear are the memories of those oven bakers of the sweetest, moistest, most succulent pinkish-orange meat. But that came later, discovered as teenagers before the new Hamp Reservoir’s spillway was built in the late Sixties, holding the water back far too long to save the big brookies we savored and have not seen since. Well, I suppose there are still some around for the taking. But let’s just say we were young back then, much more daring and capable of outrunning just about anyone giving chase through the wilds.

The hot-spot was a narrow neck that flowed under the iron bridge on the south end of the slim reservoir where I learned to take trout on Thomas Buoyant spoons, Mepps spinners and later flies. We had Steve Zayach’s dad to thank for our introduction to flies. The man was a wildlife biologist and fly-fisherman, had his equipment hanging neatly inside his Eastern Avenue garage, and he must have been OK with us borrowing it because use it we did, there and at another sweet little squaretail pond on the other side of the Connecticut River. We knew nothing about flycasting, presentation or matching the hatch, just that, according to The Count, Mr. Zayach’s son, trout preferred tiny midges enticingly twitched on the surface to draw a strike. Whether true that they preferred those tiny little artificials to larger mayflies or caddis flies or streamers from different compartments in the same flybox, we took heed and the midges seemed to do the trick over and over again at both of our favorite sneak-in sites, both reserved only for the first hour or two of light. Once lights started showing inside neighborhood homes, we were packed up and long gone in the proud Tom Sawyer/Huck Finn tradition.

By then, we had our drivers licenses and had graduated to the productive Conway streams, the South and Bear rivers and Poland Brook, and even fished the Sawmill River in Montague and Leverett now and again, particularly the lower end, sometimes as high as the base of the dam at Martin Machine (now the The Montague Bookmill), but most often in the wild, winding sanctuary that meets the Connecticut below Meadow Road. We also hunted there in the fall for pheasant, grouse and woodcock, plus jump-shot many a duck back in the day when lead shot was legal for waterfowling. To be honest, since the day lead was outlawed, I have not killed a duck. Just one of my many idiosyncrasies, I guess. But I was never much of a duck hunter, just a bird hunter who bought an annual waterfowl stamp just in case my dog flushed ducks out of small, muddy streams running through swamps I was hunting for pheasants, among them Hopewell Swamp between Christian Lane and Mount Sugarloaf.

Once we graduated to flyfishing the Deerfield, we had honed our skills and knowledge, applying what we had learned on smaller streams’ to a larger, more dangerous microcosm that from high above looked no different than those first narrow, shallow mountain streams where we learned to hunt trout. But now, instead of pendulum casts, we were using roll casts, the double-haul and shooting line through stiff winds, quickly mending it as soon as it hit the surface to produce a natural, realistic drift that fooled many a big trout, even a few big, early-morning Deerfield River browns, foolish gluttons that remained in their feeding lanes a few minutes longer than they should have.

Such rare trophy fish were always worth the harrowing hike in, negotiating a steep, switchback deer run to the river’s edge in the black of night, always hoping to drop the first cast into the river well before the birds sang their first note. Talk about magical. It was all of that and then some to be there when the river and surrounding woods awakened, the first ray of thin yellow sunlight peering over the eastern horizon still an hour or more away.