"I am not a Buddhist, but I read a lot of Buddhism," Spencer said. "It is my impression that the less harming or the more harmless my actions are in the world, the better. It probably comes down to as simple as that. It gets down to the heart of the question, 'Why does a person cast flies,' or 'Why does a person catch steelhead in the first place?"'

He got the idea from reading about Harry Lemire, a steelhead fly fisherman and fly tier from Washington, who started cutting the points off his hooks in about 1975 whenever he would get into a bunch of fish and didn't want to waste time playing them.

"Everybody thought I was crazy," Lemire said. "To me the whole peak of everything is the strike or the boil. Everything after that is downhill. Especially if you have to wait a long time to land the fish.

"When you get a fish on, you get a run and a jump and at the jump it will throw the hook. That was satisfying enough for me."

Spencer also gets a lot of satisfaction from watching the fish in the Big Bend Pool, once known as the Dynamite Pool for the preferred technique of local poachers. He sits at a meditation bench with Sis, his 17-year-old Australian cattle dog, for hours on end, watching the fish and talking to the visitors who stop to see this remote and remarkable place in the Umpqua National Forest.

Steelhead are rainbow trout that spend most of their lives in the ocean, where the food and water are more plentiful than in Northwest rivers, before returning to freshwater to spawn. Steamboat Creek accounts for 70 percent of the wild steelhead in the North Umpqua, and the 400 in the pool this year — some up to 20 pounds — account for about 30 percent of the wild fish counted over Winchester Dam.

The North Umpqua Foundation, which is dedicated to helping wild steelhead in the North Umpqua Basin, pays Spencer $39 a day from spring to winter, provides the trailer he lives in, and pays a stipend over the winter, when he finds somewhere else to live and compiles his notes on the pool.

He drives an old van once owned by Dan Callaghan, the inventor of the green-butt skunk, widely considered the best traditional steelhead fly. Callaghan's widow gave it to him. A rubber turtle hangs from the rearview mirror. Spencer gets his mail and phone messages 12 miles downstream at the Steamboat Lodge, which overlooks the waters Grey once fished.

Though he has no religion, Spencer admires the observations on human nature in Buddhist writings from China more than 1,200 years ago, and takes joy in the way the Milky Way runs directly through the crack in the trees that gives him his only view of the night sky.

"Something appeals to me about the simplicity of this existence," he said. "Nothing else I have done allows me to take books this thick, that I never had the momentum to read living in an urban setting, and open them up and go through them page by page and read 'em.