Trout Gotta' Eat!

It is a rainy day in the mountains, a day when most of us "mountaineers" hunker down, stay warm and dry.  Several years ago, our son and I were on a fishing trip in Montana.  Livingston holds some of the most beautiful trout, blue ribbon trout streams and incredible scenery.  We had fished the Yellowstone River a couple of days when the weather turn on us…cold, rain turning to snow, windy…they called them "micro climates."  To us, it was just miserable.
When I saw our guide, I told him that Chad and I were thinking of bagging it on that day.  It was just not how we wanted to spend the day.  Our guide, a student at Montana State in Bozeman, looked me square in the eye in disbelief.  I said, "What's the matter?"  With a straight face he looked back at me and said, "Trout gotta' eat!"  In other words…trout don't know it's cold and raining…they see a fly drifting in front of them and they instinctively attack it.  
The painting above is a recent commission, "Toe River Bow."  Lee McAlister knows…trout gotta' eat!