In the novel’s first sentence, the protagonist and first-person narrator states, “Don’t call me Abraham, call me Abe.” (1) Abraham, he says, sounds too “Biblical” and suggests a patriarch, which he will never be, as children make his “skin crawl.” Abe says he started fishing years ago, and that, like many fishermen, he has a storehouse of stories, but one in particular is “downright awful.” By nightfall on the day in question, he says, he’d lost a good friend, most of his own sanity, and nearly his life. Nothing could induce him to return to that remote spot in the Catskill mountains known as Dutchman’s Creek.

Abe relates that one morning, he woke up with a strange urge to go fishing, even though he hadn’t fished since he was a child. His wife of two years, Marie, had recently died of cancer, and he was becoming addicted to alcohol. He first met Marie, who was 15 years younger than himself, in Poughkeepsie, New York, where they both worked at IBM. Their brief life together was loving but bittersweet, as most of it was taken up by her rapid decline; she was diagnosed with cancer right after their honeymoon.