HAMMER HOME

THE OLD MAN called the fly the “skull crusher” because the brook trout would come after it so hard and fast that they’d bash their heads on boulders. He tied them with one arm, in the cool of the little store in the shadow of Grandfather Mountain, not far from the creek where he’d first heard of the fly when he was a kid, some 75 years earlier.

I thought I knew about the Yallerhammer, arguably the most traditional of the old Southern Appalachian fly patterns, but this was news to me. The region has