Pushing through the underbrush, Henry looked a bit like a man with an epee but only with a forward lean and never rocking back in his stance.  His 5 weight rod needed to negotiate tight passages through shrubs he never really bothered to identify - but through which he had become expert in deft maneuvering, pointing rod down, up, sideways and sometimes back underarm as though he were holding a lance.  There was the occasional switch that flipped back into his face because he didn't hold it throughout his passage, sometimes resulting in a tight and painful welt.  He was purposeful in his advance towards his goal, a bend in the river that - if approached cautiously - would hold some browns in the hole he knew was there.  

There were sounds and there were smells and there was always the possibility, however unlikely, that he'd chance upon some larger game that might create a bit more unpredictability in this otherwise stable routine.  More often than not, that was a brief glimpse of a warbler or some other such bird but sometimes he'd share the space with a white-tailed deer, even more rarely accompanied by her fawns.  These were tight quarters but the sounds and the smells and the things that created them occupied more space than the pockets between the bushes.  These ephemera, produced by things with a lifespan expected to be shorter than his existed in stark contrast to the odd beer can or plastic piece of trash that would outlive even the largest of the trees on the riverbank.  Henry thought about that footprint as his hiking boots sank deep in wet soil created over handfuls of years of decomposition and deposition.  This place was a vacuum relatively absent the outside influence of the encroaching not-so-golden horde.  In that world outside this, inside the sprawling suburban pocket, Henry made a living