THE FIRST DAY OF FISHING WAS SWEET, which should have been a warning. We rolled out in two green johnboats and were soon in warm sunshine along open, sweeping bends in the river. The Uur came out of a canyon here, fast, and made a deep cut into the valley floor. Jim hooked up on his third cast.

In no time he held a thrashing monster in the shallows. It was a mottled, flashing gray and had a disturbingly prehistoric look to it, with a wide mouth, supermodel lips, and rows of sharp-looking teeth. We netted it and photographed it, and I measured it at 36 inches. This wasn't quite one of the legendary fish of the Uur, but it was big enough that Jim had trouble holding it out of the water when Dan Vermillion reached in with a blue plastic rivet gun and drove a numbered tag through the dorsal fin. Part of Sweetwater's catch-and-release regimen involves tagging and tracking the taimen, to fill in the gaps about their habits.

Dan used a fishing technique called drop-dragging, which means floating downstream with an anchor tied behind the boat. Taimen fishing requires long, languid casts, each one covering as much water as possible, and slowing the boat helps. We were tossing five-inch poppers with sparkling tails, which landed like old sneakers and threw a wake that screamed Eat me! halfway across the valley.

Cast. Cast. Cast. Then cast some more. We'd been warned, repeatedly, that taimen are finicky creatures, hard to find and harder to catch. I'd made 150 casts by lunch, without hooking a thing. In the afternoon the temperature dropped to the forties and the wind picked up. Hurling Chernobyl squirrels into this gale was futile, swinging the heavy rods and lines a sustained torture.

But once you've seen a photograph of a man holding a fish the size of a golden retriever, you believe you will catch one that big yourself. On subsequent days, even Charlie's genetic optimism ("This is the cast... OK, I can feel it this time...") wasn't enough to summon the taimen. Twenty-inch lenok, a kind of proto-trout, were there for the taking, but we foolishly ignored them in our relentless hunt for taimen.

Each day the lower reaches of the forest were gilded with more defectors to autumn, and the upper watershed was soon a golden brocade woven tightly around the last green holdouts. We experienced all the side effects of wilderness fishing: the ice-cold water down the back of your underpants; the split thumbs; dogs howling all night at the wolves; the frosty kiss of an outhouse seat at 4 a.m. Jim and I hit the boat at dawn, fished hard all morning and then all afternoon, floating or afoot.

"Man, this is melancholy," Jim volunteered one afternoon, from a hunched position in the bottom of the boat, ice coating his boots. For one of the world's foremost combat photographers, that's really saying something.

People expect photojournalists to twitch and freak, Dennis Hoppers of the Apocalypse. But 25 years of covering wars had honed Jim rather than deformed him, stripping away the unnecessary and removing the neurotic. He was full of self-control, a drinker of club soda who listened carefully and looked where he stepped. War had rubbed him down into one of the most serene and sane men I've ever met.

In the log cabin that first night, when Big Bill demanded the story of what had happened in Baghdad, Jim had paused for a long moment. Then he gave a barren answer. With all the guides and clients leaning forward, he said, in a monotone, that someone had thrown a grenade into the Hummer he was riding in. He had taken some shrapnel in the knee. The Time writer with him had lost his hand. The two soldiers had been discharged for their injuries.

Everyone sat there, waiting for the rest of the story. But that was it. Twenty seconds. Just the facts. Jim was a terrible storyteller, probably on purpose. He spoke with his camera.

When we were alone, hiking one day, Jim did finish the Baghdad story. But it was comedy, not tragedy. He fell into giggles as he related the fallout of that night. Bleeding and stunned, he'd been evacuated to an American medical unit. But while doctors cut the shrapnel not just from his knee but from his leg, stomach, face, hand, and groin, someone had stolen his wallet. It took Jim six months to replace all the contents. "That's the only thing that really bothered me," he said, laughing at himself. Blown up by the enemy and then robbed by your own side.

The attack had real consequences. Jim had been laid up for months and still carried a satchel full of medications. Half a year later, he was once again agile as a goat, ready to cover tsunamis and slow-moving social catastrophes. But he couldn't run, and that meant no more assignments to the front lines for the time being. "There hasn't been a war yet where I didn't have to run," he said.

I'd had to run for it a few times myself. For more than a decade I'd covered insurgencies in Colombia, Cambodia, Nepal, and Afghanistan, always at boot level, among the peasant fighters and mad Marxists. I'd grown tired of tear gas and heavily armed teenagers, of having my sources arrested or, in one case, killed, of walking into minefields and tangling with mobs. And yet I'd only glimpsed, as through a curtain, the world where Jim lives almost without pause.

This peripatetic life doesn't lend itself to long-term personal relationships, so, like Nick Adams, I'd begun to walk out of my own burned past, searching, in wilderness and family, for that elusive "good place." I was settling down. In the boat one day, I told Jim about my recent wedding and the fact that my wife was secretly pregnant. We hadn't told anyone, not even our parents, because there had been a miscarriage earlier in the year.

"How old were you when you got married?" Jim asked.

"Forty," I said. Jim is 57, and still a bachelor.

"So," he said. "There's hope for me."

Later, as we drop-dragged through a slow, emerald section of the river, he let slip why he was here. We weren't catching anything, and I was in a black mood, but Jim sailed along, sublimely happy. After yet another cast to a promising spot that produced nothing, he said, "That's why I like fishing. You have this sense of hope." Each cast was a flick toward possibility. A blank slate.

"Palpable hope," he said.