Though this 18-inch fish in no way compares to the whopper the author lost some four years ago, it's not a bad consolation prize. Photo by Jim Spencer

It was late afternoon. I was fishing by myself, drifting on White River near Calico Rock, casting a Rebel Crawdad to a shallow gravel shoal.

When the fish hit, it was deliberate and firm -- not so much a strike as a sudden stopping of all forward progress. I'd have thought it was a hangup, but I saw a fish's side flash golden in the clear water when it took the lure. The flash was long and deep, and I remember thinking: Uh-oh.

The boat was drifting fast, and the fish allowed the gentle tug of my line to peel it away from the shoal and into the current. It followed me downstream, and we drifted through the fast water and into a wider, slower stretch of river.

Things began to unravel when I started applying more pressure. It didn't want to be pressured, so it went away, back upstream into the faster water beside the shoal. The drag started buzzing, and line melted off my reel.

I cranked the outboard and motored upriver, steering with my knee, reeling in line. When I got pretty much above him, it swam out to the side and allowed me to pull it down into the slower water again. We did this twice more, and each time the fish came farther downstream with me. I could tell it was beginning to tire.

I'm a fisherman, so I don't expect you to believe me. But this is gospel: When I got a look at it 45 minutes into the contest, it was approximately the length and girth of my leg, and I'm not a small man. If it wasn't close to 30 pounds, I'm a poor judge.

I lost it, of course. I tried five times to get it into my net, and each time it rolled back out because I couldn't get half of it in there. I tried grabbing it by the gills, but it wasn't having any, and I knew it'd break the line if I made it thrash around.

And then the tiny treble hooks pulled out -- just pulled out. My brown trout of a lifetime swam slowly into the clear waters of the White, more than a mile downstream from where I'd hooked him more than an hour earlier.

That was almost four years ago. It haunts me still.

Losing big fish like that will eat at you, maybe even for a lot longer than four years. But not everybody who's hooked a huge brown trout in Arkansas has lost it. Here's a gee-whiz statistic for you: The three largest brown trout ever recorded came from three Arkansas rivers.

The first was a 38-pound, 9-ounce fish taken in the Norfork River in August 1988 by North Little Rock resident Mike "Huey" Manley. The fish was accepted as the new world record by the National Freshwater Fishing Hall of Fame, but rejected by the International Game Fish Association because it was taken on a treble hook and enticed by bait consisting of corn and marshmallows.

Manley's record held for almost four years. Then, in May 1992, Howard "Rip" Collins, using a 1/32-ounce jig and 4-pound line on an ultralight spinning rig, caught an unbelievable 40-pound, 4-ounce brown from the Little Red River. That fish is still at top of the heap in both the NFFHF's and the IGFA's record books.

The last of the Arkansas Big Three is a 38-pound brown trout found dead in the Little Red River in March 1998. By the time it was discovered and hauled out of the water, turtles had eaten a good portion of this fish, so it's entirely possible that it weighed more than Collins' lunker when it was still alive.

One final item: When Huey Manley caught the trout that started this big-fish ball rolling back in 1988, his fish took the state brown trout record away from a fish caught in the White in March 1977 by Flippin-based trout guide Leon Waggoner. Waggoner's fish, in its turn, was the world-record brown trout for several years.