DICK LARSEN and I have drawn the lucky straw. We will, if necessary, crawl on bleeding hands and knees for as long as it takes to reach the heartland of this New Zealand wilderness river — this high-class, drop-your-waders-and-fork-over-the-bread, helicopter fly-out trophy trout river.

We know the stories: Alaskan resident trout shrink alongside those we will see today. Chile and Argentina will pale in the eye after this. God help us, even Montana waters will leave us yawning.

It looks good, the guides say. They always say that. It rained last night, and the temperature dropped a few degrees, perhaps enough to freshen the water and stir the salmon-sized brutes that lurk in the dark canyons and vertical ravines. We will see some suspended weightlessly in pools of clear water, looking like John McPhee's perfect metaphor: zeppelins. Others may be cruising and feeding in skinny tailouts, or hopefully at the head of runs, sifting mayfly nymphs and rummaging for anything they can find to eat. If we hit four cherries on the second pull of the casino trout-fishing machine, we might even find some taking cicadas from the surface like sharks feeding on bleeding meat.

I have fished the river before, but never the section we will fish today. If it runs true to form, there will be at least one monster in every pool, or maybe a pair, and sometimes, in the very largest pools, as many as a half dozen or more, browns and rainbows competing for space and food. Some of these will go off the end of the graph, exceeding even the limits of Larsen's imagination or my efforts to describe them.

"Geentlemen, you will see moor trout theer today over eight pounds than you weel under eight," one of the guides drawls in musical Kiwi.

"That's right, mate," his buddy offers. "These are the ooonly trout that can run a six-foot eel out of the pool."

I consider the possibilities and look around nervously. My friend Lou Rago sidearms a flask in my direction. "Here," he says, "better have a swig." He knows I am an emotional mess and I'm not even on the water yet.

I make the final filtering of the Glenfiddich through the charcoal of a cigarette, almost swallowing the entire butt. Not bad. I think I'm ready. But Tim McCarthy, head guide at Tongariro Lodge, isn't so sure. He has drawn the long straw: he will be guiding Dick and me.

Why am I so nervous? I've landed forty-inch steelhead, haven't I? So has Larsen. So have a lot of us.

"It's a bit of a walk," McCarthy warns, looking mostly at me as we wait for the chopper. I suck my stomach in and square my shoulders.

"How long?" I ask.

"Fourteen kilometers."

"How many miles is that?"

"Eight and a half. Mostly boulders and some pretty nasty river bottom. We'll head cross-country if we have to. Mostly it's OK. Just a keen hike."

Larsen picks up his rod and exhales his $50 Esplendido. "Good shit," he says. "Nine for a five-weight, baby. That's the one. How's my drag?"

McCarthy looks at the reel, but mostly at our legs, and winces. Larsen and I have probably not walked eight and a half miles at any time in our lives. We both normally do our hiking in jet boats up in British Columbia.

"Ahh, those steelhead are fun all right, but it's a no-brainer," the first guide says, without apparent malice or contempt. He goes on in the same manner, smiling one of those smiles you begin to hate after you've passed fifty-five. "There are a lot of guests who couldn't make this hike," he says, looking at us.

Larsen is cool and shows no emotion, certainly not intimidation from a mere eight and a half-mile trek into the mouth of a feeding trout like those we are supposed to see today. But his veins are pounding. He steadies himself, leaning on his African walking stick — the one he got from a Masai warrior in trade for an empty 35-millimeter plastic film canister. The Masai like to use film canisters as functional earrings, filling them with miscellania and then inserting them into large holes in their lower ears.

Larsen hefts his end of the bargain in a cloud of aromatic Cuban fog. He taps the hiking stick against his legs and says, "Ironwood, baby." Which one? I ask myself. His leg or the stick?

Now it is 8:45 a.m. and we are flying up the main river canyon. From 900 feet, the semitropical forests of New Zealand's North Island drift below us, folded in images of green cauliflower-like foliage and crumpled canyons whose small tributaries still run in shadow and cold morning fog. Moss hangs from the limbs of some trees like strange, uncombed green hair. We could be in Cambodia, Laos, Borneo, or over the lush tangle of Hawaii. I see what appear to be red flowers and immense umbrella-shaped ferns.

This isn't Kansas, Toto. If half of what the guides say is true, the trout below really are unbelievable.

I have seen their smaller cousins to the south and west; two days earlier, on another branch of this same river, I cast to a brown estimated to weigh fourteen pounds. I saw a rainbow that looked every bit as large, and others that ranged in size from six to maybe twelve pounds. In one pool, forty casts produced two "looks" and thirty-eight "kiss-my-anal-fin" refusals, each more emphatic than the last, until finally all the trout were onto us, and ganged up in fifteen feet of water in the deepest part of the pool. As we left, Ken Drummond, a great guide and friend, counted more than a dozen of them.

Drummond always shortens my name and pronounces it as if it were spelled "Lawn," and the memory of his coaching brings a smile:

"A little to the left, Lawn."

"A little to the right, Lawn."

"A little longer, Lawn."

"Oh, he's gone, Lawn."

Coaching helps. If you can take instruction, guiding and honest criticism, you will get it. New Zealand guides are perfectionists, superbly gifted and practiced anglers with eyes that can see everything — including your nerves, your ego, and every weakness you have as an angler, even those you try to hide. If you're smart, you check your privates on some tree by the gravel bar before you wade into position, although most Kiwi pros have apparently unlimited patience. But they will demand that you wear dark clothing, with no red hankies around the throat until the fish is in the net and the cameras are out of the bag. They also insist you have no chrome-plated tools dangling from a light-colored vest, and no wristwatches that might catch the sun and flash in the eye of a trout as long as your arm.

Some even apply steel wool or powdered pumice to their $900 fly rods to scour away the glossy finish. By doing so they reduce the chance of signaling to the trout that all is not well and that the airborne cicada making impossible turns at the speed of light is actually connected to the strange animal waving its arms back and forth over there on the rock.

Tim McCarthy even goes so far as to dye the sheepskin fly patch on his vest. He dyes it black. This is serious stuff.

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