Big Two-Hearted River
Ernest Hemingway
 Part one In the story, Nick Adams arrives by train at the town of Seney to find that, because of a fire, "there was no town, nothing but the rails and the burned-over country." Following the road leading away from the town, he stops to stand on a bridge where he watches the trout below in the river. He then he hikes up a hill. At a burned stump, he stops to rest, smokes a cigarette, and examines a grasshopper blackened by the fire. Later in the day he rests in a glade of tall pines where he falls asleep. When he wakes, he hikes the last mile to the edge of the river where he sees the trout feeding in the evening light "making circles all down the surface of the water as though it were starting to rain." Carefully he pitches his tent, unpacks his supplies, cooks his dinner, fills his water bucket, heats a pot of coffee, and kills a mosquito before falling asleep. Part two Early the next morning, Nick fills a jar with 50 dew-heavy grasshoppers he finds under a log in a "grasshopper lodging-house", eats breakfast, drinks sweetened coffee and makes a sliced onion sandwich. After checking and assembling his fly-fishing rod and tying on damp leader line, he walks to the river with a net hanging from his belt, a sack from his shoulders and the jar of grasshoppers from his neck. Wading in the water, he fishes the shallows where he lands a trout that "was mottled with clear, water-over-gravel color" that he releases. Moving into a pool of deep water, he lands a large trout, "as broad as a salmon", which he loses. After a rest, he moves away from the deep water to the center of the river and catches two trout that he stows in his sack. Sitting on a log, smoking a cigarette and eating his onion sandwich, he contemplates fishing the deep water of the swamp, but he decides to wait for another day. In the river, at the log, he kills, guts and cleans the two trout and then returns to his camp.