I SKIPPED A LOT OF CLASSES IN HIGH SCHOOL, so it wasn't until our soot-streaked Mi-8 helicopter slipped down into the northernmost valley of outermost Mongolia and began whirring us above the Uur River at little more than treetop level that I finally caught up with Hemingway 101.

For three hours, I had been glued to a porthole, watching the wrinkled autumn skin of the earth unveil itself as we flew north, over open desert, into rolling plains, and out toward the Russian border. Each range of hills was steeper than the last, and finally some trees—Siberian larch and pine—began to appear. When we dropped toward the last valley, I saw, flashing below us at a hundred miles an hour, the telltale black circles and twisted thickets left by a forest fire. The fire had been out for several years, but long stretches of gray hillside and tangles of stripped trunks revealed its former rage.

Over the summer I'd been on a sort of literary crack binge, hiding in the cool aisles of library stacks with all the Hemingway stories I was supposed to have read decades ago. But only now, from the Olympian vantage of a Russian helicopter, did I abruptly comprehend one of his most obvious metaphors. The cold fire down below was the same ash-strewn wreckage that greets Nick Adams in the opening sentence of "Big Two-Hearted River," perhaps the prototype for all American fishing tales. In this 1925 story, Adams walks out of that burn, away from his nameless anxieties, carrying a fly rod. Going into the wilderness of Michigan's Upper Peninsula, he finds his "good place," a section of pine forest beside a river marbled with trout. Once the tent was up, "nothing could touch him."

I was having a busy month of discoveries. A late bloomer, I'd gotten married three weeks earlier, my first time on that journey. And now here I was making my first trip to Mongolia, to catch my first taimen, one of the world's most elusive freshwater fish. A massive salmonid once common from Bohemia to Hokkaido, the taimen is making one of its last stands here, in the high, cold, pure rivers of Mongolia's remote watersheds. This rare opportunity is what filled the helicopter with Texas businessmen, doctors, and millionaire factory owners, as well as two New Yorkers: me and James Nachtwey, a legendary globe-trotting photographer for Time. We were all here to catch a big fish, maybe the fish of a lifetime.

This was also, unaccountably, my first flight in a helicopter. On the tarmac in Ulan Bator, Mongolia's capital, I had asked Jim for advice. He'd been flying in helicopters for decades, whisking in and out of war zones. Although he didn't say so, Jim had been in Darfur the week before, and the next week, no doubt, it would be some other terrible place. In War Photographer, a 2001 documentary about his career, Jim was shown calmly snapping away in burning Balkan villages and shootouts in Palestine. His terrifying pictures from September 11, taken at the feet of the twin towers, open the book War, a collaboration of the nine photographers in his agency. Living two miles from ground zero, I only felt like the north tower had fallen on my head; in Jim's case, it nearly had. Despite all this—or perhaps because of it—he had a boyish enthusiasm for adventures like this one, for the innocence of chasing wild fish in wild places. And he loved helicopters.

"They are magic carpets," Jim said, with his usual grin. Jim is a man of few words, and his advice was to the point. "Pee before getting in," he said—there were no toilets. For once, a useful tip.

When we landed and began to unpack, I could not contain my idiotic enthusiasm for my recent discoveries in the field of American literature. I told Jim how I had finally realized, while riding in the Mi-8, that the burned forest in the opening of "Big Two-Hearted Riv—"

"It was the war," Jim interrupted, not looking up from his duffel bag. He kept unpiling his clothes, sorting the fishing gear from the fleece and the socks.

"The fire was the war," he said.