MONGOLIA IS a land of brutal superlatives. With a mean temperature of 28 degrees, Ulan Bator, known as "U.B.," really is the coldest capital in the world. And with fewer than five people per square mile, Mongolia actually does have the lowest population density of any country. Despite a tourism boom—up 50 percent just last year—and a gold-mining rush, half its citizens are still nomadic, husbanding animals over vast spaces of desert and foothill. The place is a synonym for emptiness, the thing beyond the beyond.

Perfect fishing country, in other words. The helicopter had dropped off the Texas doctors in a lower camp, and we were set down 60 miles to the north. This camp, run by a Montana company, Sweetwater Travel, was on the banks of the Uur River, which drains the high timber country east of Lake Hovsgol, Mongolia's biggest, and flows down into the Eg River and eventually on to Lake Baikal, in Russia. The small encampment included five gers, the traditional Mongolian tents of thick felt laid over a round frame of willow switches.

There was also a log cabin for dining, and on that late-September night, over a dinner of Mongolian noodles with beef, we met our fellow elect. The guides were both Montanans. Dan Vermillion was a Livingston lawyer who had abandoned the bar to open these waters to catch-and-release fly-fishing a few years ago with his brothers and a Mongolian partner. Charlie Conn was the Candide of the Rockies; upon meeting me he announced that I was about to catch a big taimen and never deviated from that faith. His cowgirl wife, Wendy, had flown in with us, as had Bill and Sharon Sumner, irrepressible Texans in their mid-fifties. Sharon proved to be a sharp caster, with a game attitude and a balanced personality, which was vital, given that her husband was an angling maniac. Between stints rescuing his plastic-bag factory from one crisis or another, he fished all over the world. He'd tried to break the addiction with golf or hunting, but nothing else worked. Taimen have been known to burst out of the water to swallow prairie dogs neat. Bill had come all the way to Mongolia to see if the world's biggest freshwater salmonid would sate his fish lust once and for all.

Bill wasn't just from Texas; he was from TEXAS. He liked speaking loud, and he liked speaking his mind. About five seconds after we sat down to eat, he asked Nachtwey the question I'd been trying to avoid all day.

"SO, JIM," he bellowed. "I HEARD YOU GOT BLOWED UP IN EYE-RACK. WHAT HAPPENED?"