A year before they meet, Sauvage and his wife live in a trailer a mile from the Riverses’ house. Rivers sees the wife driving her Jeep while her husband is away at work, and she never waves back to him. One morning when she rejects his wave yet again, he is offended and later when his wife calls him she rants to him about how the woman smashed an apple tree with her car on her way up the mountain. She blames him for making her move from the city and says she’s leaving him to embroider birds, but he’s heard this before and isn’t concerned.  

When he comes home late, her car is gone and the yard looks different without the apple tree. He sees the headlights of Sauvage’s car coming back down the mountain and then entering the Riverses’ driveway. The man asks to use his cellphone because he’d found his wife eating a mouse in their house. Later, the ambulance pulls up to the neighbor’s house and Rivers watches as it begins to rain. As the emergency vehicle leaves, Sauvage follows in his car. Rivers dreams of an embroidered crow that eats human flesh and he is woken up by the sound of Sauvage returning to his trailer. At Rivers’ work the next day, Sauvage thanks him for lending him the phone and asks if he knows the “Yellow Bogs” up north. He says that it’s a bad country where animals get lost in the bottomless pools of stinking black mud, but that this is the site of native brook trout. 

They drive up to the area together and when the road ends they walk the rest of the way through the snow. Rivers says the place feels like home while Sauvage is creeped out. They paddle deep into the Bogs in silence and get lost in the fog. In the distance, they hear two big splashes followed by a coughing cry. Cautiously, they go back out to fish and Rivers thinks he sees dark shadows on the bottom of the bog. Sauvage catches several trout and Rivers catches none. Now drunk on whiskey, Rivers strips down to just his wading boots and casts for the next two hours but he catches nothing and returns to camp where he refuses to eat Sauvage’s trout. Sauvage tells him he’s seen a crazy-looking fisherman in the Bogs who stands naked with no waders with his head covered in cloth, casting for hours before walking straight into the deep water. Rivers tells him he’s seen the Wer-Trout of the Yellow Bogs, a fisherman with the body of a man and the head of a trout. He tells Sauvage that that was the splash they’d heard earlier and that the Wer-Trout only attacks if they kill female trout. He says that the Wer-Trout took both the men’s wives from them and Sauvage tells him to stop lying. Rivers kills a mouth and sticks it on the still-hot frying pan. Inside the tent, Rivers lights a candle and looks in the mirror at the chinless throat, pale snout and vacant eyes of the Wer-Trout.