When Joe Warren said he’d found trout in a Mt. Hood channel the evening before and more than a few were working the surface, I tied on a No. 12 Ant Misbehavin’ to lure a couple.

It’s a foam-bodied pattern and it looks like what a carpenter ant looks like after the first slap, maybe not dead, but punch-drunk.

We were at Timothy Lake, 10 miles off Highway 26, south of Mt. Hood. Those woods were logged a long time ago and maybe there aren’t as many ants in the timber as there would be if there were fresh clear cuts, but ants would definitely be on the menu.

It was the first evening of our Mt. Hood fish camp. I’d reserved three spaces at a campground and mentioned the trip to friends. We filled the campsites and then some with adults and teens.

My mother and father were in a drift boat with my 13-year-old nephew, Michael, who through no fault of his own lives in Southern California, where there are but few trout. James Flaherty and Joe Warren were in Warren’s boat, with anchors in the bow and stern to hold them in place.

Warren had arrived the day before and scouted the old river channel in the North Arm. The water was low and clear and, with polarized glasses to cut the glare, I could see the darker, deeper water. Narrow in places, the channel widened out into sunken pools and a person could get a sense of the creek that used to run here in Timothy Meadow before the dam was built.

We couldn’t get too close to the channel because there were skittish spotted shadows in the water — some with dark spots, some with light speckles on dark green backs. Rainbows. Brook trout.

Any forest reservoir is bound to have stumps and Timothy has no shortage. One stump stuck up above the water and gave me a place to bump my pontoon boat against, stand up and cast without getting too close to the channel.

I looked over at my nephew and his spinning rod was doubled over with his very first rainbow.

My line lay stretched out before me on the still water. Nine feet off the end of it, on a light tippet, my little soldier, the No. 12 foam ant, tempted a 14-inch brook trout. It sipped and swirled and my line went straight.

When the trees threw long shadows on the reservoir, the fish left the channel and spread out to feed. I’d landed two rainbows and two brook trout and let them go, but the best fish of the day were the ones 13-year-old Michael caught, his first trout ever. He ate them for breakfast.

After the meal, the group headed out for more fishing.

We caught a few in the morning. As the day warmed, the fish moved up toward the creek mouths, where, for a couple of hours, they were easy pickings for kids armed with spinning rods.

In between trout, the kids chased snakes, caught crawdads and experimented with different baits and lures.

“Learn the improved clinch knot,” I’d told Michael four weeks before, when he printed out the plane ticket. “If you do that, I’ll take you fishing.”

I wanted him to own it. Tie his own knots. Bait his own hook. Catch his own fish. Cook it in foil with butter and salt and pepper and lemon juice.

And he did.

We put him back on the airplane, a copy of Curtis Creek Manifesto in his hands, a simple instructional treatise on fly-fishing, illustrated comic book style. I read it when I was 13.

Maybe the boy will be a fly-fisherman when he comes back next summer. Since he’s 13, it is a good time for him to get hooked on something. It might as well be fishing.

— Gary Lewis is the host of “Frontier Unlimited TV” and author of “John Nosler — Going Ballistic,” “Fishing Mount Hood Country,” “Hunting Oregon” and other titles. Contact Gary at www.GaryLewisOutdoors.com.