MISQUAH — The first thing to say about fishing in smoke is that the fish are not in the smoke. The walleye spent the week where they always spend late July — deep breaks, twelve to eighteen feet, leeches and crawlers — and their week, by every measure available to me, was normal. Your week is the one with the advisory on it. Plan accordingly: shorter trips, easy pace, and if your chest has opinions about the air, the fish will still be there in August. They are famous for it.

Those who went found the lake rearranged by subtraction. Big Pelican lost its far shore Monday and did not get it back until Thursday; boats came and went out of a white wall like a magic act nobody applauded. Navigation was by memory and by manners — slow, wide, lights on — and the landing traffic sorted itself out with a courtesy I would like entered into the record, because I intend to cite it in arguments for years.

The dusk bite, meanwhile, was the best of the summer, and conducted under conditions I can only call astronomical. The smoke turns the low sun into a red coal and the water into hammered copper, and the walleye came up onto the flats into the middle of it. “Like fishing on Mars,” one angler told me at the cleaning station, “if Mars had walleye,” which he then agreed would change his opinion of Mars considerably.

Panfish are on the weedlines, the smallmouth have resumed ignoring everyone now that the tournament is over, and the muskie people are out there somewhere in the haze, on the theory that conditions which cannot be seen through are conditions a muskie would enjoy. Water temps held at 74 despite the filtered sun — the smoke, whatever else it does, took the edge off the heat. The week’s full weather is reviewed elsewhere on this page, where it will receive the verdict it has coming.