Spinner would rather pirouette around the dance floor than fish in a mountain stream, but she thought she'd give fishing a try--for her father's sake. Her father loves fishing so much that he named her after his favorite lure, the spinner.

After a fierce struggle on a gravelly bank of the Snake River, Spinner reels in the family prize, a monster cutthroat trout. Not only does she surprise everyone, including herself, by catching a fish, but the fish itself was a surprise. Everyone thought that cutthroat trout were extinct in this part of the Snake.

Spinner and her cantankerous cousin Al set out to get to the bottom of the mystery of the missing cutthroats. They set off into the mountains with backpacks and collecting pails. However, they encounter more than clues when the meet an angry grizzly bear, get caught on a cliff face during an electrical snowstorm, and scale the wall of a narrow river gorge.

In this forth ecological mystery, first published in1975, Jean Craighead George once again weaves together science and drama in a compelling story for budding nature detectives.