My friend Tiller was in Yellowstone, and thought he’d left all the animals behind, but it looks like they followed him home. He can’t keep them and he can’t give them away either.

“I shouldn’t have taken their pictures,” he realizes too late. “They made themselves comfortable in my phone, and now they’re breeding in there, multiplying and making videos.

“Every time I turn the phone on, there they are — buffalo ambling down the middle of the road like common sheep. Grizzly bears walking across like, like — he stalled, looking for the right analogy.

Like pedestrians jaywalking in Miami?

“Yes! Just like that! Only without staring at their phones. Bears don’t have phones, or they would stare at them in the middle of the road too.”

I asked Tiller if he’d seen any grizzlies in person. He said he had seen their tracks in the mud by a trout stream where he fished, but only tracks until he joined the tourists in Yellowstone National Park.

He took some of the pictures himself, but when he wasn’t looking, some bears and a lot of bison, also known as buffalo, sneaked into his phone on their own. Every day, even a month afterward, there are more. He thinks they want him to feed them half a ham sandwich.

He doesn’t have one because a park ranger warned him not to after scolding someone who tried it.

“Tiller, quit worrying,” Headwind told him. “You’re home now. You can carry all the food you like. If grizzly bears were running amok here, nobody would deliver pizza.”

Tiller said he wasn’t taking any chances as long as his phone stayed full of bear and buffalo videos he didn’t make himself.

He was showing us his pictures and telling us about his adventure in the ramshackle but comfortable clubhouse of the Fish or Cut Bait Society, where Tiller is chairman of the steering committee and loafers gather when the weather’s unworthy for fishing.

He had gone to Wyoming for fly fishing, not far from Yellowstone National Park. When overnight rain squalls muddied up the rivers, he decided to do the park.

When he mentioned the trout stream, everyone in the joint interrupted to ask what he had caught and how. We demanded to see fish pix. Never mind the giraffes.

Right, everyone knows giraffes don’t run around loose in Yellowstone. The reference was allegorical, not categorical.

Tiller ducked those questions. You can guess why.

“You know what?” he asked rhetorically, and before anyone could answer, “No. What?” he told us there are signs along the road in Yellowstone, saying not to approach the wildlife.

There must not be enough signs, because tourists from all over the world go there and routinely approach the wildlife — often in plain sight of a sign saying “don’t.” They must think the animals are part of a circus act.

“Hey you, bear boy! Nice bear. You vanta hoffa hom sonovitch?” he heard one say. Tiller’s ancestry is mixed eastern European; he mimics the accent without malice.

“A ranger saw that, and she ordered the man not to do it. She said if you give a grizzly bear hoffa hom sonovitch it’ll drop the wrapper on the ground. Imagine the mess if everybody did that!”

Headwind asked, “Did you cast ham sandwich flies to the trout? Do you have pix of trout tracks in the mud?”

Sensing that Headwind was messing with him, Tiller ducked again and beavered on with his bear story.

He said the ranger said she doesn’t have jurisdiction to arrest bears for littering, but if one of them drops a sandwich wrapper on the ground she can write up a ticket for the fool who fed the bear, unless the bear eats the fool too.

“She said when that happens, it kind of stinks up the whole day,” Tiller told us.

He isn’t a daring fellow, but he dared to approach a chipmunk while waiting for the Old Faithful geyser to erupt. A ranger was there too, and didn’t admonish him, so Tiller suspects the regulations are enforced a little unevenly.

“For example, there are no signs warning bears and buffalo not to approach tourists, so they do it,” he said. “When those bears and buffalo realize that tourists are dumb enough to offer them half a ham sandwich, they supposedly lose their fear of tourists.

Next they demand the other half of the sandwich, and the chips too. That’s when things get kind of tense.

“Personally, I can’t imagine a grizzly bear or a buffalo being afraid of anyone. Anyway, when one plays rough with people, the park concessionaire invites the animal on a ride to look at rustic timeshare condos. It’s never seen again.”

Gently, so he wouldn’t think I was shaming him, I asked Tiller what trout were in the rivers near Yellowstone.

“Rainbow, brown and cutthroat,” he answered warily.

I asked him what flies they were taking at that time of the year, in late August.

He pushed his chair a couple of inches away from the table, ready to dart away if I pushed too hard.

“Supposedly a foam grasshopper was king, with a very small bead-headed nymph dangling under it. If the trout didn’t eat the hopper, they’d eat the nymph. At least that’s how it’s supposed to work.”

I hate that, I told him so he wouldn’t feel baited. He nodded as I went on:

When you’re casting two flies like that, you have to open up your forward stroke and kind of lob the rig to prevent the hopper and dropper — the nymph on its own strand of invisibly light leader — from tangling.

If you make a tight cast, they’re liable to twist together but you don’t see it or feel it happening. After a few casts that ought to be good go bad, you stop for a close look. Then you erupt, geyser-like, in vulgar words of language.

Tiller kept nodding at me. I nodded back at him. He spoke:

“The way it’s supposed to work, you cast upstream and let the two flies drift downstream, gathering up slack line. Once it passes you, you give back the slack. At the end of the drift, you pause to let the line straighten on the water, then strip it back. If nobody bites, you throw it upstream again.

“You have to remember to lob your cast, not rifle it the way we do here. It’s not hard to do on a calm day, but even a light gust can knock down that kind of cast. Two or three of those and the twisted leaders roll over each other, making knots. Then you have to re-rig everything.”

I noticed that Tiller kept saying “you,” not meaning anyone in particular, instead of speaking in the first person. I think he couldn’t bear to let us think all that misfortune happened to him.

He felt better when we asked him to explain the difference between a buffalo and a bison and he said there isn’t any difference.

“If you ask a focus group what they prefer to be called, they would say bison,” Tiller said. “That’s because the nearest town, Cody, is also the surname of a man who was called Buffalo Bill because he hunted and shot thousands of them.

“Buffalo Bill died in 1917, but his name didn’t. Almost everything in Cody is named Buffalo Bill Something — a museum, streets, other buildings, pet cats and dogs, babies, convents, et cetera. Outside of town there’s the Buffalo Bill reservoir.

“Whenever bison wander into town, they see all that. It has to affect their self-esteem. They don’t complain much, but you can tell they feel it.”

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