Mount a size 12 1X long barbless dry fly hook and lay a base of black 70 denier back to the bend.
Grab eight or ten golden pheasant tippet fibres, hold the tips together and snip them off the stem so the tips stay aligned. Tie them in at the bend a little longer than the hook gap, with the second black bar showing, and snip the butts.
Tie in one brown and one grizzly dry fly hackle at the bend, first stroking the fibres up to expose a couple of millimetres of bare stem. This fly has no body — the hackle is palmered the whole way up a bare shank.
Take the thread base forward to the post position, a couple of eye lengths back from the eye.
Cut a clump of white calf tail and pull the loose fibres out. To check the amount, twist the bunch 180 degrees: the little rope should be about the same diameter as the hook wire. Pull some out if it is wider.
Tie the calf tail in tips forward with one loose collecting wrap, coming under and back up while pulling up on the bunch, then follow with six or seven tight wraps.
Trim the butts back at an angle and wrap over them to build a small ramp for the hackle to climb.
Lift the post upright and build a thread dam hard against the front of it, then take two or three turns around the base of the post as you would on a parachute so it stands straight up.
Take the thread up to the eye and put in a half hitch to park the bobbin out of the way.
Palmer both hackles forward together in even turns up the bare shank, keeping the fibres as perpendicular to the shank as you can, and take two wraps in front of the post.
Holding tension on the feathers, lock them with a thread wrap or two in front, trim the excess, then stroke any forward-pointing fibres back and bury them — or trim them — and whip finish the head.
Trim the calf tail post to just slightly longer than the tops of the hackles and clean the head up with fine scissors. To ride the fly in the surface layer rather than on top, trim the hackle flat underneath to about the hook point.