With Rod and Line in Colorado Waters. France Lewis B.

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      In those days fishing tackle was scarce, and a plum-bush pole and linen line were the best in the land. Flies were a novelty to me, but my friend had a dozen or so, some that he had saved over from more civilized times, and that had got out here by mistake. He divided with me, told me to fasten one upon the end of my line and “skitter it over the water.” This was my first and only instruction in trout fishing. “Skittering” was as novel to me as the fish, but my Professor was a Cambridge man with glasses, and I did not want him to feel that my education had been entirely neglected. I took my pole and instruction in silence, and walked a quarter of a mile up the creek. Pure instinct? Yes, I walked up stream for the single purpose of fishing down; it came just as naturally as swimming in deep water. I found a place clear of bushes for a few rods, where the current swept directly into my shore and out again, forming an eddy. I thought it a “likely place.” I gave that plum sapling a swing and landed the fly, in which I had no confidence whatever, just at the edge of the swirl. It had no sooner touched the water than I saw a salmon-colored mouth, felt a tug, and the following second my first trout was flying over my head. I deliberately put down that pole and walked out to investigate. There was no doubt about it; there he lay, kicking and gasping his life out on the green grass, his bright colors more beautiful by the contrast. He was near a foot long, and I put my hand upon him as gently as though he had been an immortal first born. It was not a dream. When he was dead I strung him upon a forked stick, went back to the eddy and caught three others, and wondered if all the trout in that stream were twins. I had already become gentler, too, even with the unwieldy plum sapling. I found their mouths were not made of cast iron nor copper lined. By the time I had fished down to camp, and with my ten trout, I felt equal to the business of the morrow. My friend, of course, had better luck, having passed his novitiate, but he complimented me in saying that I “took to it naturally.”

      Camping out was no novelty, but fresh trout was a revelation, and that night we had no bad dreams under our canvas. The next evening found us preparing nearly, what a Yankee would call, two patent pails, of trout to take home to our friends and neighbors.

      And here I am moved to say that ours is a noble fellowship; it is a gentle craft we cultivate, one that should beget brotherly love and all things charitable; and if any of you have, as I hope you have, a little white-haired tot who seems inclined to follow you down stream upon summer days, do not say nay, but let your prayer be: “Lord, keep my memory green.”

      OVER THE RANGE

      Of course it is never agreeable to go camping; it is not convenient to carry about with one bedsteads, chairs, bureaus, wash-stands, bath-tubs, and such like plunder deemed essential to comfort. And then again it is not comfortable to live out doors like a tramp. It is either too hot or too cold, too dry or too wet, – that is for a certain large class of human beings. They wonder why one will forego the comforts of our civilized ways for those of the Ute. But perhaps we may get to the solution of the problem further on.

      It was dusty when our party left Idaho for a fifty-mile drive to Hot Sulphur Springs. Of course it was dusty; the dust was in the road, in our eyes and mouths, throats and lungs, just for our discomfort, and the toll-road companies were never known to keep sprinklers. So we traveled in a cloud for half an hour, then it began to rain. Of course it did; the first rain-storm for three weeks; we got damp, then we forgot the dust, and were doggedly satisfied that if pleasure had not been one of our objects in going camping it would not have rained. We got to Empire; it rained till dark, and everybody said the rainy season had begun in earnest; that it was liable to keep on raining for three weeks to get even with the “dry spell,” and we went to bed feeling very much encouraged. There is an exasperating sententiousness about the mountain weather prophet that prevails nowhere else on the globe, I verily believe; when he tells you what the weather is, or is going to be, you must believe him. You dare not even express a hope that he may be mistaken. But even this gentry, one soon begins to believe, is essential to comfort; the weather prophet is the means of agreeable disappointment. Our weather prophet was the most entertaining old liar that ever contributed to the misery of a tenderfoot or the mortification of a moss-back. The sun never broke over the eastern hills more gloriously than on the eventful next morning; he seemed to come up in a spirit of exultation, as if aware that the prophet at Empire had been maligning him. But the prophet was not overcome; far from it; the appearance of the sun was a “weather breeder,” and the cheerful old atmospheric vaticinator swore that before we could reach the summit of the range it would and must rain, and snow and hail and freeze and thaw and blow and the – . We bade him good morning sadly, and took the road with a determination to wrest comfort, if necessary, from the worst “spell of weather” the range could boast.

      The rain of the day before was the first element to lend its influence to the day’s enjoyment; it had sweetened the air, if Colorado mountain air is ever otherwise; it had laid the dust, and the road was a marvel of excellence – for a toll road; it had sharpened the fragrance of the pines, and the wild flowers, lacking in perfume, made amends by such a wealth of beauty that one became lost in the multitude of bright colors.

      We were a happy party that rode up through the Devil’s Gate to encounter punishment. Leaving the magnificent mass of granite cliffs reaching a thousand feet high, and wondering if he who should follow next would experience the same degree of veneration for the mighty pile, we began the ascent of Berthoud Pass. We did not climb; there is no climbing to be done, except one escapes over a precipice, and has an ambition to get back. Strolling leisurely along, the white-capped range would, from time to time, reveal itself through the green of the pines, while to the left of us plunged down from the snowy heights the beautiful mountain stream, here not degraded and a satire on its name. Its banks are fringed with rich-colored mosses and decked with flowers, and the beautiful firs, waved by the gentle breeze, seem to be bowing an accompaniment to the music of the crystal waters at their feet. As we go on, the sharp ridge of Red Mountain comes into view, guarded on the east by a monster hill, which none of our ingenious explorers, so generous in giving names, have condescended to dignify with a title. Its broad base washed by the rushing torrent, its sides clothed in a mantle of living green away up to the sharp line which marks the limit of the timber growth, and yet on and up the eye glances over the granite, with its azure background, until the vast pile is diademed with a fleecy cloud. It is a noble mountain, and involuntarily I took off my hat to it, wondering if the civil engineers, explorers, and the like, had really the monopoly of the love and veneration for the beautiful. Red Mountain! a carmine-colored excrescence dignified with a name, and this overtopping evidence of God’s handiwork, like a giant overlooking a pigmy, without anything to distinguish it from its surroundings, except its own magnificence. Well, that is enough.

      But at this rate we will never get into that “infernal spell of weather” we are seeking. Up the gorge on the right, toward the summit, an ominous cloud begins to creep upon the blue, and we begin to think the prophet will, after all, command respect, but are doomed to disappointment. As the black mass rises over the summit we notice a rift in its center, soon it widens, goes to the right and left, the blue expands, and we are not deprived of a minute’s sunshine. We look down into the gorge and see the beautiful stream dancing through the firs, so far below its breadth is shrunk to a hand-span, looking now like an emerald ribbon flecked with white, and its rude noise dies into a gentle murmur as a turn in the road shuts it out from sight. On and up; disappointed about the storm nearing the summit, reaching out for the snow and the Alpine primrose, gorgeous in crimson and royal purple; finding the flowers, but the snow, alas that has been gone this three weeks, except a dirt-begrimed bushel or so a few rods from the station.

      It is high noon, and, for the first time, I stand upon the “backbone of the continent,” and a good deal of a backbone it is, here only eleven thousand four hundred and odd feet high. There must have been trouble in the neighborhood when the continent got its back up to this extent; the agitation experienced in the framing and signing of the Declaration of Independence was evidently trifling in comparison. I did not look down into the Pacific, but saw where the waters start that go that way. Never having СКАЧАТЬ