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

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СКАЧАТЬ time be in the fashion, and this not in the days of miracles. When I got out of that bath I felt as I have heard men say they felt after a hard day’s work. I took my blankets, laid on the ground and slept the sleep of godliness. Some of those fellows whose consciences are demoralized had better try this medicine instead of opium; it is at least a safer narcotic. One can go to bed with better assurance that in a day or so a servant will not be peering over the transom and finding a subject for the coroner. It is more satisfactory, too, in such emergencies, in that it removes the doubts of friends, if one has any, as well as of the public, as to “the cause,” and entitles one to Christian burial.

      Awakened the next day by that invaluable servant to us all shining in my face, I reminded the Doctor of his promise concerning the trout pools. So we were up betimes, had breakfast, the horses saddled, and with creels capable of fourteen pounds each, and a stock of tackle sufficient to start a store, we were off across the Grand, and over the hills for the anticipated pleasure down stream, to a place where the Doctor was sure no one had been. The horses of tourists and amateur fishermen usually buck and raise the devil when starting out on such a jaunt, and I was disappointed that the Doctor’s animal did not bow his back, go up, and come down stiff-legged. I like to see a horse buck when somebody else is on him, and I like to hear the man pray, if he is able, when he feels the ground and glances round to see who is laughing at him. An even-tempered gentleman like the Doctor would have afforded an enviable example of Christian fortitude under such circumstances – his horse did not buck, but led the way over the hills as quietly as a cow going out to pasture.

      We kept away from the river, traveled over high ground, and through an upland of black sage brush that would rival the mesa between Pueblo and Cañon. We followed an Indian trail, and followed it so long that I began to inquire when we were to reach my much coveted destination. The Doctor called my attention to a belt of timber some distance ahead, and said we were “going up there.” I asked him if he expected that trout roosted like sage hens, and informed him that if such had been his experience, it had not been mine, and that I was going to find water. He told me to do as I pleased, so I struck off toward the Grand – I like to be independent sometimes. My horse went scrambling through the thick sage brush, catching his toes in the roots and threatening to throw me over his head every few minutes, until finally he stopped at the bank of the river. It was fifty feet, at least, down to the water. I looked up stream half a mile, then down to the belt of timber, and that same bank presented itself at an aggravating angle of about ninety degrees. I don’t like Indians, nor any of their belongings, as a general rule, but I went cheerfully back to that trail, and quietly followed in the Doctor’s wake. When I caught up, the Doctor said in a mild sort of way that it was generally safe to keep on the trail. We walked our horses to the timber and into it, the Doctor in the lead. We got about half way round the mountain with a thousand or fifteen hundred feet of earth, rocks and trees below us, and as many above, when the Doctor discovered a “cut-off.” He led the way for a few rods, when a tree about three feet in diameter barred further progress in that direction. We could not turn round, nor could we go on, so we got off, and persuaded the horses to climb perpendicularly fifty feet up to the trail. I was satisfied in my mind that the Doctor was more than ever convinced of the safety of keeping on the trail, but he did not say so to me.

      We kept on to Williams’ Fork, and picketed our horses about half a mile from the month. The Doctor then proposed that we “hoof it” over more hills. I began to be disgusted, but was away from home and at the mercy of this new-fangled fisherman. I didn’t know an Indian trail from a cow path, and was as likely to get into one as the other. A trail, like the road of a civilized brother, leads to some place, but a cow path, – . I puffed on behind, up a high ridge of rocks, and as soon as I could get the breath, told the Doctor I was obliged to him. We stood upon a Grand Cañon in miniature. I want to describe it, but I can’t. After dreaming over it awhile, the Doctor told me an incident in his experience concerning the ledge where we had precarious foothold, looking down into the seething waters several hundred feet below. The Doctor, Wm. H. Beard, the artist, Bayard Taylor and a prospector and mining man came over the trail a few years before on horseback, the Doctor in the lead, then the prospector, and, finally, the artist and the great traveler bringing up the rear. When the prospector passed the narrow ledge, barely sufficient in width to allow a horseman to squeeze along, where one has to hang, as it were, like a fly on a wall, he became conscious that his saddle girths needed tightening. With the recklessness peculiar to his craft, he slipped off his mule, and was engaged in the necessary adjustment of his belly-band when Beard reached the narrow ledge and had to stop. The first intimation the Doctor had of anything wrong came in the way of an emphatic adjuration, that might have been heard half a mile, for the blessed prospector to get out of that. The Doctor said he was glad the artist was not given to profanity, though he said a great deal to the miner that the Doctor could not understand; it did not sound like English nor Dutch, nor any language the Doctor had ever heard, but hurled at the head of the miner from a two-foot trail hanging over five or six hundred feet of perpendicular granite, it seemed to have an accelerating effect. The miner led his mule to more convenient quarters without finishing his task, and the artist followed, not in silence, however: he did not seem to be able to get through his business with that miner for an hour.

      Looking down into the chasm, I suggested that it did not seem particularly “pokerish.” The Doctor said it was well enough to say so when one was afoot, “but just try it horseback,” in that ambiguous sort of way that always rouses one’s determination to undertake it. I did a few days after, but in returning I led my horse.

      Getting through with his anecdote, the Doctor pointed to another pile of rocks half a mile further up the stream, and called my especial attention to a pool beneath, which, even at that distance, placed me under conviction that I could see trout therein, two feet long at least. I started to get some of them. Arrived there, we shipped our tackle, and I selected a spot under a pine-tree on one side of this pregnant pool, while the Doctor took the other. I made a cast with an anxiety indescribable; I knew I would have the first strike, and I did; the fly caught in the luxuriant foliage overhead. I tried to coax the blasted thing loose, but the more I prayed and persuaded the more obstinately the line interlaced itself. If there is anything more exasperating than to get a line fastened in a pine-tree, I want to know what it is; a “picked-up dinner” on wash-day is bliss in comparison. Not being able to untangle the line, I tried to pull down the tree; then I took a seat on the bank and patiently renewed my leader. Meanwhile the Doctor was threshing the peaceful waters industriously. I asked him if he had caught anything; he said he was going to very soon, and threshed away. When I got my line fixed I murmured, “but deliver us from evil,” and got out of the reach of that pine, when I labored faithfully for full fifteen minutes, till finally we scared up a trout about six inches long. He came browsing around with his head half out of water and an inquiring expression plainly visible in his bright eyes, then he disappeared wiggling his tail in derision. We worked away in hope of bringing the scaly monster once more to the surface. A second sight of him would have been comforting; but his curiosity was evidently satisfied. I asked the Doctor if this was one of the trout pools he had been bragging about, and he said it was; he had always caught trout out of that hole, and the stories he told me of the numbers he had lifted out of that place “in the short space of an hour,” were marvelous. While listening and trying to believe him I felt a sudden jerk at my rod. Up to that moment I had entertained no special antipathy to stop-reels. But with one leader unattainable in the profuse growth overhead, and another serving as a sort of submarine union-jack to an unknown denizen of the pool, with no prospect of satisfaction, I felt – not like Patience. The trout must have been a monster, of course, or he never would have snapped that gut with so little ceremony. I shall not soon forget the sensation; it was a single and sudden blow without pause for a second pull, as though his troutship in passing that way had snapped up that fly and gone on about his business or pleasure, without realizing in the remotest degree that he had done anything more than take a midge floating on the surface of his habitation. To avoid a repetition of the calamity, I cheerfully tied the check to a crossbar of the reel, looped on another leader, and resumed, with an angler’s vow registered in heaven, which I have religiously kept.

      With that commendable resignation born of experience, I worked that pool СКАЧАТЬ