Part 10 (1/2)

He lives upon the bright blue sea.

He has to work like h----, of course, But he doesn't have to ride on a darned old horse.”

It was dark when we reached our camp-ground at the foot of the valley. A hundred feet below, in a gorge, ran the Stehekin River, a noisy and turbulent stream full of trout. We groped through the darkness for our tents that night and fell into bed more dead than alive. But at three o'clock the next morning, the junior Rineharts, following Mr. Fred, were off for bear, reappearing at ten, after breakfast was over, with an excited story of having seen one very close but having unaccountably missed it.

There was no water for the horses at camp that night, and none for them in the morning. There was no way to get them down to the river, and the poor animals were almost desperate with thirst. They were having little enough to eat even then, at the beginning of the trip, and it was hard to see them without water, too.

XIII

CAnON FIs.h.i.+NG AND A TELEGRAM

It was eleven o'clock the next morning before I led Buddy--I had abandoned ”Budweiser” in view of the drought--into a mountain stream and let him drink. He would have rolled in it, too, but I was on his back and I fiercely restrained him.

The next day was a comparatively short trip. There was a trapper's cabin at the fork of Bridge Creek in the Stehekin River. There we were to spend the night before starting on our way to Cascade Pa.s.s. As it turned out, we spent two days there. There was a little gra.s.s for the horses, and we learned of a canon, some five or six miles off our trail, which was reported as full of fish.

The most ardent of us went there the next day--Mr. Hilligoss, Weaver, and ”Silent Lawrie” and the Freds and Bob and the Big Boy and the Little Boy and Joe. And, without expecting it, we happened on adventure.

Have you ever climbed down a canon with rocky sides, a straight and precipitous five hundred feet, clinging with your finger nails to any bit of green that grows from the cliff, and to footholds made by an axe, and carrying a fly-book and a trout-rod which is an infinitely precious trout-rod? Also, a share of the midday lunch and twenty pounds more weight than you ought to have by the beauty-scale? Because, unless you have, you will never understand that trip.

It was a series of wild drops, of blood-curdling escapes, of slips and recoveries, of bruises and abrasions. But at last we made it, and there was the river!

I have still in mind a deep pool where the water, rus.h.i.+ng at tremendous speed over a rocky ledge, fell perhaps fifteen feet. I had fixed my eyes on that pool early in the day, but it seemed impossible of access. To reach it it was necessary again to scale a part of the cliff, and, clinging to its face, to work one's way round along a ledge perhaps three inches wide. When I had once made it, with the aid of friendly hands and a leather belt, by which I was lowered, I knew one thing--knew it inevitably. I was there for life. Nothing would ever take me back over that ledge.

However, I was there, and there was no use wasting time. For there were fish there. Now and then they jumped. But they did not take the fly. The water seethed and boiled, and I stood still and fished, because a slip on that spray-covered ledge and I was gone, to be washed down to Lake Chelan, and lie below sea-level in the Cascade Mountains. Which might be a glorious sort of tomb, but it did not appeal to me.

I tried different flies with no result. At last, with a weighted line and a fish's eye, I got my first fish--the best of the day, and from that time on I forgot the danger.

Some day, armed with every enticement known to the fisherman, I am going back to that river. For there, under a log, lurks the wiliest trout I have ever encountered. In full view he stayed during the entire time of my sojourn. He came up to the fly, leaped over it, made faces at it.

Then he would look up at me scornfully.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Stream fis.h.i.+ng_]

”Old tricks,” he seemed to say. ”Old stuff--not good enough.” I dare say he is still there.

Late in the day, we got out of that canon. Got out at infinite peril and fatigue, climbed, struggled, stumbled, held on, pulled. I slipped once and had a bad knee for six weeks. Never once did I dare to look back and down. It was always up, and the top was always receding. And when we reached camp, the Head, who had been on an excursion of his own, refused to be thrilled, and spent the evening telling how he had been climbing over the top of the world on his hands and knees. In sheer scorn, we let him babble.

But my hat is off to him, after all, for he had ready for us, and swears to this day to its truth, the best fish-story of the trip.

Lying on the top of one of our packing-cases was a great bull-trout. Now a bull-trout has teeth, and held in a vise-like grip in the teeth of this one was a smaller trout. In the mouth of the small trout was a gray-and-black fly. The Head maintained that he had hooked the small fish and was about to draw it to sh.o.r.e when the bull-trout leaped out of the water, caught the small fish, and held on grimly. The Head thereupon had landed them both.

In proof of this, as I have said, he had the two fish on top of a packing-case. But it is not a difficult matter to place a small trout cross-wise in the jaws of a bull-trout, and to this day we are not quite certain.

There _were_ tooth-marks on the little fish, but, as one of the guides said, he wouldn't put it past the Head to have made them himself.

That night we received a telegram. I remember it with great distinctness, because the man who brought it in charged fifteen dollars for delivering it. He came at midnight, and how he had reached us no one will ever know. The telegram notified us that a railroad strike was about to take place and that we should get out as soon as possible.

Early the next morning we held a conference. It was about as far back as it was to go ahead over the range. And before us still lay the Great Adventure of the pa.s.s.