It is a series of rapids, incredibly swift, with here and there a quiet
pool. Attempts to picture the rapids as we ran them were abortive. We
reeled and wallowed, careened and whirled. And always the fisherman-guide
was calm, and the gentleman who engineered the party was calm, and I
pretended to be calm.
At the foot of each rapids we fished. I was beginning to learn that
twist of the wrist that sends out the line in curves, and drops the
fly delicately on to the surface of the water.
As I learned, so that he did not close his eyes each time I raised my
rod, George Locke told of the Easterner he had taken down the river
some time before.
"He wanted a lesson in casting," he said. "And I worked over him pretty
hard. I told him all I knew. Then, after I'd told him all I knew, and
he'd had all the fun with me he wanted, he just stood up in the bow of
the boat and put out ninety feet of line without turning a hair. Cast?
He could have cast from a spool of thread."
In a boat behind us was a moving-picture man. For weeks he had always
been just behind or just ahead. When the time came to leave the West,
I missed that moving-picture man. He had come to be a part of the
landscape. I can still see him trying to get past us down those rapids,
going at lightning speed to gain some promontory where he could set
up his weapon and catch our boat in case it upset or did anything else
worth recording.
[Illustration: APPISTOKI FALLS NEAR TWO MEDICINE CHALETS]
He had two pieces of luck on that trip. I had hooked my first trout and
was busy trying to throw it in the boatman's face when it escaped. He
caught me at the exact instant when the triumph of my face turned to
a purple rage; and later on in the day he had the machine turned on me
when I caught two trout on two flies at the same time. Incidentally, I
slipped off the stone I was standing on at the same moment. He probably
got that, too.
I caught twelve trout in as many minutes from that same rock and furnished
the luncheon for the party. I took back loudly everything I had said
against the fishing in Glacier Park. I ate more trout than anybody else,
as was my privilege. If there were nothing else to it, I would still go
back to the Montana Rockies for the fishing in the Flathead River.
At noon we stopped for luncheon. The trout was fried with bacon, and
coffee was made. We ate on a little tongue of land around which the
river brawled and rushed.
From the time we had left Lake McDermott we had seen no single human
being. Mostly the river ran through tall canyons of its own cutting;
always it looked dangerous. Generally, indeed, it was! But never once
did the boatman lose control. It reminded me of the story Mark Twain
told of the passenger who says to the pilot something like this:--
"I suppose you know where every hidden rock and sunken tree and sandbar
is in this river?"
To which the pilot replies: "No, sir-ee. But I know where they ain't."
* * * * *
The train swung on into the summer twilight, past the ruins of old
mining-towns, now nothing but names, past brawling streams and great
deep woods.
The large trout was cooked and served. It had been worth the effort.
There were four of us to eat it--the moving-picture man, the chief
ranger of the park, the gentleman from St. Paul who had engineered the
fishing-trip, and myself.
At Glacier Park Station my wardrobe, which I had not seen for weeks, was
put on the train. "They do you very well," as the English say, in the
West. Everything was pressed. Even my shoes had been freshly polished.
A crowd of people had gathered at the station. My supper companions left
the train. There were many good-byes. Then the train moved slowly off.
I stood on the platform as long as I could and watched the receding
lights. Behind the hotel rose the purple-black silhouette of the
mountains, touched with faint gold by the lingering finger of the sun.
Stealthy coyotes had taken advantage of the dusk to creep close to the
track. A light glimmered from a tent on the Indian reservation. Flat,
treeless country, a wagon drawn by tired horses, range cattle that were
only shadows.
Then night--and the East.
THE END
The Riverside Press
CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS
U.S.A.
End of Project Gutenberg's Through Glacier Park, by Mary Roberts Rinehart