We established a good camp on the Shelburne and remained in it for
several days. For one thing, our canoes needed a general overhauling
after that hard day on the rocks. Also, it rained nightly, and now and
then took a turn at it during the day, to keep in practice.
We minded the rain, of course, as it kept us forever cooking our
clothes, and restrained a good deal of activity about the camp. Still,
we argued that it was a good thing, for there was no telling what sort
of water lay ahead and a series of rock-strewn rapids with low water
might mean trouble.
On the whole, we were willing to stay and put up with a good deal for
the sport in that long pool. There may be better fishing on earth than
in the Shelburne River between Irving and Sand lakes, but it will take
something more than mere fisherman's gossip to convince either Eddie or
me of that possibility. We left the guides and went out together one
morning, and in less than three hours had taken full fifty fish of a
pound each, average weight. We took off our top flies presently and
fished with only one, which kept us busy enough, and always one of us
had a taut line and a curved rod; often both at one time.
We began to try experiments at last, and I took a good fish on one of
the funny little scale-winged flies (I had happily lost the Jock Scott
with two hooks early in the campaign) and finally got a big fellow by
merely tying a bit of white absorbent cotton to a plain black hook.
Yet curious are the ways of fish. For on the next morning--a perfect
trout day, with a light southwest wind and running clouds, after a night
of showers--never a rise could we get. We tried all the casts of the day
before--the Parmcheenie, the Jenny Lind, the Silver Doctor and the Brown
Hackle. It was no use. Perhaps the half a hundred big fellows we had
returned to the pool had warned all the others; perhaps there was some
other unwritten, occult law which prohibited trout from feasting on this
particular day. Finally Eddie, by some chance, put on a sort of a Brown
Hackle affair with a red piece of wool for a tail--he called it a Red
Tag fly, I think--and straightway from out of the tarry black depths
there rose such a trout as neither of us had seen the day before.
After that, there was nothing the matter with Eddie's fishing. What
there was about this brown, red-tailed joke that tickled the fancy of
those great silly trout, who would have nothing to do with any other
lure, is not for me to say. The creature certainly looked like nothing
that ever lived, or that they could ever have imagined before. It seemed
to me a particularly idiotic combination and I could feel my respect
for the intelligence of trout waning. Eddie agreed with me as to that.
He said he had merely bought the thing because it happened to be the
only fly he didn't have in his collection and there had been a vacant
place in his fly-book. He said it was funny the trout should go for it
as they did, and he laughed a good deal about it. I suppose it was
funny, but I did not find it very amusing. And how those crazy-headed
trout did act. In vain I picked out flies with the red and brown colors
and tossed them as carefully as I could in just the same spots where
Eddie was getting those great whoppers at every cast. Some mysterious
order from the high priest of all trout had gone forth that morning,
prohibiting every sort and combination of trout food except this absurd
creature of which the oldest and mossiest trout had never dreamed. That
was why they went for it. It was the only thing not down on the list of
proscribed items.
There was nothing for me to do at last but to paddle Eddie around and
watch him do some of the most beautiful fishing I have ever seen, and to
net his trout for him, and take off the fish, and attend to any other
little wants incident to a fisherman's busy day. I did it with as good
grace as I could, of course, and said I enjoyed it, and tried not to be
nasty and disagreeable in my attitude toward the trout, the water,
Eddie, and the camp and country in general. But, after all, it is a
severe test, on a day like that, to cast and cast and change flies until
you have wet every one in your book, without even a rise, and to see the
other chap taking great big black and mottled fellows--to see his rod
curved like a whip and to watch the long, lithe body leaping and
gleaming in the net.
But the final test, the climax, was to come at evening. For when the
fish would no longer rise, even to the Red Tag, we pulled up to the
camp, where Eddie of course reported to the guides his triumph and my
discomfiture. Then, just as he was opening his fly-book to put the
precious red-tailed mockery away, he suddenly stopped and stared at me,
hesitated, and held up another--that is, two of them, side by side.
"So help me!" he swore, "I didn't know I had it! I must have forgotten I
had one, and bought another, at another time. Now, I had forgotten that,
too. So help me!"
If I hadn't known Eddie so well--his proclivity for buying, and
forgetting, and buying over again--also his sterling honor and general
moral purity--the fishes would have got him then, Red Tag and all. As it
was, I condescended to accept the second fly. I agreed that it was not
such a bad production, after all, though I altered my opinion again,
next morning, for whatever had been the embargo laid on other varieties
of trout bait the day before, it was on now, and there was a general
rising to anything we offered--Doctors, Parmcheenie, Absorbent
Cotton--any old thing that skimmed the water and looked big and
succulent.
We broke camp that morning and dropped down toward the next lake--Sand
Lake, it would be, by our crude map and hazy directions. There are no
better rapids and there is no more lively fishing than we had on that
run. There was enough water for us to remain in the canoes, and it was
for the most part whirling, swirling, dashing, leaping water--shooting
between great bowlders--plunging among cruel-looking black
rocks--foaming into whirlpools below, that looked ready to swamp our
light craft, with stores, crew, tackle, everything.
It was my first exhibition of our guides' skill in handling their
canoes. How they managed to just evade a sharp point of rock on one side
and by a quick twist escape shipwreck from a bowlder or mass of bowlders
on the other, I fail to comprehend. Then there were narrow boiling
channels, so full of obstructions that I did not believe a chip could go
through with entire safety. Yet somehow Del the Stout and Charles the
Strong seemed to know, though they had never traveled this water before,
just where the water would let the boats pass, just where the stones
were wide enough to let us through--touching on both sides, sometimes,
and ominously scraping on the bottom, but sliding and teetering into the
cauldron below, where somehow we did not perish, perhaps because we
shot so quickly through the foam. In the beginning I remembered a few
brief and appropriate prayers, from a childhood where such things were a
staff of comfort, and so made my peace with the world each time before
we took the desperate plunge. But as nothing seemed to happen--nothing
fatal, I mean--I presently gave myself up to the pure enjoyment of the
tumult and exhilaration, without disturbing myself as to dangers here or
hereafter.
I do not believe the times that the guides got out of the canoes to ease
them over hard places would exceed twice, and not oftener than that were
we called on to assist them with the paddles. Even when we wished to do
so, we were often requested to go on fishing, for the reason, I suppose,
that in such a place one's unskilled efforts are likely to be
misdirected with fatal results. Somewhat later we were to have an
example of this kind--but I anticipate.
We went on fishing. I never saw so many fish. We could take them as we
shot a rapid, we could scoop them in as we leaped a fall. They seemed to
be under every stone and lying in wait. There were great black fellows
in every maelstrom; there were groups holding receptions for us in the
stillwater pools below. It is likely that that bit of the Shelburne
River had not been fished before within the memory of any trout then
living, and when those red and blue and yellow flies came tumbling at
them, they must have thought it was great day in the morning and that
the white-faced prophets of big feeding had come. For years, the trout
we returned to those pools will tell their friends and descendants of
the marvels and enchantments of that day.
I had given up my noibwood as being too strenuous in its demands for
constant fishing, but I laid aside the light bamboo here in this
high-pressure current and with this high-speed fishing, where trout
sometimes leaped clear of the water for the fly cast on the foam far
ahead, to be swinging a moment later at the end of the line almost as
far behind. No very delicate rod would improve under a strain like that,
and the tough old noibwood held true, and nobody cared--at least I
didn't--whether the tip stayed set or not. It was bent double most of
the time, anyway, and the rest of the time didn't matter.
I don't know how many fish I took that day, but Eddie kept count of his,
and recorded a total of seventy-four between camp and the great,
splendid pool where the Shelburne foams out into Sand Lake, four miles
or such a matter, below.
I do know that we lost two landing nets in that swift water, one apiece,
and this was a serious matter, for there were but two more, both
Eddie's, and landing nets in the wilderness are not easy to replace. Of
fish we kept possibly a dozen, the smallest ones. The others--larger and
wiser now--are still frolicking in the waters of the Shelburne, unless
some fish-hog has found his way to that fine water, which I think
doubtful, for a fish-hog is usually too lazy and too stingy to spend the
effort and time and money necessary to get there.