feet away, for sentinels. _Coup de soleil_ is unknown in Colorado, so I
prefer the sun’s rays to lightning, especially while trees seared from
top to bottom are plentiful in the Park as monitors. To the right is
Prospect Mountain, with its west end a beetling cliff, perhaps two
thousand feet high, where I once had the buck-ague during an interview
with a “big-horn.” To the left and in front, the range, where the
storm-king holds high carnival, while lower down and nearer is a
mountain of towers and pinnacles of brown and red and gray, carved out
by that whimsical sculptor, Old Time. With the sun for my artist, the
range for both his easel and background, I have lounged away many an
hour under one of the old pines. My gaze wandering down the green slope
to the river half a mile away, and with the weird music of the tumbling
waters coming and receding on the summer breeze to help my dreams, we
have together wrought out fantastic ruins and ghostly shapes to people
them. A drifting cloud, perhaps, will change a barbacan to a spire, and
a Doric capital to a Corinthian, or the knight panoplied to a brownie
with a lily for a throne, and
“......jolly satyrs, full of fresh delight,
Come dancing forth, and with them nimbly ledd
Faire Helenore, with girlonds all bespredd,
Whom their May-lady they had newly made;”
to give place again, as the golden meshes weave, to cowled monks or
ladies, fair, as suits the whim of the artist’s patron. Again, the
goblins of the range begin their game of nine-pins, and the fleecy
clouds that have been slowly drifting, drifting all the day, settle down
upon the mountain top and change from white to gray and from gray to
black as the sport grows furious. Something these elves must have to
light up their frolic, and presently it comes in great flashes of wicked
steel-blue and red, zigzaging down the mountain side, or in straight
blinding bolts that rive paths in the hard granite, scattering the loose
rock and shivering the pines, while the noise of the jolly nine-pins
rattles and re-echoes among the crags, and dies away to come again more
quickly, until the mountain-top is a sheet of lurid flame and the din
unceasing, so closely follows peal upon peal. The game is too violent
to last, but the gnomes love to hug the range in their pastime, and I,
understanding the signs, and having no fear of their electric lights,
watch the fast growing rift of azure that crowds hard upon the driving
blackness. At last the mellow rays touch up my mountain ruins, and they
are arrayed in new splendors and peopled with other phantoms.
So I have dreamed, and might go on dreaming, but this time I am brought
back to the green slope and a little figure. The Governor is toiling
up the trail with a quart bucket, his special chattel, from the spring,
whence he volunteered to bring a drink for his mother. I can see no
impediment in his path, yet he stumbles and falls. Would I had been
there to warn him; but the water is spilled. He does not cry, but
gathers himself and his property up, and goes back to begin his task
over again. Just then there came to me pat, an aphorism, I think, of
“Poor Goldsmith”: “True greatness consists not in never falling, but
in rising every time we fall;” and I took it as an omen of good for the
boy.
The time is approaching when we must break camp and go back to the brick
and mortar and the realities of civilization. Duties to be performed
will be undertaken with better zest when I get to them, but I cast
lingering looks toward my mountain ruins as the day of departure draws
nigh. I even have a thought that it would be pleasant to relapse into
barbarism, if out of such as mine our civilization has grown—we might
build up a better. As this may not be, I am encouraged by the thought
that another season will come, and with hope in my heart I am better
prepared for the work awaiting me. I know that I shall go back with a
fresher feeling for my kind, and more charity. So when one September
morning, after a day of gray mist hanging over the range, the wind comes
down chill from the heights, and the morning sun lights up my castles
and pinnacles in diadems of new-fallen snow, I say we must be off. We
gather together our lares of nomadic life, and with a regretful farewell
to those I cannot bring away, we make the journey home, a better man and
woman, with a nut-brown, healthy boy, for much of which I give credit to
the artificial fly, and the beautiful denizens of the mountain streams.
FLY FISHING IN THE YOSEMITE.
By A. Louis Miner, Jr.
A merry party had come for a holiday to the Yosemite, and their camp
was established between the north and south domes near the forks of the
Merced. Toward the east the Tenajo Canon opened, revealing through its
vista of granite crags the highest peak of “Clouds’ Rest,” crowned with
eternal snows. Westward, the Sentinel Rock, like a minaret among the
domes, pierced the sky.
There were seven in the party, including a heathen from the flowery
kingdom, almond-eyed—Ah Yang. His nominal function was to do as he was
bid, and serve as man of all work, but in reality he ruled; and ruled
with a rod of iron. Yang had been induced to come by motives purely
sordid; but the others, aside from seeing the wondrous valley, had
various reasons for making the journey.
The Judge came for relaxation. He needed it. For the last dozen years he
had devoted himself to reading the morning papers, lunching at his club,
and entertaining his friends sumptuously at dinner.
His wife, who, in the levelling atmosphere of camp, came to be styled
the _Judgess_, imagined herself on the verge of a decline, and sought
recuperation in the forest. If the Judgess were described as fat and
forty, omitting the fair, the description would fall far short of truth.
In spite of her ailments, the Judgess would have enjoyed herself in a
way, had it not been for the young woman she was chaperoning. This was
Madge. Certain young men in San Francisco called her a _rattler_,
and certainly there was nothing slow about her. The chief end of her
existence, at home and everywhere, seemed to be the pursuit of fun;
to this end she flirted with anything that came in her way, from stray
herdsmen on the plains to an English baronet at a Yosemite hotel. When
nothing else was at hand, and to the Judgess’ indignation, she flirted
with the Judge. With charming zest she played continued games of poker
with him till his honor’s purse was far thinner than its owner. The
Judge’s admiration for Madge was profound, but after an hour at cards,
he would usually remark, “that girl has the devil in her, _as it were_,
bigger than a wolf.”
It is said that all men have a ruling passion. Be that as it may, a
passion certainly ruled a worthy clergyman of the company. The men of
our generation affected with beetle mania are many, but his Reverence
was absolutely devoted to bugs. The Judgess, a zealot to such a degree
that Mary of England was but lukewarm in comparison, said that his
Reverence valued a butterfly more than a human soul; and Madge
insisted that, while he pretended to read his office, he was engaged in
dissecting a coleoptera or something.
The Doctor, who was Madge’s unworthy brother, had come with the avowed
intention of sketching. All the long way from San Francisco he had been
at work with brushes and blotting paper. Often the “prairie schooner,”
in which the party travelled, had “lain to” while the Doctor washed in
patches of blue and white to represent cloud-effects, or a jagged gray
band against streaks of orange, portraying sunrise in the Sierras.
The last member of the party without professional distinction, and
familiarly called “Jack,” had also a _penchant_, though many years had
passed since it had been gratified. When they had left the San Joaquin
plain and its sluggish rivers oozing their way through mud and reeds,
and had climbed into the mountain, a halt was made in a deep canon. Here
was a stream indeed. How blithely it danced along, eager to find the
Golden Gate and the Pacific! How it sang to Jack of fellow streams near
the other ocean! How it whispered of trout streams ahead! Presently a
long-cherished fly book was produced and Jack was poring over it. His
Reverence, attracted by the little volume, looked over Jack’s shoulder.
He was entranced. A volume of ecclesiastical Latin would not have
interested him half so much. He began to criticise and expound. Some
were perfect. Some were caricatures of diptera. The other members of the
party drew around. “Pooh!” said the Doctor, “I hope you don’t expect to
catch any trout with those things in Yosemite! Everybody knows that the
Merced trout don’t take the fly.” The Doctor went on to say, “that with
a common string, such as any grocer would use to tie up a package of
tea, a good strong hook, and a worm,” he would catch in the same time,
more fish than could all the sportsmen of California, fishing with fancy
flies.
The Doctor, like most cynics, was somewhat given to hyperbole.
During the remainder of the journey into the valley, Jack felt himself
regarded as the victim of a mild hallucination.
The Doctor could sketch; beetles were awaiting his Reverence’s
microscope; flirtation and frolic were dawning on Madge’s horizon; even
the Judge and Judgess could get rid of a stone or two avoirdupois if
they tried; but poor Jack had come, it appeared, to fish, and there
were no fish to catch, or at least to catch with a fly. Such was the
tradition, and so the Doctor had asserted, and no one ever disputed the
Doctor excepting Yang, the Chinaman.
Our friends had been revelling in the enchantments of the valley a week;
had climbed the trails that crept zig-zag up the dizzy heights; had
spent hours among the soft mist and rainbows at the first landing of
that wonder of the world, the Yosemite Falls; and still Jack had not
accomplished the cherished desire of his heart. He had not the moral
courage to take from its swaddling clothes his beloved rod (which the
Doctor would persist in calling “your fish-pole”). Never had he so
longed to cast a fly; but he thought, of the teasing Madge and waited.
At best, he was but a poor male creature. Madge, in his place, would
have been whipping the stream, with defiance and determination, an hour
after her arrival.
His Reverence and the Doctor had arranged to ascend Clouds’ Rest on a
Thursday and return next day. Early Thursday morning, before Yang or the
birds were stirring, Jack sauntered forth to his morning bath in the
icy waters of the river. This Rio, de la Merced, would it prove to
him indeed a _river of mercy_, or a river of humiliation? But what
a glorious stream it was! Here it glided through wooded banks, the
opposite side black in the shadow of overhanging manzanita, while nearer
the rippling waters were checkered with the shadows of the cotton-wood
leaves, trembling in the growing light. Further on, the river whirled
and eddied around great boulders, resting among the mossy rocks in deep,
dark pools, bordered with fern and flecked with patches of lace-like
foam. Further still, it wound silently through the sedges, reflecting on
its glassy surface the storaied-carved Cathedral Rocks, or the huge mass
of El Capitan. Here was an ideal trout stream, but were there trout in
it! No doubt, for the Doctor had taken his grocers’ string and a worm
and a veritable pole, and after a day’s tramp had returned to camp wet,
hungry, in a sulphurous mood, but with four unmistakable trout. These,
served up the next morning, were appropriated by the Judgess, and made
an excellent appetizer to more abundant bacon and flap-jacks.
Jack had reached that pearl of waters, the Mirror Lake, and was watching
the marvellous beauties pictured on its bosom, when suddenly there was
a soft plash, the sleeping depths were troubled, a circling ripple crept
toward him, and Jack’s pulses bounded. A trout had risen!
Through the dewy chaparral and the fragrant whispering pines, our friend
hurried back to camp in a fever of impatience. He tried to help Yang
with breakfast, but was told by that dignitary to “giv’ us a rest,” and
so humbly retired. He then waked his Reverence. He wakened the Doctor
and was greeted by language far from complimentary. He aroused the
Judgess, and was pierced with daggers from her eyes while she hurriedly
adjusted her teeth.
After breakfast more torturing delays, the Judgess declined to join the
mountain party. The others must not think that she feared to ride the
mules, for she adored mountain climbing, and the exercise and all that.
(This was a dreadful fib, which was probably made use of at her
next confession.) Both the Judge and herself were pining for a few
refinements of life at the hotel. Without napkins and finger-bowls, life
became a burden. The poor Judge had to acquiesce and said: “She wants
a little civilization _as it were_.” Then Jack rebelled. There was a
general confusion, in the midst of which Yang began to fire his pistol.
This pistol was the idol of his pagan soul, and his frequent salutes the
terror of the party. No one dared to interfere. At this time the volley
was continued and promiscuous. The Judgess screamed, and having no
immediate revenge in the shape of ill-cooked dinners to fear, sharply
expostulated. Thereupon Yang, with utmost _sang froid_, told her to
“shut your head” and journey to regions he had probably heard the Doctor
name. This was too much. The Judgess climbed into the wagon and stated
her opinion of people who permitted such “goings on” and of a priest
who allowed a Christian woman to be sworn at. Madge was convulsed with
laughter, even his Reverence smiled, while the Judge, poor man, looking
as if every brewery on the continent had been burned, snapped his whip,
and the wagon was lost to sight beneath the arching sequoias.
It was high noon when the sure-footed mules had arrived and the party
fairly started off. Jack waved an adieu with one hand, and with the
other reached down his rod from the branches of a live oak. Yang
proceeded to dissect a sucker he had caught for bait, saying: “If you
fishee, me fishee too, but j’ou no sabee nothing.”
Later in the afternoon Jack stood on the grassy point where the lake
narrows into the river. He had adjusted his flies, and everything was
in readiness. He paused to watch Yang, who was stationed below on the
river, fasten a cubic inch of sucker to his hook, expectorate upon it,
turn around three times, and fling it with a tremendous splash into
the water. Whether these performances were the result of Oriental
superstition, or whether the Chinaman imitated some American example, he
did not stop to consider. His long unpractised hand, trembling a little
now, had sent the flies far out beneath the shadows of some willows.
Another cast was made, and then another. At the fourth there was a rise,
and the fish was hooked. The struggle was short but spirited. Yang,
abandoning his primitive tackle, was ready with the landing-net, and the
fish was killed. As the sport continued, Jack grew calmer, while Yang’s
excitement increased. He trembled as if the ague were upon him. His
stoicism was laid aside. He laughed, jabbered, and Jack was obliged to
address him as the Chinaman had addressed the Judgess. Yang begged to
try the rod, and by reason of his imitative faculties might have made
good use of it, but he had to content himself with the net.
At last the lengthening shadows deepened into twilight, and the
gathering darkness put an end to the sport. The great dome of Mt.
Watkins, inverted in the motionless water, had changed from gold
to crimson, and from crimson to violet; they paid no heed until the
reflection faded, then, looking up, the real mountain, circled by rising
mists, seemed to float in the darkening sky, and Jack, with that feeling
of perfect content and peace which kings can never know unless they are
anglers, stowed away his flies, unjointed his rod, while Yang shouldered
the catch.
It was a happy couple that went down the Tenajo canon that evening. The
moon smiled upon them; an owl hooted enviously; Jack softly whistled
a strain from Schubert, while Yang made the towering rocks echo and
re-echo to the joyous banging of the pistol.
The fish were dressed, supper eaten, Yang’s tin dishes washed, and
everything was snug for the night. Jack, stretched beneath a giant
pine and smoking his evening pipe, was watching the weird play of the
firelight in the canopy of foliage above. The Celestial appeared.
“Me heap lonesome, got no more cartridges; you no care; go down hotel
stay Chinaboy to-night.”
Unselfish, devoted, and charitable as Yang claimed to be, he could
hardly pretend to heroism. The Chinaman was permitted to go, and Jack,
appropriating the Judgess’ hammock, turned in. This hammock owed Jack a
lodging. All the way across the plains, and up the mountains, and in the
valley, that hammock had almost nightly collapsed. Perhaps the Judge did
not know how to tie a knot; perhaps the ample physique of the Judgess
was too much for any knot, but the thing kept occurring, to the great
discomfiture of the Judgess and all the rest of the party. As Jack, with
his feet at the fire, and his head on a sack of barley, lay studying
the midnight heavens, there would come a shock as of an earthquake. The
Judge was a little deaf and after a night or two of experience,
would lie just beyond reach of whatever member his better half could
disentangle with which to punch him. First, his Reverence would be
summoned; but he slept the sleep of the just. Then cries for Ah Yang and
the others would follow. Yang was too wise a Chinaman to awaken. Jack
sometimes rolled over and kicked the Doctor till he roused, and the good
lady hearing his exclamations, claimed his assistance; but sometimes
Jack also shed his blankets and relieved the massive limbs from a state
of suspension.
With content Jack rolled himself in the hammock. Never had he slept in
such profound solitude. The nearest camp was far away down the valley;
and towards the east, beyond the mountain-barrier, nothing but the wild
desert, and solitary, sage-clad hills of Nevada.
The river murmured over the pebbles, the pines faintly whispered, and
that was all. For once he was alone, and oh! the peace of it! Was it
such a night as this that tempted men to leave their fellows for a
hermitage? Such visions came to him as seldom visit men beneath a roof.
At last he slept, and dreamed of the first trout he had killed in a
little New England meadow-brook. He was filling a creel with bass from a
fair Wisconsin lake. He was in a plunger off Montauk Point, striking the
blue-fish. He was trolling for pike through Champlain, and casting a fly
from a canoe on Adirondack waters.
The South Dome was glowing in the ruddy morning light; a flock of
blackbirds were piping cheerily; an odor of fried trout and coffee was
in the air, and Yang was tugging at the blankets, and saying:
“Come, you heap laze, bleakfast all leddy. Git up!”
What a dinner Yang and Jack had in readiness for the party that night!
The Judge and spouse, after much pressing, had come. The lady could not
withstand the trout, especially on a Friday. The judicial pair arrived
just as Madge and his Reverence raced into camp on the sturdy mules.
The Doctor and guide followed. Madge’s cheeks were glowing, her eyes
sparkling, and her tongue rattling, as she leaped from her saddle. “Such
a time as they had had! His Reverence had been a duck, and the Doctor
for once had behaved himself and kept civil.” She gave her hand to the
Judgess, but kissed the Judge.
At Yang’s summons, a jovial company sat down to such a table as campers
in the Sierras seldom see. Madge was in ecstasies, and even the Judgess
expressed approval. There was real damask upon it, with napkins and
silver forks and wine from the hotel, with all sorts of garnitures of
Yang’s contrivance.
The dinner began, continued, and ended with fish; but fish cooked in
every way which Oriental imagination could devise, and camp facilities
permit. Even “Simpson’s Fish Dinner,” of seven courses, in Billingsgate,
could not surpass it. The Judgess, having disposed of about a dozen
fish, remarked that, after all, these were _only_ California trout, and
entirely lacked the flavor, as they lacked the beauty, of their Eastern
cousins. She thought, however, that Yang’s salad—of cresses from the
Merced—was not bad; but wine—even if it was champagne—when sipped
from a tin cup, left much to be desired. Alas! Jack had forgotten to
borrow the glasses.
All that evening, around the camp-fire, the party listened to an
account of the catch. The Doctor did not hesitate to express his entire
disbelief in the story. It was his opinion that Jack had hired the
Indians to fish for him, and bribed Yang to hold his tongue. Then Yang
spoke:
“You think you heap smart. Jack heap sabee how fish, and you no sabee,
but me sabee you. Last Fliday you go fish, and when me water horse, see
Injun sellee you fish. I sabee _you_.”
In the peals of laughter which followed, the Doctor went away to his
blankets muttering. So the trout the Judgess had enjoyed a week before
were not the Doctor’s catching, after all.
A week longer the party lingered in the valley. Madge and his Reverence
became quite expert with the fly. The lake seemed to have yielded all
its finny treasures to Jack, but the Merced afforded ample sport. Many
strings of trout were sent to fellow-campers, and to friends at the
hotel; and one little hamper made the long journey by stage and rail to
San Francisco.
The “trout-camp” became famous in the valley, and paragraphs noticing
the catch appeared in the _Stockton Independent_, and even in the
_Sacramento Bee_. Jack had accomplished his purpose, and had not come to
the Yosemite in vain.
Then the prairie schooner sailed away through the mountains, Madge and
his Reverence driving by turns, while the Judge held his ponderous foot
on the brake. Yang was mounted on a mustang, while the doctor and Jack
trudged through the dust. Frequent halts were made, the Judgess taking
her noon-day siesta; the “three fishers,” as she called Madge, his
Reverence and Jack, striking out for some neighboring stream. Near the
Tuolumne big trees his Reverence took the largest trout of the trip—a
four-pounder. On the Tuolumne Biver the three met with fair success; but
on the upper waters of the Stanislaus the sport was better. They tarried
by the stream winding through that dead little mining town, Big Oak
Flat. The banks of the little river were honey-combed by the old placer
mining. The population of the Flat wondered to see Madge cast a fly.
Even the Chinamen who were still washing for gold, would throw aside
their cradles and pans to gaze.
An ancient beau of the town stranded there fifteen years ago (such a man
as Bret Harte would have gloried in), became so enamored with the fair
angler that he would have followed in her wake; but the fickle object
of his admiration eluded her admirer, and the miner sadly headed his
mustang toward his mountain home, promising to call “next time he went
to ’Frisco.” The schooner dropped anchor in Oakland. The Judge asked all
to dine with him that day week—“a sort of a re-union, _as it were_, you
know.” His Reverence hastened to don something more in keeping with his
cloth than a blue shirt; Madge threw a kiss to Jack as the Doctor handed
her into a carriage; and Jack was left to cross the ferry alone. Yang,
however, had not abandoned him. He produced a piece of red paper and
asked Jack to write his address upon it.
“I hab one fliend who come get your washee Monday.”
Jack, inured to submission, could not refuse, and Yang’s “fliend” still
does his “washee.”
Since the Yosemite excursion Jack has trailed salmon flies on the
noble Columbia River, and whipped the California trout streams from the
cactus-covered plains of the Mexican border to the glaciers of Mount
Shasta, but he has never had such keen enjoyment with the fly as on that
afternoon at Mirror Lake.
When he arranges his tackle for a little holiday sport on the Russian
River, or the streams among the red woods of Santa Cruz, he sees again
the reflected fir-trees and granite dome trembling in the water as the
trout leap to his fly; he again hears Yang’s ejaculations and commands.
“Fifty-sleven, Jack. Hi! that big fish; fifty-eight. You _heap_
sabee. Hold him tight.’Rusalem, him sabee how swim! Pull like hella,
fifty-nine!”
“Trout take some flies because they resemble the real fly on which they
feed. They take other flies for no such reason.”—_W. C. Prime._
“The oft-repeated quotation, ‘Spare the rod and spoil the child,’ has
been misconstrued for many a long day, and if I had known early in
life its real significance it would hardly have made so doleful an
impression. There is no doubt to-day in my mind that this ‘rod’ meant a
_fishing-rod_, and the timely cherishing of it in youth tends to
develop the portion of one’s nature to which the former use was entirely
innocent.”—_Thomas Sedgwick Steele._
“My favorite fly of all is a snipe feather and mouse body.”—“_Frank
Forester_.”
[Illustration: 0178]
31. Cinnamon.
32. Deerfly.
33. Red Fox.
34. Camlet Dun.
35. Governor.
36. Green Drake.
37. Alder.
38. Cheney.