“_bon jour_-ed” the guides, and then the hat was lifted respectfully
and a lanky figure of a man arose to his feet and stood wobbling. The
guides tried to keep the boat steady, but he lurched at the dock and
slopped over. His forefoot went into some quite wet lake which we
kept there—Canadian canoes aren’t meant for doing the tango. Walter
and I snitched as one man at him, and yanked him landward, but in the
enthusiasm of salvage his eye-glasses jumped him, and according to
the law of gravity made for a crack in the dock. And somebody—said to
be me—knocked off his lid. It took to the deep and bobbed away riding
a wave, and Auguste, the guide, had to _depêche_ like sin to fish it
in with a paddle. It was an eventful landing for that sandy-haired
youth, as we discovered him to be on the escape of the hat. He
squished water sorrowfully out of the yellowest low shoes I ever saw,
and you couldn’t cheer him even when I set his crown back on him and
picked up his glasses. He just pulled off his hat promptly and gazed
at it like an anxious mother and squished more lake out of his yellow
foot, and clucked softly—I don’t know how to spell the noise, but it
was a kind of a regretful cluck. Finally he got his glasses rubbed
and his hat wiped, and Walter and I volubly offered him dozens of
shoes, though I knew we’d have to short-come on the color. With the
most exquisite courtesy we walked him up-stairs over the muddy little
precipice of a trail to the camp, and sat him in the red rocker,
and offered him whiskey. But he wouldn’t. Heavings, Maud! No. Not
for him. So we fed him Jamaica ginger and hot water, which I prefer
myself, if there’s sugar in it. And behold! he smiled like a split in
a potato and arrived at the next station.
“I beg you will pardon me, Judge Morgan. I have been disturbed a
little by these unfortunate accidents. I have forgotten to explain
my presence in your hospitable camp. My name is Spafford. I am head
clerk in the office of Bush, Engelhardt & Clarkson. I come from Mr.
Engelhardt, Judge Morgan.”
“Huh!” grunted Walter in a sweet way he has, like a cross codfish.
The sandy one looked bewildered. “Mr. Engelhardt,” he emphasized,
“the chairman of the State committee. I mean _that_ Mr. Engelhardt,”
and he paused to give Walter a chance to whoop for joy. Walter not
whooping, he trotted along glibly: “The convention which is to
nominate the candidate for governor is on the eighteenth, and Mr.
Engelhardt decided yesterday that it would be best that you should
be there. You know, of course, Judge, that you are likely to be
nominated?”
“Huh!” remarked Walter again, making awful faces, biting his cigar.
“Yes, sir.” Mr. Spafford answered that sound with firm politeness.
“Mr. Engelhardt thinks it best.” And that to Mr. Spafford seemed to
be final. “To-day is the 14th. If you take the train with me from
the club to-morrow night at eight, leaving from Quebec the next
morning, we will reach headquarters on the 17th, the day before the
convention. Mr. Engelhardt and I planned it out,” and he smiled that
split-rock smile again.
For the third time Walter got off that insulting “Huh!” And then in a
flash there spread over his face a thick layer of a peculiar sirupy
smile, which I knew to mean an attack of pig-headedness.
“I’m afraid I shall not be able to join you on the journey, Mr.
Spafford,” he cooed.
Mr. Spafford looked flabbergasted. He simply didn’t know the
repartee. That anybody should disobey Mr. Engelhardt seemed one form
of insanity. But here was a human being playing fast and loose with
the nomination for governor—that was a form even more awful. His pale
eyes popped till you could have knocked them off with a stick.
“Are you ill, sir?” he exploded finally.
“Oh, no—not ill, Mr. Spafford,” Walter answered gently. “But I’m
going fishing.”
The cigar which Walter had fed him dropped splib on the floor, and
the lower half of his mouth nearly joined it. “Fishing!” he gasped.
“Fishing! But—but,” hope dawned. Maybe Walter was absent-minded or
deaf or something—he surely hadn’t understood. “Judge Morgan,” he
began in a first-reader effect, “it—is—the—nomination—for—GOVERNOR.”
He got into capitals at that point. “Mr. Engelhardt—the
Chairman—of—the—State—”
Walter headed him off. “I know—I grasp,” he interrupted softly.
“I would like to be nominated for governor very much, but there’s
a big trout, Mr. Spafford—are you a fisherman, Mr. Spafford?” he
interrupted himself in dulcet tones.
“No.” The stunned one stared.
“Ah! then you can’t really quite understand. I’m so sorry to
disappoint Mr. Engelhardt if he wants me, but you see it’s this way.”
He proceeded to explain elaborately, as if in court, the situation
to that dumfounded youth. Walter showed him carefully how the fish
wouldn’t bite of a morning, and so the first time he could take this
one would be the next afternoon. He pointed out that he’d been after
this fish off and on all summer, and how big he was, and how one
could see that it would be out of the question to leave before he
killed him. This and more—details about flies and low water and such
things.
When he got through, the head clerk of Bush, Engelhardt & Clarkson
didn’t know what he possibly could be talking about. Then a bright
idea struck him. Walter was a practical joker—and with that we got
the privilege of hearing Mr. Spafford laugh. It wasn’t dead merry
laughter; it sounded like a rapid-fire Christmas horn gone rusty. “I
see,” he arrested the flow of it to explain. “You are jesting.” And
with that I butted in.
“Not on your life, he isn’t,” I stated. “But it’s too blamed bad.
Walter, don’t go and do such a perfectly rotten—” and at that point
Walter’s eyes flashed fire, and I stopped hurriedly.
But I didn’t give in for all that. I can get him to do things
sometimes when most people can’t, and I was bound to try this time.
So that night, after we’d tucked up the Spafford blossom in his downy
guest-tent—and he was horrid nervous about beasts and spiders—I went
into Walter’s camp and reasoned with the Judge. I pointed out things
which are obvious to the intelligence of a frog, and after a while I
got him to shed his sirupy smile and talk sense.
“I’m not keen about being at the convention, Bob,” he explained. “If
the nomination comes of itself I’ll be delighted, but I’m not the
build to roll logs and keep my dignity. And I don’t care to be led
down on a leash by that young fool. I don’t know what Engelhardt
means by sending me such an infernal puppy.”
“Ought not to talk that way before a boy like me, Walter,” I
remonstrated. And then reminded him that Mr. Spafford meant awfully
well, and that it was his proud boast that he’d been sent because of
his reputation for persistence.
“Persistence—heavenly powers!” Walter groaned. “I should say he was
persistent. Like a terrier this whole evening. Made camp a hell. I’m
so relieved to get him to bed that I could yell for joy.”
Back I went to the point. I saw he was only reluctant to go out,
not dead set against it, and I thought Mr. Engelhardt could likely
judge better than he could. I asked him, and he said yes, likely, and
that it was no harm to be there for the convention, only—he didn’t
feel like it. And he felt amazingly like taking that trout. Well, I
managed a compromise. It was agreed that we should break camp next
morning, and go down ahead of the guides early in the afternoon to
the Golden Pool, he and I and Mr. Spafford, and there Walter should
fish till it was time to go on to the club to catch the train. If he
could corral the sockdologer before that psychological moment, well
and good. If not—well, he wouldn’t promise, but I had a hunch that if
we were all packed up he’d go on. Anyhow it was the best I could do.
So I took Mr. Spafford aside next morning and stated the case, with
a rosy glow over possibilities; and I warned him politely not to nag
at Walter or he’d break for the North Pole, and never be governor or
anything else but a frozen corpse.
Next morning we were busy little housewives, bundling our earthly
alls into the big canvas mail-bags which are our camp trunks. The
guides were flying back and forth, and everybody was bubbling French,
and lots doing. And in the middle of it the poor Spafford waif clung
to the red rocking-chair, with the straw hat on his head, lost in
wonder. He couldn’t comprehend why people who might live in houses
with rugs on the floor, and lace curtains and upholstered chairs
should choose to do this. I saw him stare at a three-inch hole in my
left trouser, where my complexion showed through, and then lift his
wondering eyes to my gray flannel shirt, with much mountain wiped
upon it, and a red cotton bandanna decorating the neck of it—he
couldn’t see through the game. You have to be born to it, or you
can’t.
We got off about two, Walter and I paddling, and Spiff in the middle,
in the hat. We left all the guides to shut up camp and bring on
the “_butin_.” We paddled two miles down the lake, and then into
the river among the rocks—it was low water and you had to know the
channel. We shot a little rapids, and the flower of civilization
was scared blue, but we made the portage, and there I flopped the
canoe on my head and walked off, and Walter guided the steps of the
stranger. It’s only a mile down the portage to the Pool, so we got
there an hour after leaving camp, and Walter at once paid no more
attention to anybody. He began to put up his Leonard rod as if it
were a religious ceremony; he does it that way. He had his leader
ready, and I saw him meditate on the flies, and then open his fly-box
and look it over thoughtfully to see if there was anything more
seductive to the troutly mind. I remember that cast; it was a Jock
Scott for hand-fly, a Silver Doctor in the middle, and a Montreal
tail-fly. That’s the way he started. Afterward he changed the Silver
Doctor for a brown hackle—it was a brightish day. The minute he began
to string the rod, it came to me that we’d forgotten the landing-net.
That was ghastly when we were out for big fish, but it was much too
far to go back, and I knew the guides would have it, and so I hoped
the giant wouldn’t get on, and Walter wouldn’t notice about the net
till the guides got there. And I kept mum, not to fuss the fisherman.
The Golden Pool was named that because it is. In September, when we
fish there most, the leaves around it have turned yellow, and yellow
only, for we’re too far north for red foliage, and it’s all in a bath
of gold light. It’s a widening in the river about a hundred yards
across, and a lot of it is shallow, so, of a bright afternoon, the
tawny-colored sand-bars show through. And all around the shore are
tall birches which lean over, and their thin leaves are gold-shot,
and the sun glitters through them. There are alders close to the
water, and these are frost-touched too, and the stream rushes in
over a steep rapids at a gorge between alder walls. It tumbles
flashing around rocks in tier on tier of champagne whiteness, with
sherry-colored slides of smooth water, and in the deep holes it’s
the gold-brown of brandy. Flecks of foam whirl over the surface, and
under the bushes at the edge lie feathery hunks of it like piles
of whipped cream a foot square. As you get to the place from the
shadow and quiet of the woods, you seem to have come into a shower of
glancing light and movement and excitement. You breathe in autumn and
energy sharply. Yet it’s all as still and remote as the big shadows
on the mountains. That’s the Golden Pool, and that’s where we got,
the afternoon of September 15, when my brother squatted on the rocks,
and put up and strung his rod.
The reel sang as the first line ran, and the snells fell stiff and
curly—but not over the hole—trust Walter not to stir up that hole
till he was ready for business. In two or three casts the snells were
wet, and the flies spun out on the brown, foam-spotted water. And
then Walter cast carefully at the edge of the real fishing-ground.
Along the left-hand side of the Pool the bottom is all big rocks, and
in between are deep, cold holes, and there the big trout lie—never
many, yet every year two or three good ones are taken by the few
who know the secret, from a place about twenty feet square. It’s
ticklish fishing, for there are sharp edges to the rocks for an
educated fish to dodge under, and more than once a leader has been
cut in two by a jerk from a fish that knew his business; and many’s
the fly yanked off around those edges. So it’s skill against skill,
man with his clumsy inventions against trout with his exquisite
instinct—human brains out of their element against trout cleverness
in its stronghold. That’s the way it is when you go fishing in the
Golden Pool.
Walter cast his prettiest from the first, and that’s very pretty
casting indeed. The dim-colored Jock Scott danced delicately toward
us as he lifted the tip of the rod, hardly touching the surface; the
Silver Doctor just wet its bluish, silverish wings, and the Montreal,
with its streak of purple-red, dragged a bit in the water; big trout
are more likely to take a fly underneath than to jump for it. It
was all done in regulation form, slow recover, wrist motion only,
sidewise jiggle as the flies came in, a lengthening line covering the
hole slowly from side to side. Close back of us was the forest, with
just a few yards of big rocks and low bushes for clear space; the
recover, you’ll see, was a critical business. It was mighty easy to
catch a fly in one of those alders or on a fringe of tree, but Walter
didn’t catch once. He’s a shark at the job. However, it was too
early; the sun was too strong; nothing doing. So, after half an hour
of exhibition casting:
“Take me across, Bob,” said Walter, his eyes still fast on the Pool.
So I slid the canoe in, away off one side, awfully cautiously so no
ripple would disturb the sacred and holy twenty feet square. And
Walter stepped in the bow, and I slid the paddle into the water
without a splash, and in two or three careful strokes I had him over
at the farther side of the pond, well away, but yet within casting
distance of the hole. “Zip” went the reel, with the businesslike,
sharp, soft sound which means it’s well oiled and well wound and well
managed. It’s a joy to hear Walter’s reel. Out flew the nine-foot
line of light which was the leader, and over the brown water danced
three spots of color which were the flies. And then I saw Walter’s
fist jerk back about two inches, hard, and my eyes jumped to the
leader, and the hand-fly was taut, and there was a bunch of white
foam where it should have been, and a great bubbling of water, and
the Silver Doctor and the Montreal were floating loose, and the
kicking and bubbling and struggling were stronger each second. A fish
was on the Jock Scott, and Walter had hooked him. I watched about
thirty seconds with my heart in my mouth, and then I knew it wasn’t
what we were after. And with that Walter gave his pretty grunt.
“Huh!” he said, and began to reel in, casual-like.
“Smoll feesh?” I asked, as Blanc talks English.
“Yes, the little cuss,” Walter murmured, and yanked up alongside the
boat a three-quarter-pound trout.
“Want to keep him?”
“Heavens, no!” said Walter with contempt.
So I laid the paddle in the boat, and wet my hands in the stream,
because if you don’t do that your touch will take off the overcoat
of slime that’s necessary to a fish’s life, and he’ll die. If I’d
wanted to keep that fish I couldn’t have landed him without a net.
He was hooked by just a thread in the upper part of the mouth. But I
got the hook out gingerly, and presented him with the freedom of the
pool, and he slid off with no remarks. He lived all right. Then big
brother proceeded to disgust himself and me by taking rapidly, one
after another, five half and quarter pounders. I threw them all in,
and, seeing we were too popular with the small game, we moseyed back
to the rocks.
Meanwhile, all this time the outcast from civilization was sitting
on my sweater on a rock, gazing in wonder at the lunatics. If it
hadn’t been for the infallible Mr. Engelhardt, I’ll bet he’d have
shaken Walter as no fit thing for governor, but as Mr. Engelhardt
said he was, why, he was. Somehow, because the chairman of the State
committee ruled the cosmos, and said so, Walter had to be nominated.
So he sat, and just wondered. I thought I’d try to open a dark side
of life to his vision—be a missionary, as it were. Walter had brought
the rod-case, and I dug out an old fly-rod and strung it, and put
on a leader and three flamboyant flies—a Scarlet Ibis, and a Grisly
King, and a White Moth—regular flag effect. Then I charmed him
with kind words to follow me down the pool a way, and he followed,
lamentably complaining. He fell into holes. At last I got him where
he couldn’t hurt the fishing, and I showed him how not to hook the
tree tops, and how to work the automatic reel, and then I put the rod
in his virgin hands and said, “Fire away.”
For about three casts he was doing it to oblige me. Then an infant
trout, out of an asylum for feeble-minded orphan fish, jumped at
the Ibis and hooked himself enthusiastically. And I took it off and
showed it to Mr. Spafford—his first trout! And you wouldn’t believe
what a hurry he was in to cast again. It sure was funny. But that’s
the magic of the game. The primmest of humans aren’t proof against
the lure of fishing when they take something. So he took another, and
he was a figure of fun, standing on a rock in that wild place in his
store clothes, gleaming at head and foot with brightness of straw and
leather, prancing with excitement, and casting very fast. I showed
him points, and he began to catch on, but he threw a fit when he
hooked the Grisly King to a spruce-tree, and I had to climb for it.
“If you could go faster, Mr. Morgan, I’d be obliged,” he panted.
“There’s a large trout in the pool which I can see, and I want to
catch it.” And then a frank groan: “Oh, mercy, _do_ hurry!”
So I yanked the fly off the branch and slid, and he was casting
before I struck _terra cotta_.
About then I began to be conscious that time was passing. I looked,
and it was 4.30; the guides might be along any minute and we’d have
to go on our winding way in half an hour if we caught the train.
I glanced across at Walter. He was changing a fly. He put a Brown
Hackle in place of the Silver Doctor. He sent two or three short
casts, letting out line, and the reel whirred sharp above the
gurgling of the rapids. Then he loosed a reckless handful of line
on the butt, and his wrist went back, and the flies sailed high and
forward and floated out over the pool and touched without a sound—the
Montreal under water, the Hackle skimming, the Jock Scott an inch
over the surface. A corking cast, over sixty feet, I reckon.
Suddenly there was a swirl, and the Montreal went under deep, with a
steady old he-pull. No mistaking that taking of the fly—it was a big
trout. Sometimes a huge catfish will make you think he’s a trout, but
you can’t ever mix a trout of large calibre with a catfish. It isn’t
done.
I saw the swirl and pull, and I leaped into the woods and heard my
scholar fisherman wailing as I fled. I knew that Walter had on the
whale, and the thought of the landing-net minus made me sick. I
crashed through till I got back of Walter; then I called just a word:
“Go slow till I get the net,” and up the trail I bolted to meet the
guides.
Right where the Green Velvet Brook comes in I met them; we call
it that because there are yards of flat rocks each side of solid
emerald-colored moss. Zoëtique was prostrate on his lungs with his
face in the drink; Blanc was dipping it up in his hat; the others
were lighting pipes; my eyes lit on the four-foot handle of the net,
and with that I lit on it. I grabbed it without breaking the stride,
and was loping back down the trail, and not a word said. Those men
were surprised—the tail of my eye saw that. I took the portage at a
hand gallop, and slowed down twenty feet behind the pool, and crawled
out over the rocks to Walter.
“The net is here,” I gasped at him, and Walter didn’t throw me a
syllable, but I knew he heard and would be civil when he got time.
The brute was sulking. Down in the rocks—blamed dangerous trick. It
was all uneven on the bottom, and the rocks were big, and there were
deepish holes, and if he could get the leader across a rough edge and
yank, or if Walter pulled a bit too hard, he could cut the leader and
be off in a second. He knew it too—he was an educated person, that
trout. Wherefore it behooved Walter to fish like an archangel.
He didn’t look the part, being screwed into a wuzzle behind his
gleaming glasses, but if pretty is as pretty does, he was a beauty.
He held Mr. Sockdologer on a short line, just feeling him, and giving
him a tiny lift now and then to keep the game going. Exactly the
right amount, that’s why fishing is hard; you have to do it right
to a hair’s breadth, which is instinct. You acquire it by patient
years of losing fish. So the candidate for governor, huddled in a
brown lump, sat on an inconvenient-shaped rock and held himself there
by one boot planted in the water, and didn’t give a hang for the
governorship or the discomfort—those qualifications also go with a
fisherman.
I lay along a chosen log six feet back, and watched the battle. And
pretty soon I was aware of shapes that melted out of the trees, and
it was the guides. They slid together back of me like a group of
fauns or other woods creatures only half human, in the shadows, and
there wasn’t a sound from them, but a wreath of blue air floated
forward in a minute, and I got the dim odor of Canadian tobacco. That
odor always seems to me just one remove from leaf-mould and growing
ferns and spruce-needles and other forest-speaking smells. So there
we all watched, while Walter fought the fight.
And around the corner of the pool, out of mischief, Mr. Spafford, mad
with excitement, fished his first fish with squeals of rapture and of
agony. I couldn’t see him, but I could follow the plot by the noises
he made, and I had to chuckle, in spite of the real job on hand.
First there’d be an “Oh!” high and sharp, of excitement and hope—a
trout was on; then an “O—O—Oh!” deep and mournful—he’d lost him. Then
he’d adjure them.
“Come, little fishy,” said he; “nice fly—jump for fly, little fishy,”
as unconscious as a kitten, and as lost in the game. And pretty soon
I heard the men behind me giggling softly, and as I squinted up they
were shaking _en masse_, and trying to see the débutant Izaak Walton
around the trees.
About then, out of the hidden deeps the whale suddenly rose right at
the rod, coming with a smooth velocity that was terrific. The tip
went up, and the reel ate line; the line kept taut. But it was a
miracle that did it, and if the beast had got an inch of slack he’d
have shaken loose; he knew his job, the trout. And the next second
the reel screamed, and off he went like a cannon-ball, out and out
and out, tearing down the stream, and Walter had the rod straight
forward, lowered almost to the water, giving him line by the yard. It
was a tremendous rush, and I tell you I was proud of Walter. That
minute and the next two or three were the most superb fishing-show
I ever had the luck to be in at. For no sooner had the beast run
like mad for sixty feet straight from us, than he whirled as chain
lightning, and scooted for us, licketty-split. I thought that settled
it; no human could manage a line at that angle, I thought. I heard
Zoëtique gasp softly back of me:
“_Mais, bon Dieu, c’est fini!_”
But it wasn’t “fini.” Up flew the tip of the rod; Walter was turning
the reel rapidly, and the line was ripping in without a sag, without
a jerk—I never saw the equal of it. That, if you please, sir, is
fishing. Also it was lightning. Quick! Heavings! It discouraged old
man whale. Down he went into the rocks again, sulking, and I knew
Walter would rather have him do rushes than that, for there’s nothing
so anxious in all fishery. You can’t ever tell what minute’s going to
be an earthquake, and you don’t know what jagged edges he’s got down
there to jerk himself across, and you don’t dare pull him, and you
don’t dare hold him easy. It’s all guesswork, and mighty dangerous.
Moreover, for a hole, the hole was shallow, and you had less leeway
with the line, and a mistake in gauging the depths would be fatal
quicker than in deep water. So Walter had a handful and a brainful.
Into that breathless situation reverberated a roar. “Oh, Mr. Morgan!
_Oh_, Judge! Oh, Mr. Morgan—come and get ME. I—want—to—go! It’s five
o’clock! Come, and get ME! It’s five o’—”