While in this camp my wife and I thought one day it would be fine to take an outing together, so the ambulance was ordered and she and our little baby girl and nurse girl and myself and the driver made up the party. We crossed the west fork of the Rio Grande and went up the valley for some distance. The west fork is smaller than the main stream, with many pools and little rapids and hugs close to the north side of the valley as far as we went. The mountains rose abruptly from the waters and at a great height divided into peaks and spires, pinnacles and domes, in abandoned confusion, that impressed me not only as most remarkable but also the most beautiful combination of mountain scenery I had ever witnessed. The pools were especially attractive for I had taken my tackle with me, so I left the party in charge of the driver and started out for some good sport. I did not meet with the ready response I expected from the fish, and kept going on up stream trying one pool after another until I was quite out of sight of the ambulance but still kept going, each pool looking more inviting than the one just passed. I finally came to an unusually large pool, deep and wide, and that ran close to the perpendicular bluff on the opposite side. I had made a number of casts when a voice from somewhere called out "What luck?" It might have been from the clouds and I would not have been more surprised, and at first I could not locate it, but looked up and down stream and back over the valley but saw no one. Finally just across from me on a big block of rock that had become detached from the mountainside and in plain view sat a man. His clothing was so near the color of the rock and he sat so stalk still that I would never have discovered him if he had not made the inquiry. Answering I said, "Not very good," but some way I was so startled by that inquiry seemingly coming from the unknown and then finding a real man where of all places I least expected him, that I think I was a little nervous about it, and soon lost interest in fishing and returned to the ambulance. He had evidently been watching me as I was going up stream but made no other effort for closer acquaintance and I left him with that one response, "Not very good." CHAPTER X.