Detective and mystery stories; Hunting stories; Wilderness areas -- Fiction
The elevated prairie or table-land on which I found myself corresponded
in every important particular with the park below; there were the same
natural divisions of prairie and forests, the same erratic boulders, but
on account of the difference in elevation there was a corresponding
difference in plant life, and most interesting of all to me, there were
the trout streams. The tablelands above the park were comparatively
level in places where the stream ran almost as quietly as a meadow
brook, but these level stretches were interrupted at short distance by
foaming rapids, jagged rocks and roaring falls.
My angler’s instinct told me that the biggest fish lurked in the deep
pools, to reach which it was necessary to creep and worm myself over the
open flats of sharp stones and patches of heather, but once on the
vantage ground the swish of a trout rod sounded there for the first time
since the dawn of Creation.
[Illustration: More than once while I clung to the chance projection
... I regretted making the fool-hardy attempt]
There was an audible splash at my first cast. My, how that reel did
sing! Before I realized it, my fish had reached rapid water and taken
out a dangerous amount of line; still I dared not check him too severely
among the sharp rocks and swift waters, so I ran along the bank,
stumbling over stones, but managing to avail myself of every opportunity
to wind in the line until I had the satisfaction of seeing enough line
on my reel to prepare me for possible sudden dashes and emergencies.
Ah! that was a glorious fight, and when at last I was able to steer my
tired fish into shallow water I saw there were three of them, one lusty
trout on each of my three flies. I had no landing net so I gently slid
the almost exhausted fish onto a gravel bar and as I did so I
experienced one of those delightful thrills which comes to a fellow’s
lot but once or twice in a life-time. But it was not because I had
captured three at a strike, for I have done that before and since, but I
thrilled because they were not only a new and strange kind of trout, but
they were of the color and sheen of newly minted gold. Never before had
any man seen such trout.
I have since been informed that I had blundered on to water inhabited by
the rarest of all game fish, the so-called golden trout, which has since
been discovered and which scientists declare to be pre-glacier fish left
by some accident of nature to exist in a new world in which all their
original contemporaries have long been extinct.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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