And there you can stand hip-deep,
and just reach the eddy foam with a cast tied craftily of Royal
Coachman, Parmachenee Belle, and Montreal.
From that point you are with the hills. They draw back to leave wide
forest, but always they return to the River--as you would return season
after season were I to tell you how--throwing across your
woods-progress a sheer cliff forty or fifty feet high, shouldering you
incontinently into the necessity of fording to the other side. More and
more jealous they become as you penetrate, until at the Big Falls they
close in entirely, warning you that here they take the wilderness to
themselves. At the Big Falls anglers make their last camp. About the
fire they may discuss idly various academic questions--as to whether
the great inaccessible pool below the Falls really contains the
legendary Biggest Trout; what direction the River takes above; whether
it really becomes nothing but a series of stagnant pools connected by
sluggish water-reaches; whether there are any trout above the Falls;
and so on.
These questions, as I have said, are merely academic. Your true angler
is a philosopher. Enough is to him worth fifteen courses, and if the
finite mind of man could imagine anything to be desired as an addition
to his present possessions on the River, he at least knows nothing of
it. Already he commands ten miles of water--swift, clear water--running
over stone, through a freshet bed so many hundreds of feet wide that he
has forgotten what it means to guard his back cast.
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