It is to be waded
in the riffles, so that he can cross from one shore to the other as the
mood suits him. One bank is apt to be precipitous, the other to stretch
away in a mile or so of the coolest, greenest, stillest primeval forest
to be imagined. Thus he can cut across the wide bends of the River,
should he so desire and should haste be necessary to make camp before
dark. And, last, but not least by any manner of means, there are trout.
I mean real trout--big fellows, the kind the fishers of little streams
dream of but awake to call Morpheus a liar, just as they are too polite
to call you a liar when you are so indiscreet as to tell them a few
plain facts. I have one solemnly attested and witnessed record of
twenty-nine inches, caught in running water. I saw a friend land on one
cast three whose aggregate weight was four and one half pounds. I
witnessed, and partly shared, an exciting struggle in which three fish
on three rods were played in the same pool at the same time. They
weighed just fourteen pounds. One pool, a backset, was known as the
Idiot's Delight, because any one could catch fish there. I have lain on
my stomach at the Burned Rock Pool and seen the great fish lying so
close together as nearly to cover the bottom, rank after rank of them,
and the smallest not under a half pound. As to the largest--well, every
true fisherman knows him!
So it came about for many years that the natural barrier interposed by
the Big Falls successfully turned the idle tide of anglers'
exploration.
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