"
Why the Narrows should be any more likely to contain a big trout than
any of the other three pools you would not be able to explain. In half
an hour it will be dark. You hurry. In the forest it is already
twilight, but by now you know the forest well. Preoccupied, feverish
with your great idea, you hasten on. The birds, silent all in the
brooding of night, rise ghostly to right and left. Shadows steal away
like hostile spies among the treetrunks. The silver of last daylight
gleams ahead of you through the brush. You know it for the Narrows,
whither the instinct of your eagerness has led you as accurately as a
compass through the forest.
Fervently, as though this were of world's affairs the most important,
you congratulate yourself on being in time. Your rod seems to join
itself. In a moment the cast drops like a breath on the molten silver.
Nothing. Another try a trifle lower down. Nothing. A little wandering
breeze spoils your fourth attempt, carrying the leader far to the left.
Curses, deep and fervent. The daylight is fading, draining away. A
fifth cast falls forty feet out. Slowly you drag the flies across the
current, reluctant to recover until the latest possible moment. And so,
when your rod is foolishly upright, your line slack, and your flies
motionless, there rolls slowly up and over the trout of trouts. You see
a broad side, the whirl of a fantail that looks to you to be at least
six inches across; and the current slides on, silver-like, smooth,
indifferent to the wild leap of your heart.
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