to his muscle if not so illustrative of his
skill. For it is always dangerous to strike too hard. It does not
require a great pressure to force the barb home, while a heavy strike
or a too sudden twitch is apt either to break something or tear the
hook from the fish's jaw. In this case the hook held. For a moment fish
and fisher seemed alike astonished, and neither stirred; but it was
only for a moment. Directly away flew the fish--the line spinning from
the reel as if harnessed to a locomotive. Fortunately the eddy, which
made out from the point of an island, extended some quarter of a mile,
and before it was passed over, the Judge began to appreciate the
situation, the magnitude of the work in hand, and the difficulties he
was likely to encounter before he could call the fish his own. He held
him with a steady hand. He answered every call for line with a
promptness and caution which indicated great tact, and he lost no
opportunity to reel in when practicable. For a time it seemed probable
that he would kill his fish without being carried into the central
current. But no such luck awaited him; for after two hours of patient
waiting and working--of rushing, and leaping, and sulking--the frenzied
fish made for the centre of the river with such impetuosity that it
would have been as easy to stop the flow of the river itself as to
check him in his mad career. Where he led the canoe was obliged to
follow; and follow it did for more than two miles, with occasional
respites at available eddies, and occasional dashes up stream, putting
the canoe men to their best trumps to prevent the reel from becoming
exhausted by these upward flights.

Thus the battle progressed for more than three hours, when the fish
approached the canoe of one of the party, which was anchored near a
bank covered with overhanging brush. He rushed with such speed that the
Indians in the anchored canoe had barely time to get out of the way,
when the fish dashed between them and the bank, but so closely that
when he halted for an instant near the surface, one of the Indians,
whose movements were as quick as those of the fish himself, gaffed him
and so saved him "as by fire," for in an instant more he would have
been caught in the overhanging brush toward which he was moving, and
where, had he reached it, he would have been inevitably lost. He
weighed thirty-six pounds--the largest fish taken during our month's
sojourn on the river. But the most marvelous par