ick up a half dozen fish; but it is slow work.
When, however, the shadow of the two huge mountains feels its way
across the stream, then, as though a signal had been given, the trout
begin to rise. For an hour and a half there is noble sport indeed.

The stream fairly swarmed with them, but of course some places were
better than others. Near the upper reaches the water boiled like
seltzer around the base of a tremendous tree. There the pool was at
least ten feet deep and shot with bubbles throughout the whole of its
depth, but it was full of fish. They rose eagerly to your gyrating
fly,--and took it away with them down to subaqueous chambers and
passages among the roots of that tree. After which you broke your
leader. Royal Coachman was the best lure, and therefore valuable
exceedingly were Royal Coachmen. Whenever we lost one we lifted up our
voices in lament, and went away from there, calling to mind that there
were other pools, many other pools, free of obstruction and with fish
in them. Yet such is the perversity of fishermen, we were back losing
more Royal Coachmen the very next day. In all I managed to disengage
just three rather small trout from that pool, and in return decorated
their ancestral halls with festoons of leaders and the brilliance of
many flies.

Now this was foolishness. All you had to do was to walk through a
grove of cottonwoods, over a brook, through another grove of pines,
down a sloping meadow to where one of the gigantic pine-trees had
obligingly spanned the current. You crossed that, traversed another
meadow, broke through a thicket, slid down a steep grassy bank, and
there you were. A great many years before a pine-tree had fallen
across the current. Now its whitened skeleton lay there, opposing a
barrier for about twenty-five feet out into the stream. Most of the
water turned aside, of course, and boiled frantically around the end as
though trying to catch up with the rest of the stream which had gone on
without it, but some of it dived down under and came up on the other
side. There, as though bewildered, it paused in an uneasy pool. Its
constant action had excavated a very deep hole, the debris of which had
formed a bar immediately below. You waded out on the bar and cast
along the length of the pine skeleton over the pool.

If you were methodical, you first shortened your line, and began near
the bank, gradually working out until you were casting forty-five feet
to the