the impact of his great
footfalls on the moss. When at length he caught the flash of the bright
water ahead of him through the trees, he moved even more cautiously, so
extreme was his circumspection. Reaching the edge of the cedar growth,
he slipped unseen into a thicket of red willows which afforded a
convenient ambush, and peered out warily to assure himself as to what
might be going on around the shores. For a long while he crouched there
as moveless as a stone, that if by mischance his coming had given alarm
to any of the wilderness folk, suspicion might have time to die away.

III

In the mid-deep of the lake the silence was absolute. There was no hiss
of tense feathers to accentuate it, as in the upper vast of air. There
was no fading and elusive bird-note to measure it by, as in the gloom of
the cedar swamp. Down in the gold-brown glimmer the fine silt lay
unstirred on the stones. There was no movement, except the delicate,
almost imperceptible waving of the great trout's coloured fins.

In the shallower water along the edges of the lake there was always a
faint confusion of small sounds. The slow breathing of the lake, as it
were, kept up a rhythmic, almost invisible motion among the smaller
pebbles, making a crisp whisper which the water carried far beneath the
surface while it could not be heard at all in the air above. But none of
this stir reached the silent deeps where the big trout, morose and
enamoured of his solitude, lay lazily opening and shutting his crimson
gills.

Because the water of the lake was dark,--amber-tinted from the swamps
about its shores,--the colours of the trout were dark, strong, and
vivid. His strangely patterned back was almost black, yet brilliant,
like some kinds of damascened steel. His belly was bright pink. His
sides had a purplish hue, on which the rows of intense vermilion spots
stood out almost incongruously. His fins were as gaudy as the petals of
some red-and-white flower.

The trout was staring upward with his blank, lidless eyes. He was
hungry, and he felt that it was from that direction that food was like
to come to him most easily. Smaller fish had learned, from the fate of
so many of their fellows, to shun the haunted stillness of this mid-lake
depth; and the big trout was growing tired of caddis bait and such small
game.

The surface of the lake, as he looked up at it, presented to him a sort
of semitransparent mirror, thronged with reflections, yet allowin