he shouted: "Partner! Partner! This _is_ glory! Now you catch your
fish! Twenty-four years I've waited for this!"

I went into that icy-cold river and made my cast just above a weir, and
all but foul-hooked a blue and black water-snake with a coral mouth who
coiled herself on a stone and hissed maledictions. The next cast--ah,
the pride of it, the regal splendour of it! the thrill that ran down
from finger-tip to toe! The water boiled. He broke for the spoon and got
it! There remained enough sense in me to give him all he wanted when he
jumped not once but twenty times before the upstream flight that ran my
line out to the last half-dozen turns, and I saw the nickled reel-bar
glitter under the thinning green coils. My thumb was burned deep when I
strove to stopper the line, but I did not feel it till later, for my
soul was out in the dancing water praying for him to turn ere he took my
tackle away. The prayer was heard. As I bowed back, the butt of the rod
on my left hip-bone and the top joint dipping like unto a weeping
willow, he turned, and I accepted each inch of slack that I could by any
means get in as a favour from on High. There be several sorts of success
in this world that taste well in the moment of enjoyment, but I question
whether the stealthy theft of line from an able-bodied salmon who knows
exactly what you are doing and why you are doing it is not sweeter than
any other victory within human scope. Like California's fish, he ran at
me head-on and leaped against the line, but the Lord gave me two hundred
and fifty pairs of fingers in that hour. The banks and the pine trees
danced dizzily round me, but I only reeled--reeled as for life--reeled
for hours, and at the end of the reeling continued to give him the butt
while he sulked in a pool. California was farther up the reach, and with
the corner of my eye I could see him casting with long casts and much
skill. Then he struck, and my fish broke for the weir in the same
instant, and down the reach we came, California and I; reel answering
reel even as the morning stars sung together.

The first wild enthusiasm of capture had died away. We were both at work
now in deadly earnest to prevent the lines fouling, to stall off a
downstream rush for deep water just above the weir, and at the same time
to get the fish into the shallow bay downstream that gave the best
practicable landing. Portland bade us both be of good heart, and
volunteered to take the rod from m