--Mr. Hilligoss, Weaver,
and "Silent Lawrie" and the Freds and Bob and the Big Boy and the Little
Boy and Joe. And, without expecting it, we happened on adventure.

Have you ever climbed down a canon with rocky sides, a straight and
precipitous five hundred feet, clinging with your finger nails to any
bit of green that grows from the cliff, and to footholds made by an axe,
and carrying a fly-book and a trout-rod which is an infinitely precious
trout-rod? Also, a share of the midday lunch and twenty pounds more
weight than you ought to have by the beauty-scale? Because, unless you
have, you will never understand that trip.

It was a series of wild drops, of blood-curdling escapes, of slips and
recoveries, of bruises and abrasions. But at last we made it, and there
was the river!

I have still in mind a deep pool where the water, rushing at tremendous
speed over a rocky ledge, fell perhaps fifteen feet. I had fixed my eyes
on that pool early in the day, but it seemed impossible of access. To
reach it it was necessary again to scale a part of the cliff, and,
clinging to its face, to work one's way round along a ledge perhaps
three inches wide. When I had once made it, with the aid of friendly
hands and a leather belt, by which I was lowered, I knew one thing--knew
it inevitably. I was there for life. Nothing would ever take me back
over that ledge.

However, I was there, and there was no use wasting time. For there were
fish there. Now and then they jumped. But they did not take the fly. The
water seethed and boiled, and I stood still and fished, because a slip
on that spray-covered ledge and I was gone, to be washed down to Lake
Chelan, and lie below sea-level in the Cascade Mountains. Which might be
a glorious sort of tomb, but it did not appeal to me.

I tried different flies with no result. At last, with a weighted line
and a fish's eye, I got my first fish--the best of the day, and from
that time on I forgot the danger.

Some day, armed with every enticement known to the fisherman, I am going
back to that river. For there, under a log, lurks the wiliest trout I
have ever encountered. In full view he stayed during the entire time of
my sojourn. He came up to the fly, leaped over it, made faces at it.
Then he would look up at me scornfully.

[Illustration: _Stream fishing_]

"Old tricks," he seemed to say. "Old stuff--not good enough." I dare say
he is still there.

Late in the day, we got out of that canon.