In the early summer the fawns had watched these same finny fellows racing and leaping up the water-falls to the rapids. With the long, hot days, they had taken to the deep, shadowy pools—those watery caverns that afford such peaceful coolness everywhere along Beaver Brook.
Now as the woods turned red and gold, the trout changed their cream colored vests to the most vivid orange, which looked gay enough with their red and white fins.
Their coats were still olive-green, mottled with darker splotches, and on their sides the green melted into yellow, with the little red spots and speckles that give the trout their name.
Their thousands of tiny scales were like suits of mail,—which came in very handy when they fought, as you shall see.
Now the fawns noticed that the larger and brighter colored fish were prospecting around in the shallows, where the water ran fastest, shoveling the gravel about with their bony noses, aided by their tails. Each trout soon had a little nest scooped out in the stream bed, and over it he stood guard, (or perhaps we ought to say swam guard), defending his homestead against all comers.
Sometimes a larger trout would come by and try to steal the nest of a smaller fish; and then what a fight they had! How they butted each other about, ramming each other’s soft sides, and even, at times, biting each other on the lip. It must have hurt dreadfully, because each trout had a mouthful of the sharpest teeth, that turned backward, so that when they caught a worm he was hooked as surely as he would be on the end of a fish-line.
In trout-land, you know, it is the father of the family that makes the nest. He it is who wears the gayest clothing, too,—because if the mother were too bright colored, her enemies could see her on her nest.
Once the nests were ready the mother trout came swimming upstream and promptly set to work filling them with leathery yellow-brown eggs, which they covered with gravel so that no pike or other cannibal of the river’s bottom could find and make a breakfast off of them.
The fawns marveled as they watched, day after day, till at last the trout all went back into deep water for the winter, leaving the eggs behind them. And Fleet Foot explained how, next spring, each leathery brown egg that had escaped the cannibal fish and the muskrats would be burst open by the baby trout inside, and out would wiggle the teeniest, weeniest troutlet you can possibly imagine!
