I was hunting and fishing that spring on the head waters of the east branch. My canoe swam a lovely but nameless lakelet, and my camp, roofed with birch-bark, was near the shore. There were three brooks running into the lake noisily; and at the south end the clear young river slipped silently out through the dark trees.
It was the last day of May, and still cold in that mountain bowl. I had a fat deer hung high beside my shelter; so there was meat for some time. In a little while the fishing would be very tame, for there the trout have not fully learned what a deceiver man is, and there is little sport in standing almost astride a rill, and with a five-foot willow pulling a dozen or twenty fish out of one pool. But now I knew the big fish were around, and I determined to spend the day with my rod.
By ten o’clock I was well over toward Mount Lafayette, on the largest of the brooks which came into my lake from the west; and, descending the steep banks to the bed of the stream, prepared to fish down toward camp.
The brook fell very rapidly here, in a series of short falls, at the bottom of each of which was a deep, lovely pool of water, so clear that it seemed only air with a light tinge of green. I could see pebbles ten feet below the surface, and the brown flashes of the sportive trout.
In five minutes I was landing my first fish, a game half-pounder, and others bit as fast as I could attend to them.
There was no need of covering much ground. I could have caught in fifty yards all I could eat in a week. But I kept moving homeward, taking only one or two of the largest fish from a pool and throwing back any accidental small ones.
In this way I had gone down, perhaps, half a mile, when I came to the largest pool I had found on that brook. Here it seemed likely that there might be some particularly large trout. In fact, the first one I struck seemed to be much larger than any on my string; but he snapped the hook and was gone with a splash.
I had drawn an extra hook from my box and was “ganging” it upon the line, when some impulse caused me to look up. As I did so, the tin box fell clattering upon the rocks and my rod at my feet.
The brook here had cut a narrow gorge through a ridge, and the pool at whose head I stood touched on each side the very foot of a rocky wall nearly forty feet high. I was standing on a ledge whence the brook dropped, perhaps, ten feet into the pool, and the banks were not nearly so high there. Still, I presume the tops were fifteen feet above my head.