More than once while I clung to the chance projection ... I regretted making the fool-hardy attempt
There was an audible splash at my first cast. My, how that reel did sing! Before I realized it, my fish had reached rapid water and taken out a dangerous amount of line; still I dared not check him too severely among the sharp rocks and swift waters, so I ran along the bank, stumbling over stones, but managing to avail myself of every opportunity to wind in the line until I had the satisfaction of seeing enough line on my reel to prepare me for possible sudden dashes and emergencies.
Ah! that was a glorious fight, and when at last I was able to steer my tired fish into shallow water I saw there were three of them, one lusty trout on each of my three flies. I had no landing net so I gently slid the almost exhausted fish onto a gravel bar and as I did so I experienced one of those delightful thrills which comes to a fellow’s lot but once or twice in a life-time. But it was not because I had captured three at a strike, for I have done that before and since, but I thrilled because they were not only a new and strange kind of trout, but they were of the color and sheen of newly minted gold. Never before had any man seen such trout.
I have since been informed that I had blundered on to water inhabited by the rarest of all game fish, the so-called golden trout, which has since been discovered and which scientists declare to be pre-glacier fish left by some accident of nature to exist in a new world in which all their original contemporaries have long been extinct.
Think of it! Fish which had never seen an artificial fly nor had any family traditions of experiences with them. It is little wonder that they would jump at a brown hackle, a professor or even a gaudy salmon fly. Why they would jump at a chicken feather! They were ready and eager to bite at any sort of bunco game I saw fit to play upon them. They were veritable hayseeds of the trout family, but when they felt the hook in their lips, the wisest trout in the world could not show a craftier nor half as plucky a fight. They would leap from the water like small-mouthed bass and by shaking their heads, try to throw off the hateful hook.
The constant vigorous exercise of leaping water-falls and forging up boiling rapids had developed these sturdy mountaineer trout into prodigies of strength and endurance. Even now my nerves tingle to the tips of my toes as in fancy I hear my reel hum or see the tip of my five ounce split bamboo bend so as to almost form a circle.
I fished that stream with hands trembling with excitement and had filled my creel with the rare fish before I began to notice other objects of interest. Suddenly I became aware of the presence of two birds hovering over and diving under the cold water. They were evidently feeding on some aquatic creature which my duller senses could not discern.
Although they were the first of the kind that I had ever seen alive, I at once recognized the feathered visitors to be water ouzels. The birds preceded me on my way along the water course towards camp, and were never quiet a minute. They would hop on a rock in mid-stream and bob up and down in a most solemn but comical manner for a moment before plunging fearlessly into the cold white spray of the falls or the swift dashing current, where they would disappear below the surface only to reappear once more on another rock to bob again.