“No,” said Jack, “it wouldn’t. I shouldn’t mind wintering here a bit. I believe there would be a lot of bears in early spring, to say nothing of the fur that you would get through the winter.”
“Yes,” said Hugh, “it’s a pretty good trapping ground, and I don’t believe that it’s ever been systematically gone over in winter. A man could live pretty well here, too, for there’s lots of sheep and elk, and some deer and moose, to say nothing of the birds and a heap of fish in the lakes and streams.”
“I’m afraid I’ll never get a chance to winter in this country, Hugh,” said Jack. “It seems that I must spend my winters back East.”
“Well,” said Hugh, “that’s right enough, too. The day of the hunter and the trapper has gone by in this country, and now we can only do for sport what we used to do for a living.”
All through the morning and until well after noon, the party traveled up the beautiful valley, constantly drawing nearer to the great mountains which towered before them.
Early in the afternoon they came to a wide meadow, bordered by green timber, through which ran the river, flanked on either hand by the towering cliffs of two great mountains. Here Hugh decided to camp, and before long the tent was put up and a smoke built for the benefit of horses and men alike, for the flies were very bad.
After dinner, Jack got from the pack some mosquito netting and, working for a short time with a needle and some thread, and, helped by Joe, made three bags of the netting wide enough to slip over the head and come down to shoulders and breast. When one put on his coat and buttoned it over the net, his head and neck were protected from the mosquitoes. This work done, Jack put together his fishing rod and, drawing on his gloves, went over to the stream to fish for trout, which Hugh said were plenty in the river.
Not far above the camp was a considerable fall, where the water from a lake tumbled thirty feet over the rocks into a deep pool below, in which Jack was interested to see a great school of fish. He drew back and made a number of casts, but the fish paid no attention to his flies, and after he had faithfully whipped the pool for some time, he made up his mind that the fish would not bite. Lying on the rocks, with his face close to the water, he looked down upon the hundreds of them holding themselves in place, head against the current, apparently without moving a fin. As he studied them, he made up his mind that they were not trout, and his disappointment at not catching them was considerably modified.
While he was there, his attention was attracted by a dipper flying across the water and, presently, he saw that on a little shelf of rock, almost directly below the falls, the bird had a nest formed of green moss. There was a little hole in the bundle of moss, at the mouth of which the bird alighted and seemed to pass in food. No doubt his mate was sitting on her eggs, which a little later would hatch into hungry young, to satisfy whose appetites would tax the efforts of both parents, no matter how hard they might work.
But Jack was hungry for fish and soon started down the stream. At first it was so overgrown by willows and spruces that he could not fish, but not far beyond this the trees stood farther back from it and he began to cast. Before he had gone far he had a rise and caught a nice ten-inch trout. Just below was a dark pool, from which he took four large fish, the largest weighing perhaps two pounds. His third fish was different from any of those he had taken before, and so was the fourth. Instead of being spotted with black, these two had red spots on them and heads larger and more clumsy than the black-spotted trout. They were not like the brook trout of the East and Jack was puzzled to know what they were, but felt sure that Hugh would tell him.