Lost Pond

by Henry Abbott

The Tent at the Source of Roaring Brook

About twenty rods farther upstream we arrived at the source of Roaring Brook. It was a beautiful sheet of glassy water set in a bowl in the hills, with the bowl tilted on one side until the water spilled over its lower edge into the brook. The pond was about two hundred yards in diameter. Three deer were standing in the shallow water on the opposite edge. The water was clear and cold as ice. We both dropped our packs and shouted in chorus, "This is where we sleep!"

It was getting late, so we hurried our preparations for making camp. I undertook to set up the tent while Bige collected a quantity of dry moss for a bed. This he peeled off of a ledge of rocks on the hillside in great slabs that were three to four inches thick. Over a double layer of moss he placed balsam boughs, sticking the butt end of each bough through the moss in a sloping position and making one course of boughs overlap another like shingles on a roof. The result was most satisfactory. Bige is a wonder in making a camp bed.

While hunting material for tent pegs and poles I noticed a curious rectangular-shaped hillock of green moss a short distance from the shore of the pond. Kicking the mossy covering away, there was disclosed the rotted logs of what had many years ago been a camp about twelve feet square. A dozen yards away was a moss-covered log which seemed flattened on top and tapered at both ends. Scraping away the moss and rolling over the log, I found a "dugout canoe." This had been hewn from a pine log about thirty inches in diameter and sixteen feet long. The canoe was in fair condition, but heavy and somewhat decayed at one end. Having finished our tent and bed, we rolled the canoe down to the water's edge and undertook to put it in order for use. To insure its floating with two heavy men aboard, we cut and trimmed out two dry spruces about six inches in diameter and lashed them, one on either side of the canoe and against two smaller crosspieces placed above to keep the stringpieces near the gunwale. The crosspieces also served the purpose of seats. For many years I have carried in the bottom of the pack, when on camping trips, a coil of small rope or heavy twine and have often found it very useful. It fitted in perfectly on this occasion.

The dusk of evening was now upon us, so we hurriedly pushed our pirogue-raft into the water and climbed aboard. Bige poled our craft out toward the center of the pond while I strung up my rod and put a white miller on the end of the leader. We had heard splashing and saw ripples on the smooth surface of the water before leaving shore, indicating the presence of fish of some kind. At the first cast I hooked one, and after a short struggle Bige brought him aboard with the landing net.

Then followed twenty minutes of the swiftest and most exciting bit of trout fishing that I have ever experienced. I could have hooked three or four at a time if I had put on that many flies, but one kept me busy. With every cast two or three trout would make a rush for the fly, and they would fight one another for possession of it. Even after one fish was securely hooked and was struggling for his freedom others would appear and try to take the fly away from him. Bige said "the trout climbed out, stood on their tails and reached for the fly long before it hit the water."

It was now quite dark and we were losing more fish than we saved. It was impossible to see the landing net, and we often knocked them off the hook when trying to scoop them up. We had enough fish for supper, so we decided to leave some of them for morning, went ashore, built a fire, cooked our trout and bacon, and ate supper by the light of the fire.

I have fished for trout for twenty years, more or less, and during that time caught a great many under varying conditions. It has been my fortune to catch much larger trout than any we saw in this pond, though none of these would weigh less than a pound each. But never before nor since have I met any more sporty fish than these. They were, moreover, the most beautifully marked of any trout of any variety I have ever seen. They lived in ice-water in midsummer. They were muscular and like chain lightning in action.

With every cast I experienced all the excitement, all the thrills, and went through all the strategic maneuvers that a nature writer would describe in twelve hundred words.