Just one little story about the big trout. It was close by a face of rock that rose sheer from the water for fifty feet or more, that we struck him. Up and again up, in mighty leaps clear from the water he flung himself. With great surges he carried out the line, and then allowed himself to be coaxed gently toward the boat. When the Preacher fancied that the fight was well over and the great fish could be seen plainly but a few feet from the boat, there was another rush, and this straight down. There were one hundred and fifty feet of line on the reel, and the old warrior took out every inch of it. Where did he go? To China for aught the writer knows—but he came back. Slowly and reluctantly he yielded to the steady strain, and at last lay in the bottom of the boat, a dream of beauty. Three pounds and a quarter! The biggest rainbow trout caught in the Kootenay this summer; so the Nelson fishermen aver! Hooray!!!
By this time, the members of the gentler sex are saying, “It must have been deadly dull for the ‘girls.’” Far from it. Ask the Preacheress, and she will tell you that every moment of every day was full of happiness. That you may have a glimpse at some of the experiences which helped to make the hours pass pleasantly, listen to the tale of the chipmunks. The whole family looked at us askance when we first tied up near their home. Just a hurried scamper along the logs, and then away they fled with a warning chatter. Two days had not passed before they were eating crumbs thrown out for them. On the third day their suspicions were so far allayed that they ate from the hand of one of the party. After that, not a day passed, and hardly an hour of daylight, but some one could be seen holding out a crust at which a chipmunk was gnawing away. They lost all fear and would crawl over the knees and sometimes up on the shoulders in search of rations. They would allow us to stroke their heads and feel of the cheek-pouches in which they stored away food, without raising the slightest objections. When we left they had come to seem like old friends. They deserved better treatment at our hands than was accorded them, and the writer’s heart is filled with self-reproach as he recalls the dastardly act with which we closed our relations with these little friends. We gave them Jimmie’s pie! (Jimmie was the Chinese cook.) Near the close of our stay he manufactured the most wonderful and in every way impossible pie ever achieved by human ingenuity. One after another, every member of the party attacked that combination, only to suffer defeat. It was still intact when the time came to leave. It would have had abiding interest as a specimen, but there was danger that it might be broken in transit, so we left it for those confiding chipmunks. One thing is sure, if living, they must be woefully discouraged.
Jimmie was a character. What he did not know about the English language was equalled only by his abysmal ignorance of cooking. Asked to bring some breakfast-food for the Junior, he disappeared kitchenward, and when, after a long absence, one of the party went in search of him, he was discovered proudly bearing toward the table—a canteloupe. But Jimmie did his best, and that was quite enough to satisfy the happy members of our little family. He could boil potatoes well, and the water that he brought from Midge Creek was always first-class. Then, too, we had cooks of our own.
“Time to stop,” do I hear the weary reader say? Very likely, but the half has not been told. You should hear about the “hermit,” with his long, white hair and beard, his piercing eyes, his little shack and garden and the romantic love-affair which is said to have driven him into voluntary exile. You have not heard of the hard tramp up the canyon, past almost innumerable cascades and rapids, back and upwards until a pool is reached where a great throng of mountain trout is assembled. That marvellous rainbow which followed the Sunday afternoon storm must be ignored. The Junior’s sand-wells, his fall from the gang-plank resulting in a broken collar-bone, the fracas with a colony of yellow-jackets, the night of storm when we feared lest the cables break and we go drifting at the mercy of wind and waves—but what’s the use? You will never know what you have missed through your insistence that you’ve had enough. The writer had intended to tell of the total depravity of those trout, manifested on the Sundays of our stay with them, as they gathered en masse at the stern of the house-boat and dared the Preacher to cast a fly. Perhaps it is just as well to stop right here, for words cannot be found with which to describe the ministerial struggle.
[Original]
