But Blanc and Zoëtique paddling the home-stretch are hard to beat, and they had landed minutes before we got there, and were making oration with Walter on the porch. He detached himself with difficulty to greet me.
“Hello, Bob,” he threw at me, and “Bon jour, Josef. Glad to see you. Any luck? Wait a moment and I’ll talk to you.”
I sat myself on a bench and stretched my hunting-boots over the landscape and waited per order. It’s good for the soul to hear Walter talk French. He was enthroned in the one store chair, a red rocker, in the middle of the big camp porch, and I’ll tell how he looked, for local color’s sake. He’s a lot older than I to begin with—over forty, while I’m only at Yale—and they made him a judge the minute he cut his teeth—the youngest in the State. He sat there appearing pretty prosperous, with his nice beefy color, and his dark-gray clothes, and his dark-gray hair, for his honors have gone to the outside of his head only. He’s a trifle too embonpointish around the hips, but great men often have a rush of dignity to the waist-line, I notice. The light splashed on his spectacles so that they were all you could see of his eyes, but the glasses seemed full of earnestness, and there was a deep line in the middle of his forehead which comes when he’s most awfully serious. He was this time. I’d have bet on it, when I saw his pipe sitting on his knee like an interrogation-point upside down.
Before him stood Zoëtique and Blanc, dressed in odds and ends; trousers under their armpits, multiple suspenders, slouch hats, a red bandanna, an axe in Zoëtique’s belt, and a caribou-skin knife-sheath with buckskin fringe in Blanc’s. Rummage-sale effects. For all that Zoëtique’s got a figure which any athlete might envy, deep-shouldered, small-waisted, musclely—and Blanc moves like a greyhound, all steel springs and lightness. They stood respectfully in front of the red rocking-chair, and behind them two miles of lake stretched from the camp porch to the everlasting hills. In musical, incorrect French, with the nice polite manner all these habitants have, Zoëtique was getting to the end of a story, as I gathered, about a fish. That made it clear why Walter’s soul-depths were bubbling and he couldn’t pay attention to me. He’s keen for fishing. He’d rather fish than be President—rather than shoot the biggest bull moose on record. He had the package of letters in his hands, the first in ten days; around him were piled rolls of newspapers, and he hadn’t heard a new in all that time—but nothing mattered. Nothing but Zoëtique’s fish-story.
When Zoëtique’s crisp, rippling sort of low voice stopped, Walter leaned forward and got ready with anxious care to talk. To talk French was a necessity, for the men didn’t understand English, and I could see him working his intellect. He usually helps himself to the French dictionary and kicks it, and calls that conversation, but this was different. This was about a fish—it was important to be understood.
“Si je comprenne, Zoëtique. Comme celà. Vous l’avez view sortir à le Remous Doré, yune gros poison—gros grosse—vous disons celà?”
I yelped a short yelp. The guides canvassed the sentence with perfect gravity. I could see them guessing. “View” they recognized as “vu,” I was sure; and “yune poison,” was a fish, “un poisson”; these transformations they’d run up against before. But “sortir” stumped them a minute. They looked at each other trying to remember if they’d seen a big fish go out—sortir. Then Blanc got it—it was “jump”—“sauter.”
“But, yes, M’sieur, it is true that one saw a big fish jump—at the Golden Pool—as one passed. A very big one—b’en gros—gros de même”—and the knotty hands of Blanc measured a hearty three feet.
“Great Scott!” gasped Walter excitedly, taking it all verbatim as he does a fish-story. “Holy Moses! it’s a six-pounder, at least!”
And with that the French language was batted through a game. A Parisian would have sobbed. But Walter got his questions out of his system, and I pulled him from one or two sad holes by the boots. And then the garçons raconté-d over again for me how they had been passing the Golden Pool—the Remous Doré—on their way up from the club with the mail and provisions, and had been brought to a dead stop by an enormous splash in the water. Zoëtique specified that it was “épouvantable,” and Blanc, with gestures of hands and shoulders, told how he was so scared blue that he spilled into a two-foot hole, and the pack slid off him. Then the trout came up again, and concerning that appearance they gave measurements. They had him half the length of a canoe, and ten pounds heavy, by egging each other on a little, and Walter didn’t doubt a syllable; he didn’t want to.