And it certainly was—till the next August at least. There were no flies, and one could fish without tar oil or citronella; each breath pumped energy into the lungs; the snap of the water made a man laugh and shriek aloud as he plunged into the lake in the morning with air at forty-five degrees; the fishing and hunting were at their best.
Down by the mouth of the little Rivière à la Poêle—the “Frying-pan River”—the trout were massing for the frayage, the spawning, and there in the cool of the evening, when the shallow water was dim in the low light—at about six o’clock, perhaps—they jumped like mad things for the fly. You had but to paddle across the lake and through the rushes, slower and slower, till the rustling against the boat slid into silence as you halted; you had but to pull loose a few feet of line with your left hand and to listen to the whir of it spinning out as you put your right wrist into the cast; you had but to drop the flies over the mystery of the brown water by the edge of the lily-pads—gingerly, it must be understood; cautiously, for this is the first cast for a year; carefully, man, with a tiny lift of the rod-tip as the flies fall so that the Parmachene Belle on the tail takes water first, and the Reuben Wood touches not too soon, and the black hand-fly skims with its snell clear of the pool. Such fitting small precautions, such pleasant proprieties, were all one had to observe at the mouth of the river “A la Poêle.”
The sweet water would meet your searching with a smile as inscrutable as Mona Lisa’s—with the smile it had worn, careless of your existence, all these centuries; up the river you would hear the dull boom of the rapids, the nearer, busy monotone of the falling stream. The utter quiet of the woods, with its deep undertone of teeming life, would fold you in—there is nothing stiller. Peace and silence and the tranquil pool—only the steady swish of the line as you cast.
Suddenly a wild lashing and splashing and spraying; the bubble, bubble, bubble of broken water; a white and scarlet flashing that comes and goes where the black hand-fly holds taut to the water; a thrill and tug on your wrist that brings your heart to your mouth. You have struck automatically; he is on; you are playing your first fish of the season.
“Pas trop fort,” Godin remarks calmly from the stern; “not too hard, m’sieur. It is a big one.”
Probably, for the candidates, a presidential election is more exciting than this—certainly it lasts longer—yet I doubt very much if any quarter-hour of it carries more of a thrill. You feel Godin’s sense of the importance of the situation by the way he handles the boat. With light manœuvres of the paddle, not to disturb the pool too much, he works you, towing the fish, to a place where the water is clear and you can play his rushing lordship without fear of getting him tangled about lily-roots, and so pulling loose from the fly.
The fight is well on—it is the contest of a man’s brain, working with the awkward tools of a man’s muscles, in an unaccustomed situation, against a wonderful expert and gymnast in his own element. The outcome is always a doubtful one—it is a fair fight—that is where the thrill comes in. The long runs when you must give line with a swiftness beyond thinking; the lightning rushes toward the boat when your reel must work faster than your brain or you lose him; the lifting, the lowering of the rod that must be done by a sense acquired in many such battles, a sense come to be instinct more than reason; the whisper in the muscles that tells you not to pull him when he sulks; that tells you not to let him get line enough to shake free—all these phases and a hundred more which fishermen know were in that fight of mine on September ninth with my big record trout, down at the mouth of the Rivière à la Poêle. I won. I landed him, and he weighed five and a quarter pounds by the scales. It was my first fish of the season, and Godin was almost as pleased as I with this good beginning. We kept at it, of course, and we had what would have seemed good luck on other days, for a spotted fellow of two pounds, and three more of a pound and a half soon decorated the bottom of the boat. But the battle of the giants had led off; we had trapped the patriarch first. And, seeing this, and happy enough with our afternoon’s work as it was, Godin and I fell to talking.
He had crossed the pool now, and worked into the river, and was paddling slowly up it, where birch-trees hung over and met across brown running water, foam-spotted from rapids above. I cast at intervals, leisurely, as we floated up-stream, and the intermittent bright flight of the flies punctuated the guide’s clear-cut French sentences. A sudden thought of last year came to my mind.
“Godin,” I asked, and watched the Parmachene Belle flash delicately scarlet toward a lily-leaf. “Godin, where is Zoëtique this year?”
“Ah—oui,” the voice came from behind me. “I was about to tell the m’sieur of that. The m’sieur had an interest in Zoëtique, eh?”