Fishing at Bridge Creek, that first evening, was poor. We caught dozens of small trout. But it would have taken hundreds to satisfy us after our lunchless day, and there were other reasons.

One casts for trout. There is no sitting on a mossy stone and watching a worm guilefully struggling to attract a fish to the hooks. No; one casts.

Now, I have learned to cast fairly well. On the lawn at home, or in the middle of a ten-acre lot, cleared, or the center of a lake, I can put out quite a lot of line. In one cast out of three, I can drop a fly so that it appears to be committing suicide—which is the correct way. But in a thicket I am lost. I hold the woman's record for getting the hook in my hair or the lobe of the Little Boy's ear. I have hung fish high in trees more times than phonographs have hanged Danny Deever. I can, under such circumstances (i.e., the thicket), leave camp with a rod, four six-foot leaders, an expensive English line, and a smile, and return an hour later with a six-inch trout, a bandaged hand, a hundred and eighty mosquito bites, no leaders, and no smile.

So we fished little that first evening, and, on the discovery that candles had been left out of the cook's outfit, we retired early to our bough beds, which were, as it happened that night, of class A.

There was a deer-lick on our camp-ground there at Bridge Creek, and during the night deer came down and strayed through the camp. One of the guides saw a black bear also. We saw nothing. Some day I shall write an article called: "Wild Animals I Have Missed."

We had made fourteen miles the first day, with a late start. It was not bad, but the next day we determined to do better. At five o'clock we were up, and at five-thirty tents were down and breakfast under way. We had had a visitor the night before—that curious anomaly, a young hermit. He had been a very well-known pugilist in the light-weight class and, his health failing, he had sought the wilderness. There he had lived for seven years alone.

We asked him if he never cared to see people. But he replied that trees were all the company he wanted. Deer came and browsed around his tiny shack there in the woods. All the trout he could use played in his front garden. He had a dog and a horse, and he wanted nothing else. He came to see us off the next morning, and I think we amused him. We seemed to need so much. He stared at our thirty-one horses, sixteen of them packed with things he had learned to live without. But I think he rather hated to see us go. We had brought a little excitement into his quiet life.

The first bough bed had been a failure. For—note you—I had not then learned of the bough bed de luxe. This information, which I have given you so freely, dear reader, what has it not cost me in sleepless nights and family coldness and aching muscles!

So I find this note in my daily journal, written that day on horseback, and therefore not very legible:—

Mem: After this, must lie over the camp-ground until I find a place that fits me to sleep on. Then have the tent erected over it.