The Hills of Desire

by Richard Aumerle Maher

She decided to wait and see if he would not come up again. He did. Away at the farthest bend of the pond she heard the swish of his body as he leaped and was in time to see the silver flash of him shooting down into the water.

She started to run around the bank, but an instinct of primitive wiliness caught her and, instead, she dropped down flat and motionless in the grass at the very edge of the bank. That fish was hers. She knew it with a sudden fierceness of possession which if she had been able to think of herself would have shocked her. She would have fought the world with teeth and nails for him. But she knew that she would not get him by running after him. She would wait and make him come to her. Slowly and carefully she let the pole out over the water, the bait swinging gently just above the surface.

The sun was shining down past her shoulders as she lay there watching fiercely, and she was surprised to see the bottom of the pond clearly outlined in rocks and sand. It was her first real sight of sun-shot water in the hills, and to her whose city experience had told her that all ponds were dark and bottomless it would, at any other time, have been wonderful. Now it only meant that she would have that fish if she had to go into the pond after him. There was only one fish, she thought; so the contest was narrowed down to the personal bitterness of a duel.

She saw a thin dark line shoot across a bed of white sand. Could that be merely a fish swimming, that streak of playing lightning that had crossed again, under her fascinated eyes?

He had seen the shadow of the bait moving on the surface of the water, and he was, for a reason about which Augusta knew nothing, even more excited than the tensely nerved girl who watched for him, her head now leaning out over the bank, the weight of half her body resting on one elbow that dug a socket for itself in the dirt at the extreme edge of the bank.

Again he came shooting across over the bed of sand where she could see him clearly, and again, before she had time to do more than edge a little farther out over the bank in her excitement, he flew back across the line of her vision.

Now she was sure that he had seen the bait, for he came shooting past more swiftly, if it could be, and with shorter and shorter dashes, each time swimming closer to where the shadow fell upon the water. Swifter and shorter came his rushes, now almost underneath the shadow of the bait. Augusta trembled in her eagerness to drop the bait to the water. But a cunning instinct told her that he was not ready, that her prey was not yet worked up to the point of striking.

Hard as it was, she must still wait, fearing every instant that he would rise and miss the hook, but not yet daring to drop the bait upon the water.

Finally, when she was grinding her teeth to keep her hold upon her trembling muscles, she saw him coming; this time from a longer dash than he had been taking, and swifter, and straight at the shadow.

She plumped the bait down on the water.