The Pool
The current that went circling through its depths, keeping them always crystal pure and sweet, was so leisurely that the clear brown mirror of the surface was never broken, unless by some slow-wandering foam-cluster eddied in from the frothy little falls outside, or by the dropping of a leaf, or by the sluggish rise of a trout to some unwary skimming fly.
To the fish that dwelt in it the pool was an abiding place of perfection. It was deep; but the entrance to it was narrow and shoal, just spacious enough for the slow interchange of waters with the vivifying outer current. At the same time this entrance was so set that innumerable choice morsels, fly and beetle, grub and berry, having been battered down over the falls, were then persuasively swept into it. It was darkly overhung by great-limbed water-ash and maple; but when the sun was some two or three hours past noon its downpour reached and flooded the surface and made very wholesome basking. The bottom, moreover, offered a judicious variety of attraction. For some way in from the entrance it was of a clean bright sand, more or less broken with stones. While the inner portion, right up to the perpendicular banks and the jutting tree-roots, was floored with silted mud, fruitful in the small, ephemeral water-growths of herb and insect.
The fish inhabiting the delectable pool were all big ones, except for a few scattered young fry which dwelt precariously in the extremest shallows where the big ones could not come at them. And the fish were of just two kinds, the trout and the suckers. The suckers, lazy, pig-like, inoffensive beings, congregated over the stretch of mud, from whose fat surface their small, round, defenseless, downward-opening mouths sucked up their sustenance incessantly. Their bulk, and the power of their sinewy tails, alone protected them from the trout, whose wide, rapacious jaws and insatiable appetite were effective in keeping the size of all the pool-dwellers up to standard.
The trout, as a rule, had none of the reposefulness of the suckers. They ranged restlessly, now over the mud reaches, now over the sand and rocks, wherever quarry, large or small, might perhaps be encountered. Frequently one or another would flash out through the narrow exit, to hunt and test its strength in the bright turmoil of the rapids. And from time to time one would return lazily, perhaps with the tail of a smaller relation sticking out of its mouth, and settle down under the bank to digest its heavy meal.
To the pair of great fish-hawks, whose huge, untidy nest, like a cart-load of sticks and rubbish, filled the top of a tall dead pine-tree half a mile above the falls, the pool was a ceaseless aggravation. In the continual flight up and downstream their keen eyes were wont to search the pool enviously. But the big fish swimming so calmly in its depths were safe from them, because it was so overhung that they were unable to swoop down upon it with any effective speed. In the clear open they could drop like a wedge of steel, and flick up a darting trout from the very lip of the fall. But the pool they could reach only by a deliberate, flapping approach which gave even the drowsiest basker ample time to seek refuge in the safe depths.
But there was one wild fisherman whom the pool suited exactly. A big half-submerged root, jutting out for about three feet directly over that section of the pool where the suckers congregated, afforded the great lynx just the post of vantage which he loved. Here he would lie in wait for an hour at a time, patient and immobile as the root on which he crouched. His round, black, savage moon-face, with its pale eyes bright and hard, its stiff whiskers, and its tufted ears, would be held down so close to the glassy surface that the confused reflections of the overhanging branches were unable to interfere with his vision, and he could see with perfect clearness every detail of the transparent depths. He would stare with endless craving at the massive suckers which lay placidly mouthing the mud; but nothing could ever bring them near the surface, so he knew nothing of them but that they were fat and looked very desirable.
But it was the trout that chiefly concerned him. They had none of the fat placidity of the suckers. One or another of them, with his gold and silver and vermilion glinting up through the pellucid gloom, would be forever on the move, quartering the bottom for caddis and beetle, and now and then sailing up toward the surface to investigate some floating atom that may chance to be a fly. Sometimes it was a fly, or a moth, or a caterpillar or some edible berry. And sometimes, too, the slow circling of the current in the pool would bring it close to that still watcher on the root before it caught the eye of the feeding fish. Then the sinews of the watcher would grow rigid, his claws protrude from their sheaths, a little green flame flicker spectrally in his eyes. As the trout came slanting up on scarlet fin, shouldered the surface apart, and sucked down the morsel, out from the root above him would flash a wide-taloned paw, unerring, inescapable, scooping him from his element, and in half a second he would be flopping convulsively among the wintergreen leaves, far up the bank. In the next half of that fatal second the lynx would be upon him with an exultant pounce, holding down his slippery struggles with both forepaws, and biting through the back of his massive neck.