The Watchers of the Trails: A Book of Animal Life

by Sir Charles G. D. Roberts

It was only to the outside world—to the dragon-fly, and the bird, and the chattering red squirrel in the overhanging hemlock—that the deep water under the bank looked black. To the trout in his lair, looking upward toward the sunlight, the whole pool had a golden glow. His favourite position was a narrow place between two stones, where he lay with head up-stream and belly about two inches from the sandy bottom, gently fanning the water with his party-coloured fins, and opening and closing his rosy gill-fringes as he breathed. In length he was something over twenty inches, with a thick, deep body tapering finely to the powerful tail. Like all the trout of the Clearwater, he was silver-bellied with a light pink flush, the yellow and brown markings on his sides light in tone, and his spots of the most high, intense vermilion. His great lower jaw was thrust forward in a way that gave a kind of bulldog ferocity to his expression.

The sky of the big trout's world was the flat surface of Golden Pool. From the unknown place beyond that sky there came to his eyes but moving shadows, arrangements of light and dark. He could not see out and through into the air unobstructedly, as one looks forth from a window into the world. Most of these moving shadows he understood very well. When broad and vague, they did not, as a rule, greatly interest him; but when they got small, and sharply black, he knew they might at any instant break through with a splash and become real, coloured things, probably good to eat. A certain slim little shadow was always of interest to him unless he was feeling gorged. Experience had taught him that when it actually touched the shining surface above, and lay there sprawling helplessly with wet wings, it would prove to be a May fly, which he liked. Having no rivals to get ahead of him, there was no need of haste. He would sail up with dignity, open his great jaws, and take in the tiny morsel.

Sometimes the moving shadows were large and of a slower motion, and these, if they chanced to break through, would prove to be bright-coloured moths or butterflies, or glittering beetles, or fat black and yellow bumblebees, or lean black and yellow wasps. If he was hungry, all these things were good for food, and his bony, many-toothed mouth cared nothing for stings. Sometimes when he was not at all hungry, but merely playful, he would rise with a rush at anything breaking the sheen of his roof, slap it with his tail, then seize it between his hard lips and carry it down with him, only to drop it a moment later as a child might drop a toy. Once in awhile, either in hunger or in sport, he would rise swiftly at the claws or wing-tips of a dipping swallow; but he never managed to catch the nimble bird. Had he, by any chance, succeeded, he would probably have found the feathers no obstacle to his enjoyment of the novel fare.

At times it was not a shadow, but a splash, that would attract his attention to the shining roof of his world. A grasshopper would fall in, and kick grotesquely till he rose to end its troubles. Or a misguided frog, pursued perhaps by some enemy on land, would dive in and swim by with long, webbed toes. At this sight the master of the pool would dart from his lair like a bolt from a catapult. Frogs were much to his taste. And once in a long time even a wood-mouse, hard pressed and panic-stricken, would leap in to swim across to the meadow shore. The first time this occurred the trout had risen slowly, and followed below the swimmer till assured that there was no peril concealed in the tempting phenomenon. After that, however, he always went at such prey with a ferocious rush, hurling himself half out of water in his eagerness.

But it was not only to his translucent sky that the master of the pool looked for his meat. A large part of it came down upon the current of the brook. Bugs, grubs, and worms, of land and water, some dead, others disabled or bewildered by their passage through the falls, contributed to his feasting. Above all, there were the smaller fish who were so reckless or uninformed as to try to pass through Golden Pool. They might be chub, or suckers, or red-fin; they might be—and more often were—kith and kin of his own. It was all the same to the big trout, who knew as well as any gourmet that trout were royal fare. His wide jaws and capacious gullet were big enough to accommodate a cousin a full third of his own size, if swallowed properly, head first. His speed was so great that any smaller fish which he pursued was doomed, unless fortunate enough to be within instant reach of shoal water. Of course, it must not be imagined that the great trout was able to keep his domain quite inviolate. When he was full fed, or sulking, then the finny wanderers passed up and down freely,—always, however, giving wide berth to the lair under the bank. In the bright shallows over against the other shore, the scurrying shoals of pin-fish played safely in the sun. Once in a long while a fish would pass, up or down, so big that the master of the pool was willing to let him go unchallenged. And sometimes a muskrat, swimming with powerful strokes of his hind legs, his tiny forepaws gathered childishly under his chin, would take his way over the pool to the meadow of the blue flag-flowers. The master of the pool would turn up a fierce eye, and watch the swimmer's progress breaking the golden surface into long, parabolic ripples; but he was too wise to court a trial of the muskrat's long, chisel-like teeth.

"THEY MIGHT BE—AND MORE OFTEN WERE—KITH AND KIN OF HIS OWN."

There were two occasions, never to be effaced from his sluggish memory, on which the master of the pool had been temporarily routed from his mastership and driven in a panic from his domain. Of these the less important had seemed to him by far the more appalling.

Once, on a summer noonday, when the pool was all of a quiver with golden light, and he lay with slow-waving fins close to the coldest up-gushing of the spring which cooled his lair, the shining roof of his realm had been shattered and upheaved with a tremendous splash. A long, whitish body, many times his own length, had plunged in and dived almost to the bottom. This creature swam with wide-sprawling limbs, like a frog, beating the water, and leaping, and uttering strange sounds; and the disturbance of its antics was a very cataclysm to the utmost corners of the pool. The trout had not stayed to investigate the horrifying phenomenon, but had darted madly down-stream for half a mile, through fall and eddy, rapid and shallow, to pause at last, with throbbing sides and panting gills, in a little black pool behind a tree root. Not till hours after the man had finished his bath, and put on his clothes, and strode away whistling up the shore, did the big trout venture back to his stronghold. He found it already occupied by a smaller trout, whom he fell upon and devoured, to the assuaging of his appetite and the salving of his wounded dignity. But for days he was tremulously watchful, and ready to dart away if any unusually large shadow passed over his amber ceiling. He was expecting a return of the great, white, sprawling visitor.

His second experience was one which he remembered with cunning wariness rather than with actual terror. Yet this had been a real peril, one of the gravest with which he could be confronted in the guarded precincts of Golden Pool. One day he saw a little lithe black body swimming rapidly at the surface, its head above the water. It was about ten feet away from his lair, and headed up-stream. The strange creature swam with legs, like a muskrat, instead of with fins like a fish, but it was longer and slenderer than a muskrat; and something in its sinister shape and motion, or else some stirring of an inherited instinct, filled the big trout with apprehension as he looked. Suddenly the stranger's head dipped under the surface, and the stranger's eyes sought him out, far down in his yellow gloom. That narrow-nosed, triangular head with its pointed fangs, those bright, cruel, undeceivable eyes, smote the trout with instant alarm. Here was an enemy to be avoided. The mink had dived at once, going through the water with the swiftness and precision of a fish. Few trout could have escaped. But the master of the pool, as we have seen, was no ordinary trout. The promptness of his cunning had got him under way in time. The power of his broad and muscular tail shot him forth from his lair just before the mink got there. And before the baffled enemy could change his direction, the trout was many feet away, heading up for the broken water of the rapids. The mink followed vindictively, but in the foamy stretch below the falls he lost all track of the fugitive. Angry and disappointed he scrambled ashore, and, finding a dead sucker beside his runway, seized it savagely. As he did so, there was a smart click, and the jaws of a steel trap, snapping upon his throat, rid the wilderness of one of its most bloodthirsty and implacable marauders. A half-hour later the master of the pool was back in his lair, waving his delicate, gay-coloured fins over the yellow sand, and lazily swallowing a large crayfish. One claw of the crayfish projected beyond his black jaw; and, being thus comfortably occupied, he turned an indifferent eye upon the frightened swimming of a small green frog, which had just then fallen in and disturbed the sheen of his amber roof.