A Breeze from the Woods, 2nd Ed.

by W. C. Bartlett

It took not less than three hours to work through the interminable thickets, and to climb over the rocks, and gain a place for the first cast of a line. These mountain trout strike quick or not at all. There is a delicious, tingling sensation when the fellows jump from the eddies and swirls more than a foot out of water. You need not spit on your bait for luck, when the fish are breaking water for the hook, and the dark pools are alive with them; not very large, but with keen mountain appetites, having the brightest colors, hard of flesh, and gamy. Well, yes, here is where the fun comes in, after crawling for more than two miles through the brush, and over jagged rocks. Not the least of it is to observe that H—— has gone daft from over-excitement, and is throwing his fish into the tree-tops. What with the moon shining on his face last night, the deer coming down to tantalize him, and these mountain trout jumping wild for the hook, there is just as much lunacy as it is safe to encounter at this altitude.

The stream holds out well, and has not perceptibly diminished in a linear ascent of the mountain-side of nearly three miles. A never-failing reservoir, at an altitude of perhaps twenty-three hundred feet, creates the main branch; while lower down there is a constant augmentation from runnels, up some of which the trout find their way. It is best not to slight these little branches; for occasionally the water sinks, running underground for awhile, and then reappearing, so that a succession of pools is formed, which arrest the fish; and, having nothing to eat, they prey upon each other, until rarely more than two or three remain, and sometimes a solitary fish is left—he having ate up all his poor relations, and thus supplied their wants and his own. There is nothing very strange in this piscatory economy, after all. That bald-headed man, who lost his balance, and slid down a shelving rock nearly twenty feet into the pool, and went out on the other side, with a solitary fish dangling at his hook, and a most unearthly yell, is playing the same game in a business pool. There are more in it than can possibly succeed. One by one, he will eat up the others and become a millionaire. If a bigger fish in the pool eats him, it is only a slight variation of chances, which the commercial ethics of the times will just as heartily approve. You have made that pool desolate; but it is not necessary to yell so as to disturb the universe over a half-pound trout. If ever, O friend, you should have the luck to be drawn out of a pool thus, will there be no yelling in the subterranean caverns?

There is no heroism in jerking every fish out of the stream, just because they have keen mountain appetites. Moreover, as the rays of the sun become vertical, light is thrown into the pools and eddies, and the bites are languid and less frequent. An hour before sunset they will be as brisk as ever. But a hundred trout are enough for one morning, and too many, since no one is willing to carry them down the mountain. A year ago, an enthusiastic friend found the headwaters of the Butano, just over the ridge, toward the coast. Having cut his way out of the San Lorenzo Valley, making his own trail for seven miles or more, he cast in his hook where, he stoutly affirmed, no fisherman had ever preceded him. The falls in several places have formed deep basins in the soft, white sandstone. There this enthusiastic fisherman found his heaven for two hours, until night began to close in upon him. Did he go into a tree-top for the night, and pull his two hundred trout up after him? No; but he left them in a heap, and crept down the mountain at dusk, his pace quickened a little by the sight of a fresh bear-track. I do not think an honest bear, made fully acquainted with such sacrilegious conduct, would eat a man, or so much as smell of him.

All day long the perspective has been growing broader and richer, until these diminutive little fish, destined to be swallowed with a single snap of the jaws—even as they sought to snap the wriggling worm—have become a minor incident in the crowding events of the day. For an hour after dawn the only outlook was into the Santa Clara Valley. But the morning was cold; the thin gray smoke went up silently into the heavens from here and there a farm-house; across the valley a low column of mist clung to the foothills and rolled sullenly away. The rank vegetation of early spring, broken occasionally by the plowed fields, had all the abruptness of contrast seen in the patchwork of a bedquilt; and in the chill of the dawn was not a whit more pleasing to the eyes. But an hour later the sunlight filled all the valley; the harsher tints of the morning were melted into the more subdued glory of the spring, and one could fancy that the scent of almond blossoms came up the mountain, mingled with the grosser incense of the mold and tilth of many fields. Even the solitary stunted pine far up the mountain was dropping down its leafy spicula, like javelins cast aslant, and the last year's cones fell with a rattle, like hand grenades cast from some overhanging battlement. Life was crowding death even here, and the pine was freshening its foliage, as certain of spring time as the alder just shaking out its tassels by the river bank. Away to the southwest the Bay of Monterey, with its breadth of twenty miles, was reduced to a little patch of blue water; and wide off there was a faint trail of smoke along the horizon—the sign that a steamer was going down the coast for puncheons of wine and fleeces of wool.

The glass reveals the dome of a church at Santa Cruz, looking a little larger than a bird cage set down by the ocean. The famous picture on the ceiling of the old adobe church disappeared when the storms melted down the mud walls. If the perspective was faulty, the picture had a lively moral for bad Indians. But something better was found, not many years ago (so the village tradition runs), in one of the lofts in an old store-room near by. The Padre going up there with the village sign painter, to hunt for some half-forgotten thing, drew out of the lumber a lot of blurred and musty canvas, giving it to his friend. The latter hastened home and, unrolling his canvas, saw that upon one side there had once been a picture. But the pigment was now only powdered atoms, which a feather would sweep away. Oiling a new canvas, he laid it upon the back of the picture, and the oil striking through, the first process of restoration was safely accomplished. Then the surface of the picture was carefully cleaned. The sign painter quietly hung up his picture, satisfied that there was an infinite distance between it and a common daub. The Padre wanted the picture back after this sudden revelation of its wonderful beauty. But it never was transferred again to the old lumber room.

"What became of the Padre?"

"I think he went to heaven, where he found better pictures than were ever fished out of that old lumber room."

"And the sign painter?"

"Did you ever know a man who had a Murillo, or even thought he had one, who was in a hurry to leave this world?"