That is all very well for foxes. One expects to find such an idea in wise little heads. But who taught Unk Wunk to roll downhill and stick his spines full of dry leaves to scare the wood folk? And when did he learn to use the tree-tops for his swing and the wind for his motive power?
Perhaps—since most of what the wood folk know is a matter of learning, not of instinct—his mother teaches him some things that we have never yet seen. If so, Unk Wunk has more in his sleepy, stupid head than we have given him credit for, and there is a very interesting lesson awaiting him who shall first find and enter the porcupine school.
I was fishing, one September afternoon, in the pool at the foot of the lake, trying in twenty ways, as the dark evergreen shadows lengthened across the water, to beguile some wary old trout into taking my flies. They lived there, a score of them, in a dark well among the lily pads, where a cold spring bubbled up from the bottom; and their moods and humors were a perpetual source of worry or amusement, according to the humor of the fisherman himself.
For days at a time they would lie in the deep shade of the lily pads in stupid or sullen indifference. Then nothing tempted them. Flies, worms, crickets, redfins, bumblebees,—all at the end of dainty hair leaders, were drawn with crinkling wavelets over their heads, or dropped gently beside them; but they only swirled sullenly aside, grouty as King Ahab when he turned his face to the wall and would eat no bread.
At such times scores of little fish swarmed out of the pads and ran riot in the pool. Chub, shiners, "punkin-seeds," perch, boiled up at your flies, or chased each other in savage warfare through the forbidden water, which seemed to intoxicate them by its cool freshness. You had only to swing your canoe up near the shadowy edge of the pool and draw your cast once across the open water to know whether or not you would eat trout for breakfast. If the small fish chased your flies, then you might as well go home or study nature; you would certainly get no trout. But you could never tell when the change would come. With the smallest occasion sometimes—a coolness in the air, the run of a cat’s-paw breeze, a cloud shadow drifting over—a transformation would sweep over the speckled Ahabs lying deep under the lily pads. Some blind, unknown warning would run through the pool before ever a trout had changed his position. Looking over the side of your canoe you would see the little fish darting helter-skelter away among the pads, seeking safety in shallow water, leaving the pool to its tyrant masters. Now is the time to begin casting; your trout are ready to rise.