Sometimes we crashed through bracken;anon,where the blackberries grew rankest,we found a lonely little cemetery,the wooden rails all awry and the pitiful,stumpy head-stones nodding drunkenly at the soft green mullions.Then,with oaths and the sound of rent underwood,a yoke of mighty bulls would swing down a "skid"road,hauling a forty-foot log along a rudely made slide.
A valley full of wheat and cherry-trees succeeded,and halting at a house,we bought ten-pound weight of luscious black cherries for something less than a rupee,and got a drink of icy-cold water for nothing,while the untended team browsed sagaciously by the road-side.Once we found a way-side camp of horse-dealers lounging by a pool,ready for a sale or a swap,and once two sun-tanned youngsters shot down a hill on Indian ponies,their full creels banging from the high-pommelled saddle.They had been fishing,and were our brethren,therefore.We shouted aloud in chorus to scare a wild cat;we squabbled over the reasons that had led a snake to cross a road;we heaved bits of bark at a venturesome chipmunk,who was really the little gray squirrel of India,and had come to call on me;we lost our way,and got the wagon so beautifully fixed on a khud-bound road that we had to tie the two hind wheels to get it down.
Above all,California told tales of Nevada and Arizona,of lonely nights spent out prospecting,the slaughter of deer and the chase of men,of woman--lovely woman--who is a firebrand in a Western city and leads to the popping of pistols,and of the sudden changes and chances of Fortune,who delights in making the miner or the lumber-man a quadruplicate millionaire and in "busting"the railroad king.
That was a day to be remembered,and it had only begun when we drew rein at a tiny farm-house on the banks of the Clackamas and sought horse feed and lodging,ere we hastened to the river that broke over a weir not a quarter of a mile away.Imagine a stream seventy yards broad divided by a pebbly island,running over seductive "riffles"and swirling into deep,quiet pools,where the good salmon goes to smoke his pipe after meals.Get such a stream amid fields of breast-high crops surrounded by hills of pines,throw in where you please quiet water,long-fenced meadows,and a hundred-foot bluff just to keep the scenery from growing too monotonous,and you will get some faint notion of the Clackamas.The weir had been erected to pen the Chenook salmon from going further up-stream.We could see them,twenty or thirty pounds,by the score in the deep pools,or flying madly against the weir and foolishly skinning their noses.They were not our prey,for they would not rise at a fly,and we knew it.All the same,when one made his leap against the weir,and landed on the foot-plank with a jar that shook the board I was standing on,Iwould fain have claimed him for my own capture.
Portland had no rod.He held the gaff and the whiskey.
California sniffed up-stream and down-stream,across the racing water,chose his ground,and let the gaudy fly drop in the tail of a riffle.I was getting my rod together,when I heard the joyous shriek of the reel and the yells of California,and three feet of living silver leaped into the air far across the water.
The forces were engaged.
The salmon tore up-stream,the tense line cutting the water like a tide-rip behind him,and the light bamboo bowed to breaking.
What happened thereafter I cannot tell.California swore and prayed,and Portland shouted advice,and I did all three for what appeared to be half a day,but was in reality a little over a quarter of an hour,and sullenly our fish came home with spurts of temper,dashes head on and sarabands in the air,but home to the bank came he,and the remorseless reel gathered up the thread of his life inch by inch.We landed him in a little bay,and the spring weight in his gorgeous gills checked at eleven and one half pounds.Eleven and one half pounds of fighting salmon!We danced a war-dance on the pebbles,and California caught me round the waist in a hug that went near to breaking my ribs,while he shouted:--"Partner!Partner!This is glory!Now you catch your fish!Twenty-four years I've waited for this!"I went into that icy-cold river and made my cast just above the weir,and all but foul-hooked a blue-and-black water-snake with a coral mouth who coiled herself on a stone and hissed male-dictions.
The next cast--ah,the pride of it,the regal splendor of it!the thrill that ran down from finger-tip to toe!Then the water boiled.He broke for the fly and got it.There remained enough sense in me to give him all he wanted when he jumped not once,but twenty times,before the up-stream flight that ran my line out to the last half-dozen turns,and I saw the nickelled reel-bar glitter under the thinning green coils.My thumb was burned deep when I strove to stopper the line.
I did not feel it till later,for my soul was out in the dancing weir,praying for him to turn ere he took my tackle away.And the prayer was heard.As I bowed back,the butt of the rod on my left hip-bone and the top joint dipping like unto a weeping willow,he turned and accepted each inch of slack that I could by any means get in as a favor from on high.There lie several sorts of success in this world that taste well in the moment of enjoyment,but I question whether the stealthy theft of line from an able-bodied salmon who knows exactly what you are doing and why you are doing it is not sweeter than any other victory within human scope.Like California's fish,he ran at me head on,and leaped against the line,but the Lord gave me two hundred and fifty pairs of fingers in that hour.The banks and the pine-trees danced dizzily round me,but I only reeled--reeled as for life--reeled for hours,and at the end of the reeling continued to give him the butt while he sulked in a pool.
