Part 9
By sunrise the following morning we had started, with twenty miles to make over a new road part of the way, and no road at all in places, and the places were many. However, we had to hitch on to the end of the tongue but once, to snake the wagon over an otherwise impassable boulder. The rock stood a foot out of ground, stretched entirely across where the road was to be, and at an angle of 45°. The team could barely get a foothold upon the top, when the traces were let out full, and the double-tree hooked on the end of the tongue. The horses understood their business, and upon a word settled their shoulders into the collars together, the breeching gradually lifted as their knees bent a little; without a slip their iron-shod hoofs held to the hard granite, and we were up as deftly as a French dancing master would raise his hat to a lady. In travelling in the hills there is nothing so gratifying as a team whose pulling powers you can swear by; a balky horse is an engine of destruction or death; if you know his failing, shoot him before you reach the foothills.
As the sun dropped behind the range, lighting up the high peaks with his golden rays, and the pines were beginning to take on tints of darker green, we reached the head of the Park, and within three miles of our camping ground. To the right of us “Olympus,” with the dying sunlight dancing on his granite head, to the left Long’s Peak, with patches of snow here and there, towering godlike above the surrounding giants. Before us, Prospect Mountain with its rugged front far reaching above its robes of green, while around its base and toward us came leaping the beautiful mountain stream for two miles through the meadow-hued park, with scarce a willow upon its banks. What a place to cast a fly! Aye, indeed it is; and what a place it was to catch trout. But we must move on around Prospect Mountain to Ferguson’s for camp, which we make on a little eminence near a great spring and close by the cabin where we know we shall be welcome.
A late supper disposed of, and the Governor stowed away in the blankets, Ferguson and I fall talking at his broad fire-place about Horse Shoe Park and Fall River; of course trout are plenty there; he had been up the day before and knew whereof he spoke; yes, there were quite a number of tourists in the park, but the streams were not “fished out.” He rather thought that with “a pole” to every rod of the stream the fishing improved; at least for him.
Our genial friend who obeyed Joshua in the long ago, was out of bed next day sooner than I. Dick, the pony, gave me a cheerful good morning as I put in an appearance and changed his picket pin. I received his salutation as a good omen.
Breakfast over and Dick saddled, it was eight o’clock. We had five miles to go. I strapped my rod and creel to the pommel, and with a caution to the Governor’s mother not to let him fall into the spring, Ferguson and I were off. There was no occasion to hurry; if we reached the beaver-dams in Horse Shoe Park by ten o’clock we would be just in time. Experience had taught me that the two hours before noon, and after five o’clock were the hours for success.
Our route was a “cut off” without any trail, but familiar; across the Thompson, up stream, westward for a mile, we turned up a “draw” to the right, for a swale in the ridge dividing the Thompson and its tributary, Fall River. By nine o’clock we had reached the summit of the divide. Before and below us lay a beautiful park, three miles in length, by a mile in width toward its upper end, where it rounded at the base of the mountain range, giving it the shape of a horse shoe, which no doubt suggested its name. To the north it is guarded by an immense mountain of rocks, where towering and impenetrable cliffs stand out against the background of blue sky, as though the Titans had some time builded there, and mother earth had turned their castles into ruins, and left them as monuments of her power. To the south a long, low-lying, pine-covered hill, while from the range in the west with its snow covered summit and base of soft verdure, comes a limpid stream winding down through the grass-covered park, its course marked by the deeper green of the wild grass and the willows. A mile away a band of mountain sheep are feeding; they have evidently been down to water and are making their way back to their haunts in the cliffs, and whence we know they will quickly scud when they see or wind us. Ferguson longed for his rifle; it was just his luck; he had the “old girl” with him the last time, but “nary hoof” had he seen. To me they were precious hints of man’s absence, and the wilderness.
Reaching the stream we picketed the ponies in the grass to their knees; the nutritious mountain grass, the mother of cream so thick that you have to dip it out of the jug with a spoon. The ponies were happy, and I became nervous; it seemed half an hour before I could get my tackle rigged. But after I had sent my favorite gray hackle on its mission and had snatched a ten-inch trout from his native element, my nerves were braced. A second and a third followed; I heard nothing from Ferguson except the “swish” of his old cane pole above the music of the waters. The trout struck and I landed them so fast that the sport began to be monotonous, and I followed up the sound of the cane. Going round a clump of willows I discovered the old gentleman upon the edge of the pool, and that old rod going up and down with the regularity of a trip hammer, the owner combining business and sport. I asked him what he was doing; he said he was fishing, and I thought he was.
Wandering up stream, taking it leisurely, I had by noon filled my creel, and was enjoying a sandwich under the shelter of some willows, when my companion came along with his sixteen pound lard-can filled, besides a dozen upon a stick. I asked him when he intended to quit. He said he had never seen fish “bite” so; he hated to stop, and yet had all he could carry, but concluded with me that enough was as good as a feast. Then he began to banter me about my ash and lancewood, and the excess of his catch over mine. I told him to wait till some other day. It came in the course of time, upon the same stream. The trout refused everything I had, grasshoppers included. Finally I fished up an old fly-book from the depths of my coat pocket, and in it were half a dozen nameless blue-bodied flies with a mouse-colored feather upon a number six Kirby. Upon sight, I remembered to have discarded them in disgust, but I thought I would try one for luck, and lo! the mystery was solved. I had been working industriously for two hours and had two trout. Ferguson had been no more successful, but was in sight when the trout began to rise to my cast-off fly. He came down my way, wanted to know what I was using, and I gave him one; he lost that and his leader in some half-sunken brush, and I gave him another. But his good genius had deserted him; I persuaded a trout right away from his lure, and he quit in disgust, while I said never a word. Though a little sensitive upon the score of success, he was and is a genial and companionable angler, and one who can make a good cast withal, an he have proper tools.
Willow Park, an adjunct to Estes Park, through which runs a branch of the Thompson, has afforded me many a day’s sport, and is nearer to camp. Upon a memorable occasion I had been fishing down stream, when, with a well-filled creel, I encountered a gigantic boulder on the hank. Just beyond it was a pool that was suggestive; to reach the base of the boulder it was necessary to get over a little bayou of about five feet in width and three in depth. To jump it were easy but for the willows, yet I must get to that pool. Selecting a place where I think the willows will give way to my weight, I essay the leap. My feet reach the opposite hank, my body presses back the brush, but I feel a rebound that assures me of my fate. I clutch frantically at the swaying bush; it breaks in my hand, and I sit down quite helplessly, muttering a prayer till the cold water bids me shut my mouth. Emerging I hear a well defined laugh, but not being in the mind to fear the spirits that haunt these wilds, I make for the base of that boulder and the coveted pool. A moment after I discover a face bedecked with glasses upon the opposite side of the brook, and recognize the smiling countenance of a genial member of the guild looking at me through the willows.
“Oh, is that you?”
To this lucid inquiry I reply in the affirmative. “Where’s Ferguson?”
“At home, I suppose.”
“I thought I heard him fall in the creek.”
I told him I did not think Ferguson had a monopoly of the bathing privileges of the Thompson and its tributaries.
“Well, I thought it was funny.”
“Thought what was funny?”
“Why, I heard the splash, and supposed it was Ferguson; then I remembered Ferguson was a church member in good standing.”
I took my revenge by competing with my brother for the contents of that pool, and beat him by one. But to this day he greets me with a smile. When I got back to camp I learned that the Governor had been trying to follow in the footsteps of his father, and had tumbled into the spring. He had been fished out by the combined efforts of his mother and Mrs. Ferguson, and I discovered him swathed in a blanket by the kitchen stove, mad as a hornet; I shook hands with him.
Our camp is pitched in a pleasant spot, with two tall pines, a hundred feet away, for sentinels. _Coup de soleil_ is unknown in Colorado, so I prefer the sun’s rays to lightning, especially while trees seared from top to bottom are plentiful in the Park as monitors. To the right is Prospect Mountain, with its west end a beetling cliff, perhaps two thousand feet high, where I once had the buck-ague during an interview with a “big-horn.” To the left and in front, the range, where the storm-king holds high carnival, while lower down and nearer is a mountain of towers and pinnacles of brown and red and gray, carved out by that whimsical sculptor, Old Time. With the sun for my artist, the range for both his easel and background, I have lounged away many an hour under one of the old pines. My gaze wandering down the green slope to the river half a mile away, and with the weird music of the tumbling waters coming and receding on the summer breeze to help my dreams, we have together wrought out fantastic ruins and ghostly shapes to people them. A drifting cloud, perhaps, will change a barbacan to a spire, and a Doric capital to a Corinthian, or the knight panoplied to a brownie with a lily for a throne, and
“......jolly satyrs, full of fresh delight,
Come dancing forth, and with them nimbly ledd
Faire Helenore, with girlonds all bespredd,
Whom their May-lady they had newly made;”
to give place again, as the golden meshes weave, to cowled monks or ladies, fair, as suits the whim of the artist’s patron. Again, the goblins of the range begin their game of nine-pins, and the fleecy clouds that have been slowly drifting, drifting all the day, settle down upon the mountain top and change from white to gray and from gray to black as the sport grows furious. Something these elves must have to light up their frolic, and presently it comes in great flashes of wicked steel-blue and red, zigzaging down the mountain side, or in straight blinding bolts that rive paths in the hard granite, scattering the loose rock and shivering the pines, while the noise of the jolly nine-pins rattles and re-echoes among the crags, and dies away to come again more quickly, until the mountain-top is a sheet of lurid flame and the din unceasing, so closely follows peal upon peal. The game is too violent to last, but the gnomes love to hug the range in their pastime, and I, understanding the signs, and having no fear of their electric lights, watch the fast growing rift of azure that crowds hard upon the driving blackness. At last the mellow rays touch up my mountain ruins, and they are arrayed in new splendors and peopled with other phantoms.
So I have dreamed, and might go on dreaming, but this time I am brought back to the green slope and a little figure. The Governor is toiling up the trail with a quart bucket, his special chattel, from the spring, whence he volunteered to bring a drink for his mother. I can see no impediment in his path, yet he stumbles and falls. Would I had been there to warn him; but the water is spilled. He does not cry, but gathers himself and his property up, and goes back to begin his task over again. Just then there came to me pat, an aphorism, I think, of “Poor Goldsmith”: “True greatness consists not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall;” and I took it as an omen of good for the boy.
The time is approaching when we must break camp and go back to the brick and mortar and the realities of civilization. Duties to be performed will be undertaken with better zest when I get to them, but I cast lingering looks toward my mountain ruins as the day of departure draws nigh. I even have a thought that it would be pleasant to relapse into barbarism, if out of such as mine our civilization has grown—we might build up a better. As this may not be, I am encouraged by the thought that another season will come, and with hope in my heart I am better prepared for the work awaiting me. I know that I shall go back with a fresher feeling for my kind, and more charity. So when one September morning, after a day of gray mist hanging over the range, the wind comes down chill from the heights, and the morning sun lights up my castles and pinnacles in diadems of new-fallen snow, I say we must be off. We gather together our lares of nomadic life, and with a regretful farewell to those I cannot bring away, we make the journey home, a better man and woman, with a nut-brown, healthy boy, for much of which I give credit to the artificial fly, and the beautiful denizens of the mountain streams.
FLY FISHING IN THE YOSEMITE.
By A. Louis Miner, Jr.
A merry party had come for a holiday to the Yosemite, and their camp was established between the north and south domes near the forks of the Merced. Toward the east the Tenajo Canon opened, revealing through its vista of granite crags the highest peak of “Clouds’ Rest,” crowned with eternal snows. Westward, the Sentinel Rock, like a minaret among the domes, pierced the sky.
There were seven in the party, including a heathen from the flowery kingdom, almond-eyed—Ah Yang. His nominal function was to do as he was bid, and serve as man of all work, but in reality he ruled; and ruled with a rod of iron. Yang had been induced to come by motives purely sordid; but the others, aside from seeing the wondrous valley, had various reasons for making the journey.
The Judge came for relaxation. He needed it. For the last dozen years he had devoted himself to reading the morning papers, lunching at his club, and entertaining his friends sumptuously at dinner.
His wife, who, in the levelling atmosphere of camp, came to be styled the _Judgess_, imagined herself on the verge of a decline, and sought recuperation in the forest. If the Judgess were described as fat and forty, omitting the fair, the description would fall far short of truth. In spite of her ailments, the Judgess would have enjoyed herself in a way, had it not been for the young woman she was chaperoning. This was Madge. Certain young men in San Francisco called her a _rattler_, and certainly there was nothing slow about her. The chief end of her existence, at home and everywhere, seemed to be the pursuit of fun; to this end she flirted with anything that came in her way, from stray herdsmen on the plains to an English baronet at a Yosemite hotel. When nothing else was at hand, and to the Judgess’ indignation, she flirted with the Judge. With charming zest she played continued games of poker with him till his honor’s purse was far thinner than its owner. The Judge’s admiration for Madge was profound, but after an hour at cards, he would usually remark, “that girl has the devil in her, _as it were_, bigger than a wolf.”
It is said that all men have a ruling passion. Be that as it may, a passion certainly ruled a worthy clergyman of the company. The men of our generation affected with beetle mania are many, but his Reverence was absolutely devoted to bugs. The Judgess, a zealot to such a degree that Mary of England was but lukewarm in comparison, said that his Reverence valued a butterfly more than a human soul; and Madge insisted that, while he pretended to read his office, he was engaged in dissecting a coleoptera or something.
The Doctor, who was Madge’s unworthy brother, had come with the avowed intention of sketching. All the long way from San Francisco he had been at work with brushes and blotting paper. Often the “prairie schooner,” in which the party travelled, had “lain to” while the Doctor washed in patches of blue and white to represent cloud-effects, or a jagged gray band against streaks of orange, portraying sunrise in the Sierras.
The last member of the party without professional distinction, and familiarly called “Jack,” had also a _penchant_, though many years had passed since it had been gratified. When they had left the San Joaquin plain and its sluggish rivers oozing their way through mud and reeds, and had climbed into the mountain, a halt was made in a deep canon. Here was a stream indeed. How blithely it danced along, eager to find the Golden Gate and the Pacific! How it sang to Jack of fellow streams near the other ocean! How it whispered of trout streams ahead! Presently a long-cherished fly book was produced and Jack was poring over it. His Reverence, attracted by the little volume, looked over Jack’s shoulder. He was entranced. A volume of ecclesiastical Latin would not have interested him half so much. He began to criticise and expound. Some were perfect. Some were caricatures of diptera. The other members of the party drew around. “Pooh!” said the Doctor, “I hope you don’t expect to catch any trout with those things in Yosemite! Everybody knows that the Merced trout don’t take the fly.” The Doctor went on to say, “that with a common string, such as any grocer would use to tie up a package of tea, a good strong hook, and a worm,” he would catch in the same time, more fish than could all the sportsmen of California, fishing with fancy flies.
The Doctor, like most cynics, was somewhat given to hyperbole.
During the remainder of the journey into the valley, Jack felt himself regarded as the victim of a mild hallucination.
The Doctor could sketch; beetles were awaiting his Reverence’s microscope; flirtation and frolic were dawning on Madge’s horizon; even the Judge and Judgess could get rid of a stone or two avoirdupois if they tried; but poor Jack had come, it appeared, to fish, and there were no fish to catch, or at least to catch with a fly. Such was the tradition, and so the Doctor had asserted, and no one ever disputed the Doctor excepting Yang, the Chinaman.
Our friends had been revelling in the enchantments of the valley a week; had climbed the trails that crept zig-zag up the dizzy heights; had spent hours among the soft mist and rainbows at the first landing of that wonder of the world, the Yosemite Falls; and still Jack had not accomplished the cherished desire of his heart. He had not the moral courage to take from its swaddling clothes his beloved rod (which the Doctor would persist in calling “your fish-pole”). Never had he so longed to cast a fly; but he thought, of the teasing Madge and waited. At best, he was but a poor male creature. Madge, in his place, would have been whipping the stream, with defiance and determination, an hour after her arrival.
His Reverence and the Doctor had arranged to ascend Clouds’ Rest on a Thursday and return next day. Early Thursday morning, before Yang or the birds were stirring, Jack sauntered forth to his morning bath in the icy waters of the river. This Rio, de la Merced, would it prove to him indeed a _river of mercy_, or a river of humiliation? But what a glorious stream it was! Here it glided through wooded banks, the opposite side black in the shadow of overhanging manzanita, while nearer the rippling waters were checkered with the shadows of the cotton-wood leaves, trembling in the growing light. Further on, the river whirled and eddied around great boulders, resting among the mossy rocks in deep, dark pools, bordered with fern and flecked with patches of lace-like foam. Further still, it wound silently through the sedges, reflecting on its glassy surface the storaied-carved Cathedral Rocks, or the huge mass of El Capitan. Here was an ideal trout stream, but were there trout in it! No doubt, for the Doctor had taken his grocers’ string and a worm and a veritable pole, and after a day’s tramp had returned to camp wet, hungry, in a sulphurous mood, but with four unmistakable trout. These, served up the next morning, were appropriated by the Judgess, and made an excellent appetizer to more abundant bacon and flap-jacks.
Jack had reached that pearl of waters, the Mirror Lake, and was watching the marvellous beauties pictured on its bosom, when suddenly there was a soft plash, the sleeping depths were troubled, a circling ripple crept toward him, and Jack’s pulses bounded. A trout had risen!
Through the dewy chaparral and the fragrant whispering pines, our friend hurried back to camp in a fever of impatience. He tried to help Yang with breakfast, but was told by that dignitary to “giv’ us a rest,” and so humbly retired. He then waked his Reverence. He wakened the Doctor and was greeted by language far from complimentary. He aroused the Judgess, and was pierced with daggers from her eyes while she hurriedly adjusted her teeth.
After breakfast more torturing delays, the Judgess declined to join the mountain party. The others must not think that she feared to ride the mules, for she adored mountain climbing, and the exercise and all that. (This was a dreadful fib, which was probably made use of at her next confession.) Both the Judge and herself were pining for a few refinements of life at the hotel. Without napkins and finger-bowls, life became a burden. The poor Judge had to acquiesce and said: “She wants a little civilization _as it were_.” Then Jack rebelled. There was a general confusion, in the midst of which Yang began to fire his pistol. This pistol was the idol of his pagan soul, and his frequent salutes the terror of the party. No one dared to interfere. At this time the volley was continued and promiscuous. The Judgess screamed, and having no immediate revenge in the shape of ill-cooked dinners to fear, sharply expostulated. Thereupon Yang, with utmost _sang froid_, told her to “shut your head” and journey to regions he had probably heard the Doctor name. This was too much. The Judgess climbed into the wagon and stated her opinion of people who permitted such “goings on” and of a priest who allowed a Christian woman to be sworn at. Madge was convulsed with laughter, even his Reverence smiled, while the Judge, poor man, looking as if every brewery on the continent had been burned, snapped his whip, and the wagon was lost to sight beneath the arching sequoias.
It was high noon when the sure-footed mules had arrived and the party fairly started off. Jack waved an adieu with one hand, and with the other reached down his rod from the branches of a live oak. Yang proceeded to dissect a sucker he had caught for bait, saying: “If you fishee, me fishee too, but j’ou no sabee nothing.”