Part 25

For an instant you allow the flies to drift downstream, to be floated here and there by idle little eddies, to be sucked down and spat out of tiny suction-holes. Then cautiously you draw them across the surface of the waters. Thump--thump--thump--your heart slows up with disappointment. Then mysteriously, like the stirring of the waters by some invisible hand, the molten silver is broken in its smoothness. The Royal Coachman quietly disappears. With all the brakes shrieking on your desire to shut your eyes and heave a mighty heave, you depress your butt and strike.

Then in the twilight the battle. No leisure is here, only quivering, intense, agonized anxiety. The affair transcends the moment. Purposes and necessities of untold ages have concentrated, so that somehow back of your consciousness rest hosts of disembodied hopes, tendencies, evolutionary progressions, all breathless lest you prove unequal to the struggle for which they have been so long preparing.

Responsibility--vast, vague, formless--is yours. Only the fact that you are wholly occupied with the exigence of the moment prevents your understanding of what it is, but it hovers dark and depressing behind your possible failure. You must win. This is no fish; it is opportunity itself, and once gone it will never return. The mysticism of lower dusk in the forest, of upper afterglow on the hills, of the chill of evening waters and winds, of the glint of strange phantoms under the darkness of cliffs, of the whisperings and shoutings of Things you are too busy to identify out in the gray of North Country awe--all these menace you with indeterminate dread. Knee-deep, waist-deep, swift water, slack water, downstream, upstream, with red eyes straining into the dimness, with every muscle taut and every nerve quivering, you follow the ripping of your line. You have consecrated yourself to the uttermost. The minutes stalk by you gigantic. You are a stable pin-point in whirling phantasms. And you are very little, very small, very inadequate among these Titans of circumstance.

Thrice he breaks water, a white and ghostly apparition from the deep. Your heart stops with your reel, and only resumes its office when again the line sings safely. The darkness falls, and with it, like the mysterious strength of Sir Gareth's opponent, falls the power of your adversary. His rushes shorten. The blown world of your uncertainty shrinks to the normal. From the haze of your consciousness, as through a fog, loom the old familiar forest, and the hills, and the River. Slowly you creep from that strange enchanted land. The sullen trout yields. In all gentleness you float him within reach of your net. Quietly, breathlessly you walk ashore, and over the beach, and yet an unnecessary hundred feet from the water lest he retain still a flop. Then you lay him upon the stones and lift up your heart in rejoicing.

How you get to camp you never clearly know. Exultation lifts your feet. Wings, wings, O ye Red Gods, wings to carry the body whither the spirit hath already soared, and stooped, and circled back in impatience to see why still the body lingers! Ordinarily you can cross the riffles above the Halfway Pool only with caution and prayer and a stout staff craftily employed. This night you can--and do--splash across hand-free, as recklessly as you would wade a little brook. There is no stumble in you, for you have done a great deed, and the Red Gods are smiling.

Through the trees glows a light, and in the centre of that light are leaping flames, and in the circle of that light stand, rough-hewn in orange, the tent and the table and the waiting figures of your companions. You stop short, and swallow hard, and saunter into camp as one indifferent.

Carelessly you toss aside your creel--into the darkest corner, as though it were unimportant--nonchalantly you lean your rod against the slant of your tent, wearily you seat yourself and begin to draw off your drenched garments. Billy bends toward the fire. Dick gets you your dry clothes. Nobody says anything, for everybody is hungry. No one asks you any questions, for on the River you get in almost any time of night.

Finally, as you are hanging your wet things near the fire, you inquire casually over your shoulder,--

"Dick, have any luck?"

Dick tells you. You listen with apparent interest. He has caught a three-pounder. He describes the spot and the method and the struggle. He is very much pleased. You pity him.

The three of you eat supper, lots of supper. Billy arises first, filling his pipe. He hangs water over the fire for the dish-washing. You and Dick sit hunched on a log, blissfully happy in the moments of digestion, ruminative, watching the blaze. The tobacco smoke eddies and sucks upward to join the wood smoke. Billy moves here and there in the fulfilment of his simple tasks, casting his shadow wavering and gigantic against the fire-lit trees. By-and-by he has finished. He gathers up the straps of Dick's creel, and turns to the shadow for your own. He is going to clean the fish. It is the moment you have watched for. You shroud yourself in profound indifference.

"Sacré!" shrieks Billy.

You do not even turn your head.

"Jumping giraffes! why, it's a whale!" cries Dick.

You roll a blasé eye in their direction, as though such puerile enthusiasm wearies you.

"Yes, it's quite a little fish," you concede.

They swarm down upon you, demanding particulars. These you accord laconically, a word at a time, in answer to direct question, between puffs of smoke.

"At the Narrows. Royal Coachman. Just before I came in. Pretty fair fight. Just at the edge of the eddy." And so on. But your soul glories.

The tape-line is brought out. Twenty-nine inches it records. Holy smoke, what a fish! Your air implies that you will probably catch three more just like him on the morrow. Dick and Billy make tracings of him on the birch bark. You retain your lofty calm: but inside you are little quivers of rapture. And when you awake, late in the night, you are conscious, first of all, that you are happy, happy, happy, all through; and only when the drowse drains away do you remember why.

XVIII.

MAN WHO WALKS BY MOONLIGHT.

We had been joined on the River by friends. "Doug," who never fished more than forty rods from camp, and was always inventing water-gauges, patent indicators, and other things, and who wore in his soft slouch hat so many brilliant trout flies that he irresistibly reminded you of flower-decked Ophelia; "Dinnis," who was large and good-natured, and bubbling and popular; Johnny, whose wide eyes looked for the first time on the woods-life, and whose awe-struck soul concealed itself behind assumptions; "Jim," six feet tall and three feet broad, with whom the season before I had penetrated to Hudson Bay; and finally, "Doc," tall, granite, experienced, the best fisherman that ever hit the river. With these were Indians. Buckshot, a little Indian with a good knowledge of English; Johnnie Challán, a half-breed Indian, ugly, furtive, an efficient man about camp; and Tawabinisáy himself. This was an honour due to the presence of Doc. Tawabinisáy approved of Doc. That was all there was to say about it.

After a few days, inevitably the question of Kawágama came up. Billy, Johnnie Challán, and Buckshot squatted in a semi-circle, and drew diagrams in the soft dirt with a stick. Tawabinisáy sat on a log and overlooked the proceedings. Finally he spoke.

"Tawabinisáy" (they always gave him his full title; we called him Tawáb) "tell me lake you find he no Kawágama," translated Buckshot. "He called Black Beaver Lake."

"Ask him if he'll take us to Kawágama," I requested.

Tawabinisáy looked very doubtful.

"Come on, Tawáb," urged Doc, nodding at him vigorously. "Don't be a clam. We won't take anybody else up there."

The Indian probably did not comprehend the words, but he liked Doc.