clothes, and strode away whistling
up the shore, did the big trout venture back to his stronghold. He
found it already occupied by a smaller trout, whom he fell upon and
devoured, to the assuaging of his appetite and the salving of his
wounded dignity. But for days he was tremulously watchful, and ready
to dart away if any unusually large shadow passed over his amber
ceiling. He was expecting a return of the great, white, sprawling
visitor.

His second experience was one which he remembered with cunning
wariness rather than with actual terror. Yet this had been a real
peril, one of the gravest with which he could be confronted in the
guarded precincts of Golden Pool. One day he saw a little lithe black
body swimming rapidly at the surface, its head above the water. It was
about ten feet away from his lair, and headed up-stream. The strange
creature swam with legs, like a muskrat, instead of with fins like a
fish, but it was longer and slenderer than a muskrat; and something in
its sinister shape and motion, or else some stirring of an inherited
instinct, filled the big trout with apprehension as he looked.
Suddenly the stranger's head dipped under the surface, and the
stranger's eyes sought him out, far down in his yellow gloom. That
narrow-nosed, triangular head with its pointed fangs, those bright,
cruel, undeceivable eyes, smote the trout with instant alarm. Here was
an enemy to be avoided. The mink had dived at once, going through the
water with the swiftness and precision of a fish. Few trout could have
escaped. But the master of the pool, as we have seen, was no ordinary
trout. The promptness of his cunning had got him under way in time.
The power of his broad and muscular tail shot him forth from his lair
just before the mink got there. And before the baffled enemy could
change his direction, the trout was many feet away, heading up for the
broken water of the rapids. The mink followed vindictively, but in the
foamy stretch below the falls he lost all track of the fugitive. Angry
and disappointed he scrambled ashore, and, finding a dead sucker
beside his runway, seized it savagely. As he did so, there was a
smart click, and the jaws of a steel trap, snapping upon his throat,
rid the wilderness of one of its most bloodthirsty and implacable
marauders. A half-hour later the master of the pool was back in his
lair, waving his delicate, gay-coloured fins over the yellow sand, and
lazily swallowing a large crayfish.