ome 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
checked him at eleven and a half pounds. Eleven and a half pounds of
fighting salmon! We danced a war dance on the pebbles, and California
caught me around 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 a weir, and
all but foul-hooked a blue and black water-snake with a coral mouth who
coiled herself on a stone and hissed maledictions. The next cast--ah,
the pride of it, the regal splendor of it! the thrill that ran down from
finger-tip to toe! 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 upstream flight that ran my
line out to the last half-dozen turns, and I saw the nickeled reelbar
glitter under the thinning green coils. My thumb was burned deep when I
strove to stopper the line, but I did not feel it till later, for my
soul was out in the dancing water praying for him to turn ere he took my
tackle away. 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 I accepted each inch of slack that I could by any
means get in as a favor from on high. There be 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 around me, but I only 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. California was farther up the reach, and with
the corner of my eye I could see him casting with long casts and much
skill. Then he struck, and my fish broke for the weir at the same
instant, and down the reach went California and I, reel answering r