nd slowly unwind my bait, I was almost always rewarded
by a lively mountain trout as long as my hand, for they never ran over
six inches. The grasshopper was absolutely deadly; no fish seemed able
to resist it, and sometimes in ten minutes I took six, or even ten, out
of a pool as big as an ordinary dining-room table. The fact of the
matter is that the greatest difficulty lay in getting to the water. When
I fished up stream into the narrow gorge through which the creek ran, I
often walked four or five miles before I got the small tin bucket, which
was my creel, half full; yet I knew that if I could have really fished
five hundred yards of it I might have gone home with a full catch.

But it was not so much the fishing as the strange solitude, the thick,
lonely brush, that made such excursions pleasant. Every now and again I
came to a spur of the mountains, and climbed up into the open and lay
among the red barked bull-pines. If I went a little higher I could
catch sight of the dun-coloured hills which ran down, as I knew, to the
waters of Kamloops Lake, only five miles distant. If I felt hungry, I
could easily light a fire and broil the trout; with a bit of bread,
carried in my pocket, and a draught from a spring or the creek itself, I
made a hearty meal. And all day long I saw no human being. Every now and
again I might come across a half-wild bullock or a wilder horse, or see
the track of a wolf, but that was all, save the song of the birds, the
wind among the trees, and the ceaseless murmurs of the creek. In the
evening I made my way back in time to give the cook what I had caught.

In California I used to fish in the small creek running at the back of
Los Guilucos Ranch, Sonoma County, and, though the trout were by no
means so plentiful there as in British Columbia, I often caught two or
three dozen in the afternoon. But there I had to use worms, and they
seemed far less attractive than the soft, sweet body of the grasshopper.
Yet once I caught a very large fish for that part of the country. He was
evidently a fish with a history, as I caught him in a big tank sunk in
the earth, which supplied the ranch, and was itself supplied by a long
flume. As I went home past this tank one day I carelessly dropped the
bait in, and it was instantly seized by a trout I knew to be larger than
I had yet hooked. But, though he was big, he had very little chance. The
smooth sides of the tank afforded him no hole to rush for, and, afte