Eddie's fishing. What
there was about this brown, red-tailed joke that tickled the fancy of
those great silly trout, who would have nothing to do with any other
lure, is not for me to say. The creature certainly looked like nothing
that ever lived, or that they could ever have imagined before. It seemed
to me a particularly idiotic combination and I could feel my respect
for the intelligence of trout waning. Eddie agreed with me as to that.
He said he had merely bought the thing because it happened to be the
only fly he didn't have in his collection and there had been a vacant
place in his fly-book. He said it was funny the trout should go for it
as they did, and he laughed a good deal about it. I suppose it was
funny, but I did not find it very amusing. And how those crazy-headed
trout did act. In vain I picked out flies with the red and brown colors
and tossed them as carefully as I could in just the same spots where
Eddie was getting those great whoppers at every cast. Some mysterious
order from the high priest of all trout had gone forth that morning,
prohibiting every sort and combination of trout food except this absurd
creature of which the oldest and mossiest trout had never dreamed. That
was why they went for it. It was the only thing not down on the list of
proscribed items.

There was nothing for me to do at last but to paddle Eddie around and
watch him do some of the most beautiful fishing I have ever seen, and to
net his trout for him, and take off the fish, and attend to any other
little wants incident to a fisherman's busy day. I did it with as good
grace as I could, of course, and said I enjoyed it, and tried not to be
nasty and disagreeable in my attitude toward the trout, the water,
Eddie, and the camp and country in general. But, after all, it is a
severe test, on a day like that, to cast and cast and change flies until
you have wet every one in your book, without even a rise, and to see the
other chap taking great big black and mottled fellows--to see his rod
curved like a whip and to watch the long, lithe body leaping and
gleaming in the net.

But the final test, the climax, was to come at evening. For when the
fish would no longer rise, even to the Red Tag, we pulled up to the
camp, where Eddie of course reported to the guides his triumph and my
discomfiture. Then, just as he was opening his fly-book to put the
precious red-tailed mockery away, he suddenly stopped and stared at me,
hesitated, an