Fast Water==A True Fishing Story
By Russel Lord, from Farm and Fireside
-Y
The stout man, a minister of
the Gospel snorted:
“Trouble with you, you’ve nev
er really fished! When you get
into the Yellowstone, tell you
what you do: Get some real
good fisherman to take you into
fast water. Let one of those big
rainbow trout strike at your line.
Then you’ll know what it iheans
to be alive with a fight on your
hands.”
This to a thin man with thin
hair, a writer, who had just re
marked that fishing was stupid,
and cruel, and who now with
rather elaborate gestures of non
chalance lighted a pipe and said
“Humph! You weigh some
two hundred pounds and with
both feet braced on shore. Out
there in slippery water, thresh
ing around, a miserable little
creature weighing two, four,
maybe six, pounds. You with an
intelligence that is the product
of a million years of ceaseless
evolution and four years more
at the Yale Divinity School. At
the other end of the line, a poor
fish. What a battle!”
The two sat there until the
club car was darkened and de
serted. They sat there arguing
on one subject and another, un
til half past two in the morning.
The reverend went to bed.
The writer yawned over a book.
He was leaving the train in two
hours at Bozeman, Mont., and
in some quiet corner at Boze
man he counted with yearning
on finding a white, soft, deep ho
tel bed upon which to sleep the
day out. For more than a week
he had been traveling day and
night. He was brain, nerve and
bone tired. He fell asleep in his
chair and the train had come to
the end of its ten-minute stop
in Bozeman before the porter
discovered him.
The porter did not pause to
awaken him. He simply got him
off and threw his luggage after
him. Dazed, dirty disheveled,
with a grouch on which it would
have been possible to hang
things this benighted traveler
stumbled around a hard cinder
platform in the hard, bright
light of a brand-new Montana
morning. Gropingly he sought
to collect hat, suitcase, book,
briefcase, camera and typewrit
er. Sourly he muttered unpleas
ant observations as to life and
its manifold humiliations.
Up breezed a rugged resident,
his host. “We’re going fishing!”
cried the rugged resident, whose
name was Ray Bowden. “Put
these on.”
The thin, worn creature with
the thin hair blinked and star
ed. All life, all hope, all con
sciousness of kinship with striv
ing humankind went out of his
face. Collapsing drearily amid
his scattered luggage he sadly
drew over his modish trousers
the pair of hip boots his host
forced upon him.
Now the man of whom I have
told is of course myself. Yet not
exactly so, for even f om the
dullest day to its dull ,omorvow
no man ever remains the same.
There come, moreover, certain
days at the end of which we
have changed so greatly that ev
en we, dull as usually we are in
such matters, recognize it* and
we say, as I say to you now,
‘ That day made a new man of
me.”
This was such a day, yet the
beginnings of it remain even
now vague and drab in my mem
ory. Two other men joined Ray
and me, and while I was brought
back to life with thick cups of
coffee these men kept jumping
around from one leg to another
and exclaiming, in a manner
that seemed to me highly irritat
ing and juvenile, that it would
be time to come home before we
got there.
Ray snapped his fingers and
said that he’d be a dot-dashed
something or other boob if he
hadn’t clean forgotten to dig any
bait!
Romaine Hogan, second of
the party, a Los Angeles lawyer,
frothed from under his crisp,
clipped mustache a number of
violent assertions as to the un
trustworthy memory of college
professors.
Sherman G. Phillips, a Boze
man bookseller, who never
swears, contributed the mildly
patient observation that we’d
have to dig some worms when
we got there. And “The new
man digs,” he said.
I had just enough brains to
recall certain headlines, “Get
Mr. Coolidge,” I said.
Then they all beamed upon
me. For they were fly fisher
men, all—and I had passed Test
Hn o
I do not remember much of
anything else until we came to
that narrowing of the Gallatin
Valley where the mountains
press most closely upon that
swift river at the west gate of
Yellowstone. Here we quit the
car and unslung our tackle. Ray
pointed to a deep pool slowly
whirling at the verge of a great
turn of the river. He advised
me in an excited whisper to try
that pool, withdrew, then sneak
ed up to photograph me parked
there peacefully on the back of
my lap, angling in the eastern