Among the Trout of the Pacific Slope. 
made expressly for the river, was per- 
haps a useless appendage. 
My companion was Captain George 
Cumming, an old-time commander of 
the days of the American racing clipper, 
and as generous, unselfish and true a 
sportsman as it has ever been my good 
fortune to meet. It is his pride that 
when in command of the Clipper 
Young America, he never met anything 
carrying sails that passed him on the 
seas. 
With his 73 years, he has the buoy- 
ancy and spirits of a boy, and it is as 
great a pleasure for him to put the gaff 
into a companion’s fish as to kill a big 
one himself. 
When I showed him my evening’s 
catch, and remarked that I had seen 
no fresh water whales, porpoises, or 
even a shark, he smiled quietly and 
said nothing. He had fished the river 
many seasons before, and preferred to 
let it speak for itself. 
By times we were out the next morn- 
ing. I did not change my rod. Stop- 
ping on a reach of the river, where a 
ledge of rock stretched diagonally 
across, and made a beautiful but not 
too strong a riff, we commenced pro- 
ceedings. 
After three or four casts, I hooked 
and landed a very pretty jumper of 
about 1 tb weight; when lengthening 
my cast to perhaps seventy feet, I saw 
a surge, like that made by a heavy sal- 
mon, and striking briskly found myself 
fast to a monster indeed. Without 
being particularly alarmed, the fish re- 
turned to his place in the stream, and I 
was lucky enough to get back most of 
my cast before he discovered that any- 
thing was amiss ; but soon the trouble 
commenced, and he raised Cain all over 
the shop. Rushing to the surface he 
made the water fly; then, surging 
311 
down, he crossed and recrossed the 
stream, making everything hum. Re- 
peating all the antics of the best of 
them and never once sulking; the little 
rod, though tried far beyond what 
should be asked of it, never ceased its 
even and deadly strain, and inch by 
inch came the struggling fish toward 
the shore. Meanwhile the dear 
Captain, with his blue eyes aflame, 
had reached me, and gaff in 
watched the proceedings with perhaps 
more excitement than I could muster 
for the occasion. 
With short but heavy rushes, the fish 
continued to resist, but time had done 
for him, that which it will do for us all, 
and eventually his huge tail and dorsal 
fin were seen more and more upon the 
surface, and at last he was brought 
within the reach of the gaff and landed 
on the grassy shore. The Captain 
slapped me on the back with one hand, 
and with the other immediately pro- 
duced a scale and in a jiffy the fish was 
hanging to its hook, while the indicator 
pointed exactly at the ten pound mark. 
The Captain avers that I sat down 
and simply gazed at that fish for half 
an hour. Perhaps I did. It was the 
largest trout I had ever taken with a 
fly. Besides I had the scales to count 
and found he had on the lateral line 
129. They were larger than on any 
trout I had heretofore seen. His. anal 
fin contained eleven rays. His color, 
more uniform than on any trout I had 
seen so high up in fresh water, being of 
a shaded hue of delicate red. The 
spots were neither very numerous nor 
were they conspicuous, but a careful ex- 
amination disclosed them evenly dis- 
tributed, and few, if any, were below 
the lateral line. There was but a slight 
trace of the flaming red streak, so 
marked a feature of the rainbow of the 
old 
hand, 
