64 



Rod, Gun, and Palette in the High Rockies 



day, after elk next week, so you might as well get into training 

 now." 



Arthur is obedient, be it observed, but to the discerning eye 

 may be seen to have his own thoughts on the matter. There are 

 few who make such a cheerful virtue of necessity. 



The passage to the trouting grounds, the same stretch of 

 water as was visited on the day before, was made almost fault- 

 lessly, with but a single shoaling, and the cook and captain bold 

 overboard to tow the gallant and sievelike craft off a bar only once. 

 On the way up, a colony of barn-swallows' nests were noted 

 beneath the edge of a cut bank overhanging the water. Bee-hive 

 shaped, of clay, each with its little round doorway at the apex, 

 they stuck out horizontally from the face of the bank. A grebe 

 or two made his jerky twisting plunge, and odd pairs of duck 



squawked away before our passage. 

 A heron lazily rose and trailed off 

 over the willow tops to a new 

 solitude. The very spirit of after- 

 noon peace was in the land. 



Quite a breeze, fitfully dying 

 down at intervals, ruffled the water 

 on reaching the fishing ground. 

 Rods set up and leaders bent on, the 

 triad went to work. Art working 

 down, and Bill and his scholar up- 

 stream, with a passing salutation 

 to a solitary and hopeless rancher 

 on the opposite bank, who was 

 pessimistically experimenting with 

 grasshoppers. There was nothing 

 doing either side of the stream for 

 some minutes. Then the artist and 

 William simultaneously hooked a two-pound whitefish apiece. 

 In the course of the fishing period William hooked and landed 

 one more, rather to his own and the artist's boredom, for the 

 whitefish is not a pretty fish, with coarse scaling, an evil neutral 

 gray-green color, and a sucker mouth. 



The fishers waded and worked under the edge of thick willow 

 brush, its topmost branches a dozen feet high. This called for 



