The Trout of the Great Forest 129 



not only restocked annually by the State of California, but 

 the country maintains a fine hatchery at Brookdale, and 

 when the season opens in May the sport is at the best. 

 The habitues of the streams catch the hard-fighting steel- 

 heads, and it was my good fortune to see them in many 

 places. I found a small school of possibly three-pounders 

 lying beneath the shelter of a bunch of seaweed offshore 

 at Capitola, and in September I stood on the sands at this 

 attractive hamlet where the Soquel has broken down the 

 cliffs and made a little laguna, and saw them entering the 

 stream from the sea, collecting for the long run up stream, 

 then I found the Soquel under the shadow of the redwoods 

 five or more miles up from the laguna, and fished it up and 

 down, even in the pools of its branches which rose in the 

 very heart of the Santa Cruz range. 



This little stream is not so large as the San Lorenzo; 

 it has cut no deep canon to compare to the former, yet it 

 has many delights and charms. The San Lorenzo seeks 

 the deep and dark nooks and corners, lies in a deep canon, 

 while the Soquel is more often in the open sunlight, though 

 it does not entirely lack abysmal gorges in its upper reaches, 

 but the portions most to my fancy were the open reaches 

 where it seemed to flow through little meadows, yet was 

 always in a canon far below the road. To the west the 

 hills and mountains had been denuded, but to the east the 

 redwood forest rose and formed the graceful sky line and 

 covered the face of the steep, precipitous cliff with a solid 

 mass of trees which cast green, purple and amber shadows, 

 ran beneath tree trunks to sweep out into wide stretches and . 

 tip over rocky moraines in silvery flocculent masses, afford- 

 ing shelter everywhere to trout of some size, degree or sta- 

 tion. I fished in all these pools, and the little stream had 

 a marvelous faculty of taking one by and into little hamlets, 

 and through ranches where one could see that marvel of Cal- 

 ifornia, oranges and apples growing in the same dooryard ; 

 redwood and Arctic spruce, banana and rubber tree, cheek by 



