22 



RECREA TION. 



not in great demand among the whites. 

 The goeduck is a fine " bird," and to be 

 prepared for the table it has to be cleaned 

 and dressed as you would dress a chicken. 

 This proposition rather floored the cook, 

 who could find no head, wings, or feet to 

 cut off; but as he expressed it, " He took 

 the works out of 'em." 



The party from up the river soon re- 

 turned with a nice string of Dolly Varden 

 trout. But the laugh was on the engineer. 

 We had heard of grangers having hayseed 

 in their whiskers but a fisherman with sal- 

 mon eggs in his hair was something new, 

 and as his hand went quickly through his 

 back hair there they were, hard and dry. He 

 then remembered that having a bite on his 

 line and another on his head, at the same 

 time, he had attended to the latter with the 

 hand that held his bait; but as he had 

 landed his big trout he was let off. 



In going farther up the river the next 

 day we were surprised to encounter a dense 

 thicket of our beautiful state flower, the 

 rhododendron, which, in its cultivated state 

 is a mere shrub, but here they grow into 

 trees 30 or 40 feet high, and 3 to 4 inches 

 thick. 



Instead of going back on the deer trail we 

 had used in going up, we attempted to fol- 

 low the river down, and fish it to its mouth. 

 We soon found this well nigh impossible, 

 for it led through a narrow, rocky canon, 

 making it almost impossible to obtain a 

 foothold anywhere. The water was too 

 deep and rapid to wade, so we were obliged 

 to scramble along through the underbrush 

 like rabbits. 



Wild berries were plentiful, and noon 

 found us hungry. We made a meal of the 

 fruit about us — sweet, trailing blackberries, 

 mealy sallal berries, red, blue, and black 

 huckleberries, and the big, yellow rasp- 

 berry known as the salmon berry. No use 

 of anyone starving to death in the woods 

 of Washington. 



Deer and elk tracks were all about us, 

 and the berry patches had been trampled 

 down by bears; but we were a noisy crowd 

 and so did not even get a glimpse of any- 

 thing of the kind. 



After 8 hours of the hardest kind of 

 tramping we came to the end of the gorge, 

 too tired to fish, now that we had a chance, 

 but willing to eat the good square meal that 

 was soon ready. 



That afternoon we steamed down 10 miles 

 along the shore and reached the Hamahama 

 river. While not over 30 feet wide it was 

 sufficiently deep to allow the boat to travel 

 up it a mile or more, where we settled down 

 again for a short stay. 



Up the river, where the water was fresh, 

 the trout took the fly readily. They were 

 of good size and mainly brook trout, al- 

 though one rainbow was taken that 

 weighed over 7 pounds. 



We found ruffed and blue grouse plenti- 



ful on the hill-side, and band-tailed pigeons 

 scattered among the tall, dead trees of the 

 bottoms. 



One day all hands went on an explora- 

 tion trip up the river, that led into the very 

 heart of the beautiful Olympics. Their 

 green sides of cedar and fir rose grandly on 

 either side, each summit being crowned by 

 a glistening cap of eternal snow, the source 

 of numberless little streams that coursed 

 down their sides. Here we found the fish- 

 ing excellent, but the roar of a cataract ahead 

 enticed us farther up the stream, to some 

 splendid falls that leaped from an overhang- 

 ing shelf, 80 feet above us. In order to ob- 

 tain a better view of the falls we felled a tree 

 across the creek, which let us out to a 

 bowlder in mid-stream. Here we sat, 

 drinking in the wild beauty about us and 

 imagining we were monarchs of all we sur- 

 veyed, when down the mountain side came 

 half a dozen pretty girls attired in bloomers 

 and straw hats. They accepted our invita- 

 tion to cross on our foot-log, and join us 

 on the opposite bank. Their big brothers 

 were soon lost to view, fishing round a 

 bend in the river, and we had the dear 

 creatures all to ourselves. We must have 

 presented a sorry appearance, with our 

 dirty clothes and unshaven faces, but their 

 bangs had long lost their curl which 

 evened things up, somewhat. In the course 

 of conversation mention was made of Mt. 

 Tacoma. " Oh, no; you mean Mt. Rai- 

 nier," said the girl with dreamy eyes. That 

 settled it. They were from Seattle. They 

 had just arrived, bent on a trip similar to 

 our own. 



" Wouldn't we please take their photo- 

 graphs, with the falls for a background," 

 they asked. 



" Certainly we would," and here is where 

 the special artist, who had been kept in the 

 background, came modestly forward. He 

 labelled the plate—" Maids of the Mist; " 

 but when the developer had washed over 

 the plate for 10 minutes, in his dark room 

 at home, and nothing came up he con- 

 cluded something had been missed, sure 

 enough. And now when he meets a mem- 

 ber of our party he hears some remark 

 about " dreamy eyes " and " forgetting to 

 draw the slide." 



Our next camp was made near the head 

 of the canal, on the Skokomish river. 



Being tired of trout we tried deep-sea 

 fishing and soon found we could land 

 flounders and rock-cod about as fast as we 

 could pull in the 300 foot line. 



On the second day here the party went 

 up the river, with guns and tackle — all but 

 the cook, who stayed with the boat and put 

 in his time making biscuits. He cast 40, 

 enough for 2 meals, and put them away; but 

 alas for the cook! When the hungry crowd 

 got back the biscuits were all eaten at the 

 first call, and quantities of grouse breasts 

 and pink trout beside, to say nothing of 2 



