PLATTE, THE WONDER HORN OF ANGLING 417 



two small, cold rivulets empty. They con- to get out of the boat and wade. Splendid 



tain large and finest trout, but are very diffi- trolling for bass and pickerel now! Here 



cult to wade, owing to mire and brush. Dr. Baker, from Findlay, Ohio, landed a 



Wild? That is another name for the Dead thirty-seven pound mascalonge after thirty 



Stream. Great patches of dry reeds and minutes of heart-breaking fight and excite- 



wire-grass and ferns run back for miles ment. Following the right shore, far out, 



from the banks, and generally so thick as to we pass for two miles over a deep reef — good 



be impenetrable. There one may study and trolling ground all the way — and then across 



photograph wild life — minks, loons, turtles the lake to Birch Point, a perfect lunching 



and myriads of blackbirds. He may hide place in the woods. We do not take fish 



near the nests of mallards and teals, and home with us, so they are not saved to be 



count and admire their eggs. put on ice at the hotel. We dress, cook and 



Another mile of slow rowing and the eat fish, and hand the balance to a pair of 



" Stream" widens among low tamaracks boys that are here "berrying." Just south 



into Little Platte Lake, the very home of of that lunching place a forest spring emerges 



large-mouth black bass. Being ashamed to from woods to form a rivulet that purls 



take more than thirty minnows in the pail, across a long, low, white beach of hard sand 



the writer has never had enough minnows and gravel. 



when fishing on this remote and fascinating South of the Point the fishing is too good, 

 tarn. It is shallow, dotted with lily pads A dozen times I have seen small boys get 

 over much of its water, and its patches and into trouble and have a fright as the grass- 

 lines of bulrushes sway in the little gusts and pike refused to let their hooks alone. There 

 billows. are frequent growls as the rock bass take 



It certainly is dangerous to cast a minnow our minnows — we want small-mouth bass 



alongside one of the lily pads or a bunch of and pike. Here I landed an eight-pound 



"rushes." I recall the Irish expletives, more pickerel on a "star " spoon, grabbed in early 



forcible than polite, of "Uncle" Thompson, starlight, when the owls and whippoorwills 



who had, with proud forethought to which had begun to call and just before that fury 



he confidently directed attention, "fixed "up of a thunder-storm came trooping over the 



a heavy line and big hook with special refer- woods beyond Round Lake, and the wind 



ence to having his "fishin' rig" strong, and raged, and flashes of lightning revealed the 



able to "make it interesting" for a real fish, pure white of the foam-caps on the mad 



and how, at the second cast, his line was little billows. 



carried straight away from the bow of the Out near the blue water a lone cluster of 



boat by an unseen fish that started to tow very tall bulrushes is called Pratchett's 



us and broke the line — leaving a dismayed Island, probably because no island is there, 



and swearing Irishman. That fish never but only several acres of white sand and 



stopped! rock twenty feet below the surface. The 



Large-mouth bass were there by dozens — small-mouth bass there are becoming wary, 



not the lazy "trout" that we snared in For twenty minutes I watched a three-pound 



Florida waters last Christmas, but burly bass play around my minnow — not biting, 



northern fellows, full of steel springs and 'but striking the minnow with his tail, and 



ginger. I took eight of those beauties before finally hooking himself in the side, putting 



the minnows were all used. And giant mas- up a tremendous fight and getting away 



calonge are there, in water three-fourths of because the work was rather too heavy for 



a mile across and not more than fifteen deep the five-ounce lance wood rod. 



anywhere. If a camper would take a tent West from Birch Point down the lake 



and mosquito net from the "hotel," pitch along more good trolling "ground," and 



the tent on the point across and to the right past the abandoned lumber mill and hamlet 



from the start of the Dead Stream, the early of Edgewater, and we enter the finest, most 



morning fishing would make him happy for a picturesque stream on which' I ever rowed 



month. a boat — the continuation at the foot of the 



Back and down the streams into Big lake of Platte River. We drift with the 



Platte, going across the bar where we have four-mile current for a mile and admire 



