46 
THE GOLDEN RIVER. 
rocks are better adapted for hanging you up. 
I say this with bitterness. My fish had rushed 
like a mad elephant all over the strong water; 
but I was just beginning to take charge and 
hoped to haul him into the backwater, when 
suddenly he got me round a submerged rock. 
There then ensued twenty minutes of experi¬ 
ence such as we have in nightmares. The line 
was fast, far over the river, and above us. The 
stream was too strong to allow us to paddle up, 
get above and clear. Pedroso tried heroically, 
tried till he nearly dropped, and I took the 
paddle and did no better. We could just hang 
on in the stream, now making a few yards, now 
losing them; but get within fifty yards of that 
rock we could not. Oh, for a pair of oars : even 
a pair of sculls might have done it, but a paddle 
was useless. No man could force the boat 
against that torrent. Finally we tried to go 
inshore out of the stream, get above, and then 
put out into the stream again. But here too we 
were beaten. There were two hundred yards of 
line on the reel. But that was not enough to 
reach from the rock into the still water. I had 
to break, and the maddening thing was that the 
fish was still on. He was on all the time. He 
kept swirling up and splashing, rolling over on 
his broad golden side, securely anchored forty 
yards below where the line pointed. Some days 
after, as we came back and the water had fallen 
so much that the reef over which we had 
