April 30, 1910.] 
FOREST AND STREAM. 
699 
breakfast we packed up and were off. Ihe boys 
may have lacked system, but they had willing¬ 
ness and strength in abundance. Both were 
husky six-footers, and no load or work dis¬ 
couraged them. At the start I had carefully ap¬ 
portioned the loads, assigning to each his share 
of the common duffle as exactly as possible. 
Everything went into our packs except the 
rods, the ax and the cooking kit, which went 
as hand baggage. At each halt, however, when 
it was necessary to delve into the packs for sup¬ 
plies, my young friends vied with each other on 
repacking to see who could appropriate for his 
load the largest share of common property. As 
we would repack and Fred would grab a few 
cans of milk, Bob would exclaim with an in¬ 
jured air, “Hey! those go in my pack!” To 
which Fred would make the generously impo¬ 
lite retort, “Get out, you lobster! I carry those 
cans!” Then Bob, if I did not watch him, would 
surreptitiously appropriate some of my duffle to 
make up for the lost weight. And this last- 
mentioned youth had an advantage over Fred 
and myself which must be mentioned here. 
Fred carried the regulation Adirondack pack 
basket and I had a large waterproof canvas 
pack. Both of these were of limited capacity. 
Bob, on the other hand, with his year or two of 
experience in the Canadian woods, had acquired 
the Indian pack cloth and tump line habit—a 
method of packing that is neck-breaking to those 
who are not used to it. Now this pack cloth of 
his was a generous article about nine feet by six, 
so that its capacity seemed unlimited. He al¬ 
ready had in it the tent in addition to his share 
of smaller articles, and this morning, before I 
could stop him, he calmly added the entire cook¬ 
ing kit which was nested in a large pail and 
weighed about six pounds, rolled it up in that 
interminable cloth and unconcernedly marched 
off. What can justice do in the face of such 
cheek? In vain I protested that he had twelve 
or fifteen pounds too much. All the reply that 
I could get was, “Oh, this is fine. I needed 
something to balance my pack better,” and off 
he strode, perfectly erect, unconcernedly hum¬ 
ming a popular song. 
Among the many amusing passages in old 
NTessmuk’s “Woodcraft” is one in which that 
professor of going right but light tells how he 
admonishes his stalwart young friends not to 
carry heavy canned goods into the woods, but 
how, before the evening fire, when the boys be¬ 
gin to get out their cans, he relents so far as 
to consent to share their contents. The action 
of my two youths brought home to me the truth 
of that passage. I verily believe that if they 
had not respected my dignity they would have 
calmly appropriated my whole pack and left me 
to carry the rods. 
A tramp of four or five miles, with no further 
strain on the much-enduring trousers, brought 
us to the banks of the stream on which we had 
hoped to encamp the night before. I had fished 
this region a year or two earlier, but now I 
could hardly recognize it. The lumbermen had 
been busy all along the brook for a mile or 
more and had felled nearly all the spruce, large 
and small, leaving dead branches and tops strewn 
about in their usual untidy fashion. On the 
banks, all over the surrounding hills, and worst 
of all in the brook itself, lay a tangle of spruce 
branches and pulp wood. Nothing but a freshet 
would restore the stream to its ancient condition. 
Indeed, had it not been for the recent down¬ 
pour, 1 should not have ventured to light a fire 
anywhere in the vicinity of such a tinder box. 
But everything was sodden with rain and a fire 
would be quite safe during our short stay. Ac¬ 
cordingly, we proceeded to camp. The boys were 
naturally eager to fish first and make camp after¬ 
ward, but I pointed out to them that we were 
probably going to get more rain and it would be 
pleasanter to return from fishing and find a 
home awaiting us. They were tractable as al¬ 
ways, and working with a will we soon had a 
place leveled -for the tent floor, the tent up, and 
even a supply of balsam for beds and some fire 
IN A NORTH SHORE TROUT STREAM. 
From a photograph by Frank F. Frisbie. 
wood cut. Then we stowed everything snugly 
within the tent under a poncho and proceeded 
to joint our rods. 
We were camped near the confluence of the 
two main branches so that there were three 
streams at hand for our sport. The boys were 
inexperienced in fly-fishing and so I gave them 
a choice of the route they should follow. They 
elected the two branches, leaving the main stream 
to me. Being in no hurry I sat on the bank 
smoking and watched the initial operations of 
Fred who had started in just above the camp 
where there was a fine pool, badly choked, how¬ 
ever, with limbs and pulp logs. The efforts of 
a tyro in such a place are not without interest 
to an old hand, and I had a pleasant fifteen 
minutes watching Fred. He spent most of his 
time disentangling his flies from the spruce tops 
and the contiguous bushes, making meanwhile 
certain sulphurous remarks which I could catch 
above the roar of the brook. Whenever by good 
luck he got his flies into the pool, he had a 
strike, promptly jerked the fly out of the trouts 
mouth and suspended it on some bush behind 
him. Then followed more remarks. Meanwhile 
I smoked in silence. It was not a moment for 
advice. , 
When Fred had at length moved on up stream 
in search of a less encumbered pool, I deter¬ 
mined to try the one he had left, thinking that 
he had not spoiled it all. Standing at the tail 
of the pool (Fred had been fishing from above) 
I cast beneath the shade of a young spruce 
which had fallen across the current. Instantly 
I hooked a small trout which soon freed itself. 
The second cast brought up a good one, but it 
was a task to land him. By walking forty feet 
of logs and plunging to my hips in the cold cur¬ 
rent, I at length succeeded in steering him to a 
safe landing place. When I had him out on 
the bank I whistled to Fred, who was not yet 
out of sight, and held up the catch. Dropping 
his rod, Fred came tearing back over the boul¬ 
ders. “Gee! he’s a beauty!” was his comment. 
“What’ll he weigh?” The little steel rule gave 
the length of the fish as seventeen inches and 
the scales said one pound and three-quarters. 
Curiously enough this first trout was the largest 
that we secured, although later I saw a pair of 
larger ones. But the heavy rains had swollen 
the streams too much for good fly-fishing. I 
soon found this out, for I worked hard for an 
hour or two and took only five or six. Fortu¬ 
nately they were all nice ones, averaging over 
a half pound a piece, and with what the boys 
would get I thought that we should have more 
than we could eat for lunch. With this thought 
I returned to camp, but I reckoned without due 
allowance for the appetites of those boys. 
Bob was already in camp with two or three 
small trout. He had slipped into the brook once 
or twice and finally had run into a bunch of “no- 
see-ems” by which he was fairly routed, having 
of course forgotten his fly dope. Hence wood 
cutting in camp had more attractions for him 
than fishing with one hand and fighting midges 
with the other. We started a fire, got some rice 
to boiling and were about to bring things to a 
point when Fred hove in sight wet to the waist, 
an extra tear or two in his clothes, but happy 
in the possession of one good trout and two or 
three smaller ones. It was the same story all 
around—water too high. However, we knew that 
the water would subside rapidly if we had no 
more rain and we looked forward to better luck 
next day. Meanwhile everybody was ravenous, 
or rather I was ravenous and the boys were most 
ravenous. Nothing but the superlative of a 
strong adjective would properly describe their 
appetites, and there was not a whit to choose 
between them. I had been used to this sort of 
thing, but this experience set a new mark for 
me. We cooked all the trout—about six pounds 
—a pail full of rice, numerous slabs of bacon, 
about three quarts of coffee and added sundry 
thick slices of bread and some chocolate. I 
had expected to save some of the rice to fry 
next morning. No such luck; it went the way 
of everything else. And when it was all over 
and we were lolling back like stuffed pythons, 
Fred remarked, between whiffs from his pip^ 
