With Rod and Line in Colorado Waters

But how about the trout fishing? you ask. Well, the trout fishing is good. I have met the usual tourist, with cod hooks, chalk lines and wagon poles, with an occasional hatful of highly colored flies; the fellow with the hundred dollar rig and helmet hat, apparently all “fly,” and I have seen them belabor the beautiful Grand for a mile at a stretch, my mind dwelling on murder. The “swish” of their poles through the air sounds like the sough of an amateur cyclone, and the fall of the lines upon the water as though some indignant father were having an interview in the woodshed with his first born, and nothing handy but a quarter strap. Could the fishing be otherwise than good? Good for the fishermen because it gives them plenty of exercise, and as half at least of the pleasure of this life is made up of anticipation, these fellows keep thinking all the time that they are going to catch something, and they do – cold. Good for the trout because they are never caught, and good for the sportsman who knows their ways, though they be like the “way of the serpent upon the rock” – past finding out. The instinct of the trout is akin to the sense of the human sucker, and I have sometimes wondered if they did not entertain a pretty fair idea of our lunatic asylums, and gain the impression that at certain seasons there was an exodus; that the inmates escaped into the wilderness and deployed along the mountain streams; that these people were the descendants of farmers and laborers opposed to the probable innovations of threshing machines, and esteeming the ancient flail above all other methods, thus expressed their hallucination. It requires no stretch of the imagination to thus consider.

There is no genuine enjoyment in the easy achievement of any purpose; there is no bread so sweet as the hard-earned loaf of the man who works for it. The rule holds good in the school of the sportsman. The fellows I have been writing of, had they their way, would become mere engines of destruction; they would catch, not for the pleasure of catching, but because they could, and a universe of trout would not satiate them. Sportsmen are not made of that kind of material. A little horse sense goes a great way in all things, trouting not excepted; it is an indispensable foundation to success. Avarice must be ruled out; your genuine angler has none of it, but will insist on his neighbor having at least as good as he, if not better.

I said awhile ago that I was away from toll roads and wayside houses of entertainment. I’m stopping with a friend, a genuine angler, whom I have seen walk in the wake of one of those threshing machines, with a rod light as a buggy whip, and with a twist of the wrist drop a fly upon the water thirty or fifty feet away, and as it settled gently down, as falls the snowflake upon the bosom of the stream, there would come a rush and struggle that denoted the fishing was really good to him who had achieved the art of casting a fly. He is no seeker after distinction, and I shall not give you his name. He does not read Horace, nor does he understand the thirty-nine articles of the established church, as some of our amateur Christians do, but he knows how to treat his friends, which is better. I had been tickling my vanity with the belief that I knew something about trout fishing, but I have found out that my acquirements were, by way of comparison, merely with the escaped lunatics. He sends me out to “take the cream off” a pool, or out of it, and when I’d be ready to swear there was not another left, he’ll make me bear witness to my own lack of faith by striking as many, if not more, than I had brought to creel. He thinks I’ll learn to handle a fly rod after awhile, and I have hope; besides I am learning to cultivate all the virtues. Think of me with the mercury at seventy or more at high noon, rubber boots with tops to my hips, thick breeches, woolen shirts and a duck coat, my intellectual head swathed in a net and my horny hands encased in buckskin gauntlets, a ten-ounce fly rod, and ten pounds of trout brought to basket at my back, perspiration exuding in streams; outside that net nine thousand mosquitoes to the square inch, yet I’m happy – going to school, and have the best of the vermin.

METEOROLOGICAL

Hot weather is pleasant to have – in Denver – and I didn’t escape because of hot weather. But I have lived there a long time and know a number of people, and every time I met a fellow on the street he was sure to say: “Hot, ain’t it?” Five minutes after, if I met the same man, he would pull off his hat, mop his head with a handkerchief, and as if it had just occurred to him, tell me the same thing, with an emphatic prefix. By way of change it is interesting to see a couple of fellows meet on the sidewalk, shake hands, and hear them tell each other “it’s hot.” The amount of information mutually imparted is gratifying, and makes one think, at first, that life is worth living. But when this delight is experienced a hundred times a day for a couple of weeks, one begins to sigh for the old stand-by: “What’s new?” “Nothing.” The monotony becomes exasperating, and even one not given to profanity stands in imminent peril of falling into the prevailing habit. Shakespeare, Mother Goose, or some other mortal plethoric with wisdom, has informed us that evil associations corrupt good manners. I was being led astray; I knew it, in fact.

The air was becoming thickly freighted with expletives; heat and profanity, as I had been taught to believe, before “the new version,” were inseparable. The maternal admonition came back to me in all its bitter sweetness, and I had the fortitude to shun the temptation. In the classic language of this age, “I lit out” for lighter air and a purer atmosphere; I did not find what I wanted until I got beyond Golden. When the train entered the cañon the sublime grandeur of – but I promised not to say anything about Clear Creek Cañon, as that has been written about once before. I took it all in, however, cinders included; all except “that mule.” I have never been able to find “that mule.” Several years since I was advised of the existence of “the mule,” and though I firmly believed at the time that my informant was only trying to make himself agreeable, I have, upon every occasion, faithfully looked out from the mouth of the cañon to Beaver Brook for the picture of that much-abused hybrid. The nearest approach to success in my efforts was a spotted cow, three years ago, browsing among the rocks – but she is not there now.

At Dumont a friend of mine climbed on the train, and the first thing he said to me was: “It’s hot in Denver.” He did not speak interrogatively, but the remark was affirmative, in a tone of defiance. I asked him if he had ever heard of Billy the Kid. He said he had and that he was dead. I told him that was a mistake, “He is not dead,” said I, “he’s on the train with me. I have hired him to go as far as Empire to kill the first man who says the word ‘hot’ to me. There he sits,” and I pointed to our very sedate fellow-townsman, Judge – , who sat behind us deeply immersed in a formidable bundle of law papers.

“The devil!” said my friend.

“Yes, he is, and a dead shot; let me introduce you – come.”

“Excuse me, my wife is in the other car, just up from Denver, and I havn’t seen her for a week. Some other time I’ll be happy.”

I do not understand why it is that this generation is so given to lying. That friend of mine is not married, and he must know that I am aware of it; yet he slid out of the car with all the bustle of a conscientious man of family. In fact he was too anxious, except for a Benedict in the honey-moon. When he left I went over and sat down by the Judge. In the meantime the latter had folded up his papers and wanted to know of me, first thing, if I had ever read Pompelli or some other fellow, who had traveled in Abyssinia, where the mercury stood habitually at 150°, when you could find a shady place for the thermometer; where the natives cut steaks out of the live oxen, sewed up the wounds and cooked the meat in the sun; where these same natives went about naked with raw hide umbrellas, and each fellow carried a pair of tweezers in his pocket to pull the cactus thorns out of his feet. While being entertained with these veracious statements, I discovered that our car had suddenly become quite full, and that the Judge and I were objects of interest. Just then the engineer sounded the whistle for Empire, and I gathered up my creel and grip-sack of commissaries, and made for the door. As I got off the platform I heard one passenger tell another that “the reward is $2,000,” and as the train started on I noticed the Judge in animated conversation with a burly fellow whose prominent features were a heavy moustache and a square jaw. The Judge is a good man – physically, I mean – but I shall not see him again for a month, and if it comes to the worst, roughing it in the hills has a tendency to take off flesh and put on muscle. I take comfort in the reflection.

At Empire I found my conveyance awaiting me – a light wagon and a pair of playful mules; little fellows with coats of satin and gentle eyes. Some fellow would say they had “sinews of steel,” but these mules were not built that way; they were the natural sort. I dearly love a mule, and were I a poet, would write a sonnet to a mule’s eye. I admire a mule’s eye; always feel interested in that portion of his anatomy, and, as one likes to be in the vicinity of that which is pleasing, so I, when I have any business with a mule, find his head the attractive feature. These mules behaved remarkably well; they took us to the top of Berthoud Pass in about three hours, and climbed over each other only twice during the trip. That, however, was only in playfulness; they pretended to be frightened, in one instance at a laborer’s coat lying by the roadside, and in the other at an empty fruit can. I thought on both occasions that the mountain side was steeper, the gulch ever so many million feet deeper, and the road narrower than any other place I had ever been in. But as the mules were only in fun, I did not feel scared. After the first exhibition of hilarity the driver told me that the last stranger who rode behind those mules had his neck broken by jumping out of the wagon. I know the driver to be an innocent young man, unversed in the wicked ways of this world, and it was comforting to be in congenial company.

On the summit Captain Gaskill handed me his thermometer. I don’t know why he did it; I had not said anything about the temperature. But I saw the mercury rise in the tube the moment I touched it; I told him to take the blasted thing away or I would melt right there; with my heavy overcoat on I would have been a mere spot in ten minutes. He hung the agitator on the side of the house, and it registered 45°. I felt cool, and he took me to the fire. No one that I know of except Hamlet’s father has returned to give us any authentic information from beyond the sea; and how it was ascertained that “in the twinkling of an eye” we mortals should realize the end of our journey from this shore, I am not prepared to say. But I can vouch for the fact that it was just eight hours from Denver to happiness. If dissatisfied humanity demands a country better adapted to its wants than Colorado, it will have to die to find it.

Upon a former occasion several years ago, I took upon myself to say publicly through the columns of a Denver daily, that I thought Coates Kinney’s “Rain on the Roof” a satire. But the night before I had lain in a pool of water on the banks of the Blue with nothing between me and the angry heavens except my prayers for daylight; they, of course, were thin but earnest. This night, however, I had, as the preacher used to say, “a realizing sense” of the effect of surrounding circumstances, repented me of my harsh verdict, and hope to be forgiven. I had supper, a not uncommon event on the top of the range at this particular point. Thanks to the mules (they had allowed me to walk a mile or more) and the light air, and wholesome food well cooked, and the obliging host and his wife (think of their hibernating, the snow level with the ridge-pole, and never a soul to visit them except the mail carrier on snow-shoes), I had an appetite, and made good use of it, while the clouds gathered outside for a jubilee. After supper came the indispensable pipe and chat, and then to bed, right under the rafters, with the rain pattering on the shingles.

“It seemed as if the musicOf the birds in all the bowers,Had been gathered into rain-dropsAnd was coming down in showers.”

There is only one line of Kinney’s poem that ever troubled me (the foregoing is not his):

“Then in fancy comes my mother.”

When I was a boy I didn’t fancy my mother coming around my bed after I had crawled into it. It meant something besides prayers for me; we had hard timber in the country where I was born and bred, – how pliant the young twigs were! Coates must have been a good boy, especially with such a name; I can solve the mystery in no other way. But all that about “another,”

“With her eyes delicious blue,”

will do “passing well,” except the color; mine were not blue, and she played the same game on me.

With the “patter of the soft rain overhead,” I soon forgot all about the thermometer and the other misfortunes, being wrapped in – forty pounds of blankets.

Having gone to bed, it is a very good place to stop; and as to the trip down to the Springs, if those mules give me any trouble I will let you know about it.

MULES

The morn, in russet mantle clad, walks o’er the dew of yon high eastern hill.” That was my matutinal orison as I tumbled out of bed at Gaskill’s. The air was fragrant with the perfume of the pine, and the hardy wild flowers were brilliant in liquid diadems. Some other fellow would say that he ”drank in the life-giving tonic“; but I don’t drink, so I breathed it, with my head out of the garret window, and felt as though this world has some things to enjoy, and that fresh air is one of them. The blue seemed nearer, and as I looked over into the Park, and over the fir-crowned hills to the majestic piles of granite, everywhere set off with a background of azure, I felt as though there was a mistake somewhere in my make-up. I ought to have been born with a gift to make the whole world feel as I did then – happy but humiliated among these magnificent monuments of Divine greatness. I’m not a self-made man, that’s the trouble; if I’d had the ordering of it, I’d have got up a success. There is nothing like success, even in a fraud, until it stands face to face with such evidences of the sublime handiwork as I looked out upon that bright morning; then the “uses of this life” seem “flat, stale and unprofitable,” as we use them.

But I must not forget the mules. Gaskill has a couple of cinnamon bears, in a room at the end of the barn. I can’t say that the Devil got into the mules, because the Devil is now ruled out; without a hell to put him in, he is no longer of any earthly use. I am sorry to lose him, because under certain circumstances I am a believer in intimidation; it is wholesome. I have known a single quiet and orderly hanging in a summary way, to make a neighborhood that would have terrorized Satan himself, as nice and well behaved as a community of Quakers. I heard one of our Denver preachers once say – and we all loved him – that there was “a certain class of mortals whom it was necessary to take by the neck and choke before they could be made ready for conviction.” The Devil has always been useful for that purpose, and I think he could be made available yet.

But I started to say something concerning those mules. The Devil, as I have said, did not get into the mules, but they got scent of those bears, and I venture the assertion that the bears discounted the Devil in his palmiest efforts, as heretofore reported. To speak without exaggeration, those mules were frightened; the bears were in their heads, heels, hair and eyes; inside and out, above and below, and all around, were bears. To those mules, it rained bears, and the atmosphere was pregnant with bears about to be delivered. If those mules had been human I would have thought it the worst case of delirium tremens that ever racked a diseased imagination. As the driver expressed it: “they was plumb crazy.” There was no crookedness about it; they were frightened horizontally as well as straight up and down, as I suppose the driver meant to be understood. It is impossible for me to tell what they did or attempted. They seemed capable of any extravagance except dying. I like to ride after mules in that condition; there is something exhilarating in dashing down a mountain road with one’s hair straightening out behind as though it would disappear by the roots; careening around short curves and making lightning-like estimates of the thousands of feet to the bottom of the gulch; picking out the softest rocks upon which to fall; flying over boulders and becoming entangled in tree tops fifty feet in the air, there to remain a torn and wretched monument of indiscretion. It wouldn’t be much of a monument, but enough to tell the tale. I thought how grand it would be, and told the driver that I preferred to have him pick me up whole some distance down the road; I felt confidence in my ability to control my own legs; the air was just right for a brisk morning walk; besides, much of the pleasure of the ride would be denied me by reason of my not having any hair to speak of that might stream in the wind. I made these suggestions and started. I believe the driver thought I was afraid to ride after those mules; but that was a mistake. I intended to ride after them provided there was anything to ride in when he should catch up to me, if he ever did. About two miles down the range I sat on a log and waited for the wreck. Presently I heard the rumbling of the wagon; soon it came in sight, the driver sitting at his post singing, as well as the roughness of the road would permit: “I want to be an angel.” I certainly thought he did, and asked him if the mules had not tried, at least, to run away, when they were being harnessed.

“Oh, no; they was too bad scared. You see, when they get that way they want to stay right with me; a mule is an obstinate cuss, you know, and only runs away for fun.”

Just then the ears of the off mule stuck out straight as the prongs of a magnified clothes pin, and she began to dance. This time it was a ground squirrel, not much larger than a lead-pencil. But the brake had to come down before the mule did. Shortly after, the nigh mule went through a like performance for a similar cause, and then they both waltzed to the music of the Frazier. I was sorry when we got as far as Cozzens’, because there it was plain sailing, with plenty of room to turn round and run away in, and yet those delightful mules trotted right along twenty-two miles to the Springs, regardless of gophers, old clothes, tin cans and two badgers. If Gaskill’s bears had got in the way, I firmly believe those mules would have trotted over them, or kicked them out of the road. Kick! They could kick in pure cussedness. “I should say so.”

A mule is a natural kicker, as a rule, but this pair had so improved upon nature’s gift, by constant practice, that they had reduced the accomplishment to an exact science. “They can fetch anything they go for, from a gnat on a stall post to a self-confident hostler.” “The nigh mule can take a fly off her right ear with her nigh hind foot.” I can’t describe how she does it, not having seen the feat performed, but the driver explained it to me so that I understood it. From my confidence in the veracity of the driver, but especially from my knowledge of the mule, I am ready to be sworn. But it is about time these mules were lost.

We have the usual complement of campers and tourists in the Park this season. The former are mostly of our own mossbacks; but it will not do to call the tenderfoot by any less dignified title than a tourist. I saw one of the latter start out the other morning for a day’s sport. He had a rifle and a shot-gun, a game-bag, a fishing rod and creel; he remarked to me, as he climbed up on the off side of his horse, that he was pretty well fixed for a day’s campaign. I told him I thought he was, but suggested that he ought to take along a bass drum to beat up the game, and, do you know, the fellow got mad and made me apologize. If he had only kept me in front of his infernal arsenal, I never would have modified my suggestion, but he threatened me over his shoulder, and that looked dangerous. He came back at night, to my surprise, but brought neither fish, flesh nor fowl; it is perhaps needless to say he was the only disappointed party in the Park.

A strict enforcement of the game and fish law would be an advantage to this vicinity. The Park is easy of access, and when the railroads, or either of them now under construction, shall be completed, the Park and its surroundings, a very paradise for sportsmen, can be made the most attractive resort in the state. Why, it is worth a day’s journey to sit where I do now, under the shadow of a pine whose every sigh in the cool breeze is freighted with fragrance, and feast on the massively beautiful scenery. A foreground of a mile or two of meadow rich in green and gold; the beetling lava cliffs on the left, and the brown hills, studded with great piles of granite, sloping gently down to the margins of the Grand. The noble stream flecked with silver, rolling majestically along and keeping time to its own melody, while away beyond lies the range for a background, with Long’s Peak, o’ertopped with fleecy clouds to serve him as a diadem, to be changed to a turban of rainbow tints for evening dress. And the sunsets that gather about the head of the rugged giant! You who view them from the other side should sit under the shadow of Mount Bross and see the cloud tints that crown His Majesty. Your view from the eastern side shows but the work of a tyro; from this the accomplished task of the master. If I had the gift I spoke of, you should see it as I do; as it is, there is nothing left but to come over and take it in for yourself. You can have a change of programme every day, and when you tire of the pictures, if you can, it is easy climbing a few hundred feet to find a dozen others just as grand and no twins. I suppose many a fellow has glanced over his shoulder up the Grand and seen a mountain with a notch in it, no more, not even a patch of color. But ten to one of these have seen something more and yet made a hearty meal of flitch and potatoes.

MUSIC AND METEOROLOGY

Without fair success with rod and line, a camping trip, to some at least, would be a failure. The weather giving fair promise, I started over the divide below the Springs to revisit several familiar pools and riffles down the Grand, in anticipation of a good morning’s sport. The forenoon was expended with half a dozen trout and as many miles’ tramp as the result. Life is not worth living without a disappointment now and then. I met with a decided failure where I had rarely had anything but success, and it sharpened my appetite – for dinner.

A day or two after I was joined by my familiar and guide, the Doctor, who is an animated encyclopedia not only of the Park, but of the state, and we forthwith put up a job, as it were, upon the denizens of Williams’ Fork. Nine o’clock found us on the banks of that beautiful stream, our horses picketed and we ready to meet any emergency that might arise – that’s a new name for ’em. The Doctor started up stream and I took to the bed of the creek about half a mile from its mouth. Twenty minutes and not the sight of a fin. I also began to think that Williams’ Fork was depleted. Brown hackles and gray, and a half dozen other newfangled varieties not named to me, had no more effect than the wiles of a three-card-monte dealer have upon one who “has been there.” I thought of lying down upon the bank and seriously playing with the garter snakes, but changed my mind and put on a gray hackle with a peacock-body. Result, a trout. I had found the color to tickle their fancy for the day.

Trout and – and – women are very much alike; few men know much about either, unless you take their own words for it. Both are handsome, of course, delicate in taste, fickle as to ornament, not otherwise, and always too confiding in that which is least to be relied on. I felt sorry for that trout as I slipped her into my creel; they are such short-sighted fish – I’ll not say why – but they exact the angler’s care, and carry out the simile admirably. Had I offered that trout a worm for breakfast, the chances are ten to one she would have inquired whether I took her for a sucker. But it occurs to me all at once that I am on delicate ground – the current runs five miles an hour, the water is above my knees and the rocks are slippery; to fall is easy as – lying; the fate of our common ancestor is a warning.