With Rod and Line in Colorado Waters

I obeyed reverently; he accomplished the trick deftly and handed back my leader in silence.

“Judge, can you tie a fly?”

“Not very well; but I will some day, and then I’ll make the trout round here think they are eating candy.”

“By the way, Judge, do you like candy?”

“Yes, sir, I do.”

I was glad of that, because I’m fond of candy myself, though I never before took any on a camping trip.

We have been at my friend’s house nearly a week. I have not as yet had an opportunity to test the qualities of the pony “to fish off’n,” but the boys corroborate the stableman’s assertion, and I think that unless I can get a good price from the man of whom I purchased him, I shall take him home with me and try him another season. The idea, however, is not of my own suggestion; my boy proposed it. Besides, some day when the boy is at school – blessed be the school, the school teacher, and not the birch – his mother might get a chance to ride. The pony could rest at night, of course. It would only involve a dollar a day and a side-saddle. Think of a pony eating himself up once a month! That kind of financiering is what keeps me a pauper; I shall have to forego the pleasure of fishing “off’n that pony.”

At my friend’s house our tent is pitched on the bank of the river. I came away from home to be out. I have slept in the house for so many years that it has ceased to be a novelty. The boy and I sleep together; or rather he sleeps on the same spruce boughs or hay that I occupy. Perhaps there is nothing in the world so beautiful as a sleeping child, with the rosy flush of health mantling brow and cheek, with, may be, a tear trembling on the closed lashes, the remembrance of a sorrow that was, but now forgotten. This has been an inspiration to a multitude of poets, but the inspiration did not come upon them in camp, nor were the poets trying to snatch repose in the same bed; they were lookers on merely, giving the rein to their imagination. A poem under such circumstances would be a satire, certainly.

Last night the boy went to bed early, while the pony sorrowfully partook of his evening meal in my friend’s meadow. I flattered myself that a good night’s rest was in store for me, and turned in as the moon came up over the range. The night was very still, and I was dozing off under the soothing melody of the swift flowing river on its road to the sea, when I thought I heard the distant lowing of a cow; that was no strange matter in this neighborhood. I forgot it in a moment and was gone, perhaps five minutes, trout fishing, or eating wild raspberries with cream, yellow cream, not blue, when I heard the cow again, then something like three hundred cows and as many calves, and six hundred cow-boys, all yelling like a band of Apaches just before day break. If you never heard an Apache yell, remember, the first time you do, each particular hair will stand on end – if you have any left. Each cow bellowed for her calf and each calf for its dam – how I’d like to put an “n” to that last word, with cow to top off with – and each particular cow-boy yelled as though he were six, and interested in his mission. They were trying to ford the stream, not a hundred yards from my head. Of course I was broad awake, expecting every instant that the boy would start up with the impression that a million Utes had come down for him. I opened the tent fly, and the moonlight streamed brightly in upon his sunburned face; he heaved a long sigh of utter satisfaction, turned over and snored an accompaniment to the pandemonium in the road. I gave it up, and prepared to turn in again just as the rear end of the cavalcade was passing out of sight.

But not to sleep, just yet. My friend has a dozen or more burros, and the burro is another of the blessings of this world for which I possess unlimited love. Their patient and melancholy looking eyes will excite the sympathy of any human save the miner; their ears are a mystery; their song! – Oh for a bard to string his lyre and sing in poetic numbers his praises of the burro’s song! I have sometimes thought the burro the Pegasus of some of our Colorado poets, but that they shunned their source of inspiration; gave him the cold shoulder, as it were. Rivalry begets jealousy, and that may account for it; each individual poet would swear by himself only, upon the same principle that every fellow likes to take to himself the credit of all the good things said and done, forgetting there is nothing new under the sun.

Well, my friend’s burros had ranged themselves in line along the inside of the lane fence, and with their ears sticking straight out a foot or more between the top rails, seemed to be silently investigating the cause of the misery in their vicinity. A little blue fellow at the head seemed to take in the situation, as the last cowboy galloped by; then he stuck his head through the fence rails and laughed; his immediate neighbors of course saw the joke, and joined in. The whole band at once became inspired, and that infected me. When it grew monotonous, I began “heaving rocks;” they pulled their heads in at this unexpected interruption, backed off a few rods out of the reach of my compliments, and stared at me with their ears. After apparently taking in my situation, they began laughing again. I laid down in disgust, and the boy slept on. The moon was going down in the West before the serenade entirely ceased; then I went to sleep, and dreamed – no wonder, you say – that I was in Ireland. There I met the Doctor, driving round in an American buckboard, with no tires on the wheels. I asked him where the irons were, and he told me the English Government was covering the Green Isle with railroads as a military necessity, and was confiscating all the iron. Building railroads being then my mission, I had a gang of men at work, when I felt myself suddenly hit in the back with a spike hammer, whereat I was broad awake in the tent on the bank of the river, and the boy’s knees planted in my ribs. I shook him, gently of course, and asked him why he did it. He said he didn’t know, but guessed he was asleep; that he could always do it at home, and strike his knees against the wall. There was no answer to this, so I told him to go to sleep again, which he did. In less than five minutes he was lying crosswise. I straightened him out, gently of course, and he wanted to know why I did that. My explanation being satisfactory, he went to sleep again, and I was getting into a doze when he turned a somersault and lit with his head in my stomach. I straightened him out again, gently of course, and asked him if he thought I was a circus ring. He said he had been dreaming. I told him he shouldn’t dream; that dreaming was the peculiar privilege of his elders. I might have read him quite an essay on dreaming, but he was having out his morning nap, and I turned out quite refreshed. When I went to call him to breakfast, he was on his knees with his face buried in his hands, and his hands on his pillow. Of course I hesitated to disturb him in that Oriental attitude of devotion, but I soon discovered he was asleep, finishing that morning nap. As soon as he was fairly awake he began to whistle.

The boy, the pony and I went back to the stableman to-day, and the latter offered me thirty dollars for the pony, saddle and bridle. I told him I thought thirty dollars rather an extravagant expenditure for a week’s use of a pony, but the man seemed to have forgotten that he had sold him to me. When I reminded him of the fact, he said he couldn’t buy and sell horses without making something; that the buying and selling of horses was his business; that he had a family to support and expenses to meet; but seeing as how I was, anxious to sell, though he had no particular use for a pony, and as long as it was me, he’d give me thirty-two fifty for the outfit. I had finally learned the value of the pony, and being loth to impose upon him something that he did not need, I concluded not to sell, notwithstanding the side-saddle and the ability of the pony to consume himself monthly. The boy approved the plan – that is all this emergency demands. I shall yet “fish off’n that pony.”

The dining-room of the caravansary where my boy takes me to get our daily bread is presided over by a goddess possessed of a pink cotton gown and a Grecian nose with a mole – an exquisite sorrel mole with two sable hairs pendant. Looked at from any point of the compass she resembles a shingle with an old-fashioned candle extinguisher for a head. The former physical peculiarity is the result, I presume, of the Mother Hubbard cut of the cotton robe; the latter, of the manner in which she dresses her hair. While she served the fried liver to-day, a pensive sadness lingering about her blue eyes exaggerated the mole, and it seemed that both the mole and its owner felt they were out of place. As she stood over against me, with the stoneware platter of felicity gracefully poised in her nut-brown hands, hers was that “far-away look” we read about, and I thought,

“The melancholy days have come,The saddest of the year.”

Might she not be a New England school ma’am away for a vacation? Or perhaps one of our own seminary young ladies escaped for a holiday. I had heard of such vagaries in other hill countries further east, and knew that fashion followed the star of empire rapidly. I had never met any poets – might she not be one? Her style of coiffure and number seven boot were suggestive of something out of the ordinary, to say the least. Presuming upon the far-away look and my paternal appearance, I said:

“My dear, can I have a glass of milk?”

The look was not so far away any more – only about three feet, or less; and to me the little boy appeared quite as tall as I, as she answered:

“No, sir; we buy our milk.”

I wanted to ask her if I might infer that all else in that hostelry was stolen, but daren’t. She left me in this collapsed condition, and the boy then wanted to know of me who she was. I ventured to tell him she was the lost pleiad. Then he wanted to know what a pleiad was. When I had explained as well as my limited knowledge of mythology would permit, he wanted to know if the pleiades were in the Milky Way. In my then condition of mind, the inquiry from any other source would have proved the proverbial “last straw.” He pouted on my laughing at him, and threatened to tell the young woman that I had said her husband was in hell rolling stones. Only the promised deprivation of the pony, in such event, averted the calamity.

Sometime during that forenoon my boy picked up a friend whom he brought into camp behind him on the pony. This other boy was dressed in the remains of a shirt, with some other man’s pants, strapped to his arm pits by a relic of suspender and rolled up to his knees. The iris of one eye was black, the other gray; his hair had the withered appearance of having been cured in the sun; his skin russet and of grain leather texture. He might have been half a score or three in years; if he had ever possessed any timidity the sharp edges of it had been rubbed off years ago. Looking down at me with a Selkirkian satisfaction, he inquired hoarsely:

“I say, Mister, be you this kid’s dad?”

“His mother says so, and I have no reason to doubt it.”

“Is she the boss?”

“She is.”

“Thought so; does she chaw gum?”

“No.”

“What! Don’t chaw gum! What kind of a Christian is she, anyway?”

“A Methodist – an orthodox.”

“Well, so’s mam, and she chaws gum, you bet – see that” – and he held out a hand that in its normal state would have rivaled Vulcan’s for color; but the combination of pitch and dirt exhibited was a marvel of blackness. “That’s her’n.”

Thinking my turn had come, and taking advantage of the momentary lull, I inquired his name.

“Tom.”

“What is your surname?”

“My what?”

“Your other name?”

“Oh! Hain’t got none.”

“What is your mother’s name?”

“Mam, you mean? – Jane.”

“Well, what is her other name?”

“Dunno.”

“What is your father’s name?”

“Dad, you mean? – John.”

“Has he no other name?”

“Not that I knows on.”

“What does your mam call him?”

“Don’t call him at all – she blows the horn.”

Upon further questioning I learned that this scion of a nameless house was a nephew of the young woman who owned the mole. Also that he had been informed that I was “one of them newspaper fellers.” I hastened to convince him that however much I felt honored I could not lay claim to the distinction. At this he wanted to know what I was “givin’” him. I disavowed any intention of giving him anything, unless, indeed, it might be a taste of the quirt my boy used to tickle the pony’s ribs. Not having an appetite for that kind of pabulum, he suddenly slipped off his perch and disappeared; as he did so the sulphurous fumes from the Springs were heavier than I had ever known them. My boy then had an interview with me, amicable, of course, during which we discussed at length the evil influence of miscellaneous associations, the Sunday school mission and kindred subjects. Half an hour afterwards I saw them together again killing water snakes. I went immediately and turned the pony into the pasture, thinking he would need at least three days’ rest; it proved a specific.

That day at dinner I found a glass of milk awaiting me, as well as the young woman, with a smile, instead of the excrescence, being the absorbing feature. Being neither Mexican nor French, the revolution was a surprise; I carried that round with me all the afternoon without knowing what to do with it. Had my boy’s mother been accessible she could have cleared up the surprise in five minutes.

In the evening I sat on the tavern porch, enjoying my brier-root, when I became conscious of the presence of the cotton gown and its owner. She wanted to know of me if I were “star gazing.” I began to think she had taken me for a widower and eligible, so I hastened to tell her that since my fourth marriage I had outgrown the sentiment involved in her inquiry. She nevertheless assured me that she “doted on the study of the heavenly orbs,” and a minute afterwards I learned – “Oh, my prophetic soul” – that poetry was her mission. She said she had been trying to find out the difference between a spondee and a trochee; I told her I knew nothing about the former, being a temperance man; as to the latter, I recommended Brown’s, and offered her one, as she seemed to need it at the moment. But she declined, as I thought, in a manner unnecessarily formal. Then she informed me that she had no reference to bronchial difficulties or their remedies, but to feet. I expected no less than a dissertation on corns, that being a tender subject with me, and hastened to express my interest. I became convinced in a moment that I had verily “put my foot in it” for the second time, when she told me she meant “poetic feet.” I was about to say something, but felt out of my depth, and refrained, lest I might disappear, head and ears. She then informed me that a spondee was a foot, but whether it was a foot of two short syllables and a long one, or two long ones and a short one, was what “bothered” her. I told her the subject was too long for me to get round, and, in short, that I had never read any poetry but that of Walt Whitman. She had never heard of him, and wanted a taste of his quality; I gave it her:

“My head slews round on my neck;Music rolls, but not from the organ;Folks are around me, but they are no household of mine” —

She interrupted me at this point, and wanted to know what I was “giving” her, and whether I called that poetry. It became my duty, of course, to assure her of my utter inability to express an opinion. Thereupon, in a burst of confidence, she informed me that, as I had no appreciation of poetic numbers (though she possessed “piles of manuscript”), she had just finished “An Essay on Time.” The subject being prose, and original, I begged the favor of hearing it. She began without hesitation:

“Once more has the earth completed its circuit round the burning and brilliant luminary of heaven; the wheels of Time still roll on and bury every moment in the dust the wrecks of former revolutions – ”

Just then my boy came with the announcement that he was sleepy and wanted to go to bed. It is difficult to resist a boy’s appeal, as a rule; of the sleepy boy an impossibility. If not yielded to at once, he repeats his invocation every half minute until success crowns his efforts. But I could not go without exacting a promise that, at some future time, when she had time, the Essay on Time, “whereof by parcels I had something heard, but not intentively,” she would “dilate” fully. Of course she promised, but the Arctic smile which beamed upon the boy would have made his mother wretched. The next morning at breakfast he complained to me that his coffee tasted salty. I had learned of him that he had already that morning corroborated to the aunt my denial to the nephew of the editorial dignity charged upon me by that youth the day before. I had no milk for dinner that day, nor any day thereafter; the far-away look came back into Merope’s eyes, and, for me, was stereotyped there. The Essay on Time was lost; so were I and the boy – at least we seemed to be the only ones aware of our own presence at meal times. I always have sympathy for those who realize having, as it were, “wasted their sweetness on the desert air.” But the young woman ignored sympathy, and I was made painfully conscious of my inability to eat her pearls. One’s pride may sometimes exert the mastery over one’s appetite, but a boy’s stomach, especially a healthy boy’s, possesses no such armor. His tyrant began to dictate to him, and, as tyranny generally begets rebellion in the subject, there was no alternative but to declare war or vacate. Being always peacefully inclined, I adopted the latter, and the boy, the pony and I took our leave.

“HE’S NO SARDINE.”

Wagon Wheel Gap ought to have been colonized by Frenchmen. Why, did you say? Well, the Gap proper is a few hundred feet long. On the southwest side of the Rio Grande, a cliff, about six hundred feet at the base, reaches heavenward perpendicularly about the same distance. Opposite, and stretching for two miles or more down the stream, is a beetling wall, in some places, they tell me, thirteen hundred feet high. To reach the summit, one must go two miles up the river to Bellows Creek, strike into a game trail that leads through numberless little parks, bordered with mountain pines, and gorgeous with the hues of wild flowers. If a Frenchman should walk to the summit of his ambition, he would be too tired to fall off; if he rode up, being a mercurial creature, he’d have time to, and would, change his mind, go back to his family, if he had any, and wonder why he had ever entertained the notion that this is not a good world to live in. Looked at from below, there would be such a fascination in the absolute magnificence of the means to his end, that when the melancholy fit enraptured him again, he’d go over the same trail, with the same happy result. With those cliffs hanging over him, the consequences of charcoal, morphine, the pistol or the rapier would become coarse. He would abandon all other routes to immortality, and finally die in his bed with the weight of years, like a Christian. That was my explanation to the Captain, and he believed in it, as we lay peering over the edge and looking down at our six-feet friends turned into midgets.

Those friends of ours, good rodsters, all, stood on the bank of the river, evidently predicting what a day might bring forth. The Rio Grande was metamorphosed from a crystal stream into a river of mud. From our dizzy height, it looked like a demoralized rope, the impeding boulders in the current making the frayed patches. We had seen it in that plight and none other for two weeks. But that we had been assured each day that there would certainly be a change on the morrow, we would have sworn its normal condition was “rily.”

Having been lied to daily for the last fourteen days, our hope had ended in the faith that inspired our comforters. “So much a long communion tends to make us what we are: – even I” promised each newcomer, anxious to test his skill, that the river would “clear up to-morrow.” We had heard, too, about four times a day, of the eight-pound trout captured somewhere in Antelope Park, on a seven-ounce rod, – the trout I mean, not the park. I knew all the history of that trout; it had been skinned and the skin stuffed; I saw a woman who saw the trout, and I, of course, had no hesitation in confidently asserting its weight and the details of its capture.

Our hourly routine had been to go to the river, examine the color of the water, and the mark that registered its stage; every fellow said it would “clear up to-morrow;” then we went back to the house and smoked.

Being on higher ground, the Captain thought he would vary the subject, so he said:

“I’d like to catch a pound and a half trout.”

I told him he should have one; that one of eight pounds had been caught somewhere in Antelope Park, and that it had been skinned and the skin stuffed; then he said he felt encouraged. That night the river did clear a little, and notwithstanding we knew that every fish in the river was gorged, we could not resist going down stream. Having floundered round on the slippery boulders for a couple of hours without sitting down, we reached a couple of good-sized pools at the head of a riffle; the Captain took the upper, I the lower. Making my way out near to mid-stream, I took up my station behind a large flat rock that stood about a foot out of water, and busied myself sending a “coachman” and a “professor” out into my domain with a little hope that I might induce something out of the inviting pool. Before I had been there five minutes a yell from the Captain caused me to look his way. His Bethabara was beautifully arched, and at the end of fifty feet of line something was helping itself to silk.

“I’ve got him – he’s a whopper.”

“That’s the pound and a half I promised you,” I answered, as a beautiful fellow shot across stream not three yards above me; “but you’ll lose him in that current.”

“I know it, unless I work him down your way.”

“Come on with him – don’t mind me.” I reeled in, climbed on the rock, and sat down to see the fun. The noble fish made a gallant fight, but the hook was in his upper jaw, and it was only a matter of time when he would turn upon his side. Working him down stream, through my pool and round into the quieter water near shore, was the work of ten minutes at least; the captive, seeming to readily understand that still water was not his best hold, kept making rushes for the swift current; but each time he was brought back, and soon began to weaken under the spring of the lithe toy in the Captain’s hand. Fifteen minutes were exhausted when the scale hook was run under his gills, and he registered one pound twelve ounces.

Apologizing for creating a row in my quarters, the Captain went back to his old place, while I again tried my luck. About five minutes elapsed when I heard another, not to be mistaken yell.

“I’ve got another – he’s bigger than the first.”

“Yes, I see you have – I think it’s infernally mean.”

“I know it is, but I can’t help it. I’ve got to come down there again.”

“Well, come on,” and I sat down again to watch the issue. The struggle was not so brave, though the fish, when brought to scale, weighed half a pound more than the first. While we were commenting on this streak of luck, we noticed a change in the water, its partially clear hue began to grow milky, and in less time than it takes to tell it, a boulder six inches under the surface was out of sight.

“We might as well go to dinner, no trout will rise in that mud,” and I reeled up with the reflection that the next best thing to catching a trout is to see one captured by one who knows how to manipulate a two-pounder on a seven-ounce rod.

That evening the river gave promise, as usual, of “clearing up to-morrow,” whereupon six of us made arrangements for a trip up stream half a dozen miles, with a lunch in the wagon. The morrow came and brought with it comparatively clear water. We were off immediately after breakfast; arrived at our lunching place under the shelter of some pines by the river bank, it was at once discovered that the river had gone back on us, so to speak; muddy again. No one swore, we just arranged ourselves along the margin and prayed; all good anglers know how to pray. I am indifferently skilful – at angling I mean – but always endeavor to do the best I can. In the course of an hour the river gave us some encouragement. It grew better as noon approached, and after lunch each man was assigned his quarters and struck out for them.