The elevated prairie or table-land on which I found myself corresponded in every important particular with the park below; there were the same natural divisions of prairie and forests, the same erratic boulders, but on account of the difference in elevation there was a corresponding difference in plant life, and most interesting of all to me, there were the trout streams. The tablelands above the park were comparatively level in places where the stream ran almost as quietly as a meadow brook, but these level stretches were interrupted at short distance by foaming rapids, jagged rocks and roaring falls.
My angler’s instinct told me that the biggest fish lurked in the deep pools, to reach which it was necessary to creep and worm myself over the open flats of sharp stones and patches of heather, but once on the vantage ground the swish of a trout rod sounded there for the first time since the dawn of Creation.
[Illustration: More than once while I clung to the chance projection ... I regretted making the fool-hardy attempt]
There was an audible splash at my first cast. My, how that reel did sing! Before I realized it, my fish had reached rapid water and taken out a dangerous amount of line; still I dared not check him too severely among the sharp rocks and swift waters, so I ran along the bank, stumbling over stones, but managing to avail myself of every opportunity to wind in the line until I had the satisfaction of seeing enough line on my reel to prepare me for possible sudden dashes and emergencies.
Ah! that was a glorious fight, and when at last I was able to steer my tired fish into shallow water I saw there were three of them, one lusty trout on each of my three flies. I had no landing net so I gently slid the almost exhausted fish onto a gravel bar and as I did so I experienced one of those delightful thrills which comes to a fellow’s lot but once or twice in a life-time. But it was not because I had captured three at a strike, for I have done that before and since, but I thrilled because they were not only a new and strange kind of trout, but they were of the color and sheen of newly minted gold. Never before had any man seen such trout.
I have since been informed that I had blundered on to water inhabited by the rarest of all game fish, the so-called golden trout, which has since been discovered and which scientists declare to be pre-glacier fish left by some accident of nature to exist in a new world in which all their original contemporaries have long been extinct.