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THE

CHAPTER III

THE ANGLER'S STORY

HE nights grow cold in September and October around the Klamath country. The days were still radiant and warm, but the summit of Pitt-a splendid volcano cone,-over to the west, was now always white with snow. The pines and other trees looked darker, in the shadows which raced across the lake of dreams, the rays that painted the Modoc hills with vermilion were deeper in tint and tone. The tules had been nipped by the frost and had lost their vivid greens, and hung in the wind, or crackled as the ducks and geese rustled through them, like banners in red and gold. The water of the thousand springs grew cooler, and one imagined a greater, stronger flow. Ducks, geese, jacksnipe were going south; long lines could be seen every day, above the black forests of the Cascade, and every little river, inlet, and bay had its voyagers, while out in the lake proper, great ghostly cottonlike masses told of the white pelican already thinking of some warmer clime.

A great change was imminent, and it did not require a conjurer among the anglers, or a great prophetic soul, to say that it was winter. Yet winter was weeks away; these were only the premonitory symptoms, and they drove us to the big log hunting lodge o' nights and to our little camps among the trees, where we piled on the logs of Oregon pine and revelled in its roar. Sometimes we sat and listened to the strange sounds of the forest, the weird note of an owl, the cry of a mountain lion, perhaps, or the fiercer growl and menace of two limbs which smote one another and snarled as only two dead limbs can, on a cold dry night when the sky is clear, and each star is like a steel facet in the sky.

I have often wondered why some hunter who writes of the woods has never thought to translate the voices of the dead limbs, the sounds of the forest as the strong wind pulsates through them. You have seen the soft summer wind rippling purring through a green field; how it changes the color, until marvellous tints and tones come with every breath, yet all in green. Once, a mile high or more in the Sierra Madre, I saw a wild and sportive wind sweeping over the forest seemingly in just this way, rippling through the trees, imitating all the animal sounds ever dreamed of in our philosophy. And so we sat, watching the roaring fire; now going over to the table where B- sat tying flies

just for the fun of it. It is too bad that Bdoes not have to tie flies for a living, as anglers have lost a great artist. He is the impressionist, the Monet of the school, as note his great creation, the Prodigioso fly, which hangs in the Tuna Club, formed of bear's hair, moa crest, and the hackle of a roc,, made for me for taking an eight-pound rainbow. While B- ties flies and smokes, D— reads from an old book, John Dennys' Secrets of Angling: "Of Angling, and the Art thereof I sing."

You Nymphs that in the Springs and Waters sweet,
Your dwelling have, of every Hill and Dale,
To sport and play, and heare the Nightingale;
And in the Rivers fresh doe wash your feet,
While Prognes sister tels her wofull tale:
Such ayde and power unto my verses lend
As may suffice this little worke to end.

The conversation then fell upon the habits of anglers and of the charming men, and women, too, we had met, and Fsang of Mynheer Vandunck, as a warning to S-, who was in the back room brewing a punch whose pallid breath reeked through the seams of the comfortable shanty, preaching sermons of the delights of iniquity, pipes, hot jorums on roaring nights, punch on fairly cold nights (like this), and fish stories that were neither hard nor fast, so far

as truth is concerned. But let us strike a moral when we can, and here is the song of Mynheer Vandunck, written by some Dutch wag in 1603, slightly paraphrased.

Mynheer Vandunck, though he never got drunk, Sipped brandy and angled gaily;

And he quenched his thirst with two quarts of the first,

Hooking lots of fine salmon daily:

Singing, "Oh that a Dutchman's draught could be As deep as the rolling Zuyder Zee!"

Water well mixed with spirit good store,
No fisherman thinks of scorning:

But of water alone he drinks no more

Than to help him bring his fish on shore
Upon the market-stall in the morning,
For a fishing Dutchman's draught should be
As deep as the rolling Zuyder Zee.

The wind rises and we pile on the wood and tell about the catches of to-morrow; then we call upon the author, who has been looking into the fire, doubtless on a long still hunt for inspiration, and we demand a song or story.

"I don't know whether you know," he began, "but not far to the south of us, over the Siskiyous in Plumas and Sierra counties, California, they have the deepest snow in the world; not always, but at times.

In Plumas,

near Quincy, they have had snow forty feet deep on the level. I have seen towns buried out of sight, the streets marked by staffs, with rags tied to them. When you came to a staff you would see a hole, and walked down snow steps until you reached the second-story windows of Clancy's house, and so the Clancy family.

"Men living in such conditions must be men, and I have a number of yarns regarding an angler named Clancy. He was the best fly tier and caster in this part of the country, and the moral of it all is that among the anglers way up in the Sierras you find some of the biggest men and some of the noblest of souls."

"Hold on a moment," cried S putting on a big log; "now, then, sail on."

And so with the wind whistling down the chimney and the fire roaring, the author read his story before he sent it to the magazine that was to publish it 1; a story supposed to be fiction, yet founded on fact.

Clancy of the Jack-pot

It was Clancy's ante, but after going over his hand mentally for a moment, he looked up and with a peculiar drawl said, "Boys, let's make

1 McClure's, December, 1907.

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