Page:Edison Marshall--The voice of the pack.djvu/115

Rh twilight he brought the body of a lynx tumbling through the branches of a pine at a distance of two hundred yards. A shotgun is never a mountaineer's weapon—except a sawed-off specimen for family contingencies—yet Dan acquired a certain measure of skill at small game hunting, too. He got so he could shatter a grouse out of the air in the half of a second or so in which its bronze wings glinted in the shrubbery; and when a man may do this a fair number of times out of ten, he is on the straight road toward greatness.

Then there came a day when Dan caught his first steelhead in the North Fork. There was no finer sport in the whole West than this,—the play of the fly, the strike, the electric jar that carries along the line and through the arm and into the soul from where it is never quite effaced, and finally the furious strife and exultant throb when the fish is hooked. There is no more beautiful thing in the wilderness world than a steelhead trout in action. He simply seems to dance on the surface of the water, leaping again and again, and racing at an unheard-of speed down the ripples. He weighs only from three to fifteen pounds. But now and again amateur fishermen without souls have tried to pull him in with main strength, and are still somewhat dazed by the result. It