Page:Fantastic Volume 08 Number 01.djvu/114

 I scrambled down the bank to the stony shore and stood there breathing in the early morning dewey smell and the drifting spray from the bubbling white water at the foot of the fall. In spite of a thousand disillusionments, these moments are the high points of my life. You know the saying, about anticipation and realization?

There just had to be fish in this hole!

I put on my earphones, turned on the gear, which hung from my neck like a Brownie camera, and chucked the sounding knob out to the end of its ten feet of cable. It sank into the clear, green water, and I upped the volume control.

Nothing but a faint hash in my phones!

I just couldn't believe that this piscatorial paradise was that deserted, so I stuck together my fly-rod, tied a gray-hackle on the end of a half-pound-test leader and was quite ready to make a liar out of my own fish-detector, when a steelhead long as my arm did it all by himself.

He erupted from the surface practically at my feet, danced on his tail while he looked me over and then smashed back like a log, spattering my waders with the splash.

Men and fish are perverse.

I knew he'd seen me. I knew I had the wrong kind of a fly on for a steelhead. I knew that the half-pound leader holding that fly was meant for a trout, not a lunker of a steelhead. And I could visualize the sad wreck he could make of my slender wisp of bamboo if I hooked him.

So, breaking all the rules, I cast out anyway. And the mammoth steelhead, defying all common fish sense, split the surface instantly and gobbled the puny little gray-hackle.

Down he went, some 200 feet to the bottom with no argument from me. In the excitement of my incredible luck I'd forgotten about the earphones on my head and was tensing up on my rod, trying to coax in a little line when someone said very distinctly:

"I'll be a son-of-sucker! Hooked again!"

I was so startled I almost dropped my rod, twisting around to look behind me. Nothing but the brush and trees and boulders as far as I could see down-stream. The falls blocked my view to my right.

In wrenching around like this I fouled my reel in the cable of the fish-spotter. I said 114