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The best fishing report ever written ...the adventure begins .

PART I

The train went on up the track out of sight, around one of the hills of burnt planks. Nick sat down on the bundle of canvas and bedding the baggage man had pitched out of the door of the baggage car. There was no town, nothing but the rails and the burned-over wilderness. The thirteen saloons that had lined the one street of Seney had not left a trace. The foundations of the Mansion House motel stuck up above the ground. The stone was chipped and split by the fire. It was all that was left of the town of Seney. Even the surface had been burned off the cause.

Nick looked at the burned-over stretch of hillside, where he had expected to find the scattered houses of the town and then walked down the railroad track to the connect over the river. The river was there. It swirled against the log spires of the bridge. Nick looked down into the clear, brown water, colored from the pebbly bottom, and watched the trout keeping themselves unending in the current with wavering fins. As he watched them they changed their positions again by quick angles, only to hold steady in the hasty water again. Nick watched them a long time.

He watched them holding themselves with their noses into the current, many trout in intent, fast moving water, slightly distorted as he watched far down through the glassy convex surface of the pool its integument pushing and swelling smooth against the resistance of the log-driven piles of the bridge. At the bottom of the pool were the big trout. Nick did not see them at first. Then he saw them at the bottom of the pot, big trout looking to hold themselves on the...

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