We had enough, however, without him. We took home forty-eight trout that weighed, when dressed, sixty pounds, and of all the many days I have spent fishing in the many years long gone, I never enjoyed any more intensely, never had grander sport than in these two days on Big Spring creek.
It has been stated that the mountain trout lacks the game qualities of our Eastern brook trout. I have not found it so. They are quite as gamy, as vicious in their fighting, and as destructive to fine tackle as the brook trout, the only perceptible difference being that they do not fight so long. They yield, however, only after a stubborn resistance, sufficiently prolonged to challenge the admiration of any angler. I have caught a number of two and three pounders that required very careful and patient handling for twenty to thirty minutes before they could be brought to the landing net.
There are various other streams along the line of the Northern Pacific Railroad which afford almost equally as fine sport as the Bitter Root, and some of them that are even more picturesque and beautiful. In fact, nearly every stream reached by the road, between Billings and Puget Sound, teems with these graceful beauties. By leaving the road at almost any point on the Rocky Mountain or Pend d'Orielle Divisions and pushing back into the mountains twenty to one hundred miles, the enterprising angler may find streams whose banks have seldom been profaned by the foot of a white man; where an artificial fly has seldom or never fallen upon the sparkling blue waters, and yet where millions of these beautiful creatures swarm, ready to rush upon anything that reaches the surface of their element bearing the least resemblance to their natural food, with all the fearless enthusiasm of untainted and unrestrained nature. In these wilder regions the tourist will also find frequent use for his rifle, for elk, bear, deer, mountain sheep, and other large game may yet be found in reasonable quantities in all such undisturbed fastnesses.
Northern Wisconsin is one vast and almost unbroken deer range. It is penetrated by several railroads, along the immediate lines of which are a few small farms and some fair-sized towns and villages; but on going a few miles back from these roads, in almost any direction, one passes the confines of civilization and enters a wilderness that is broken only by the numerous logging camps, and these as a rule are occupied only in winter. Thousands of acres of these pine lands have been chopped over, and the old slashings, having grown up to brush, brambles, and briars of various kinds, furnish excellent cover and feeding grounds for _Cervus Virginianus_.