John Evered loved fishing; and he knew the little brook along the hither border of Whitcher Swamp, below the farm, as well as he knew his own hand. But this year had been busy; he found no opportunity to try the stream until the first week of July. One morning then, with steel rod and tiny hooks, and a can of bait at his belt, he struck down through the woodlot, past the spring where Mary had been killed, into the timber below, and so came to the wall that was the border of his father’s farm, and crossed into the swamp.
Whitcher Swamp is on the whole no pleasant place for a stroll; yet it has its charms for the wild things, and for this reason John loved it. Where he struck the marshy ground it was relatively easy going; and he took a way he knew and came to the brook and moved along it a little ways to a certain broad and open pool.
He thought the brook was lower than he had ever seen it at this season; and once he knelt and felt the water, and found it warm. He smiled at this with a certain gratification for the pool he sought was a spring hole, water bubbling up through pin gravel in the brook’s very bed, and the trout would be there to dwell in that cooler stream. When he came near the place, screened behind alders so that he could not be seen, he uttered an exclamation, and became as still as the trees about him while he watched.
There were trout in the pool, a very swarm of them, lying close on the yellow gravel bottom. The water, clear as crystal, was no more than three feet deep; and he could see them ever so plainly. Big fat fish, monsters, if one considered the brook in which he found them. He judged them all to be over nine inches, several above a foot, one perhaps fourteen inches long; and his eyes were shining. They were so utterly beautiful, every line of their graceful bodies, and every dappled spot upon their backs and sides as clear as though he held them in his hands.
He rigged line and hook, nicked a long worm upon the point, and without so much as shaking an alder branch thrust his rod through and swung the baited hook and dropped it lightly in the very center of the pool, full fifteen feet from shore. Then he swung upward with a strong steady movement, for he had seen a great trout strike as the worm touched the water, had seen the chewing jaws of the fish mouthing its titbit. And as he swung, the gleaming body came into the air, through an arc above his head, into the brush behind him, where he dropped on his knees beside it and gave it merciful death with the haft of his heavy knife, and dropped it into his basket.