Rising abruptly from the prairie was a frowning precipice a thousand or more feet high and above and beyond the top of this cliff, the mountains.

When Big Pete told me that his park was “walled in” he told me the mildest sort of truth; the prairie is the bottom of a wide canyon, in fact everything seems to indicate that the whole park had settled, sunk—“taken a drop” of a thousand or more feet; forming what miners would call a fault.

From the glaciers up among the clouds numerous streams of melted ice came dashing down the sides of the mountain range, fanciful cascades leaping without fear from most stupendous heights spreading out in long horse-tail falls over the face of the cliff, doing everything but looking real. At the foot of each of the falls there was a pool of deep water, in one or two instances the pools were smooth basins hollowed out of solid rock in which the water was as transparent as air and but for the millions of air bubbles caused by the falling water every inch of bottom could be plainly seen by an observer at the brink of the pool.

The trout in these basins were almost as colorless as the water itself (the light color of the fish is due to their chameleon-like power of modifying their hue to imitate their surroundings)—this mimicry is so perfect that after looking into one of these stone basins, the rounded smooth sides of which offered no shade or nook where a trout might hide, I was ready to declare the waters uninhabited but no sooner had my brown hackel or professor settled lightly on the surface of the pool than out from among the air bubbles a fish appeared and seized the fly.

My sprained ankle was now so much improved that upon discovering a diagonal fracture in the face of the cliff, which looked as if offering a foot hold, and feeling reckless, I determined to make the effort to scale the wall at this point.

If the giant “fault” is of comparatively recent occurrence, geologically speaking, it seemed reasonable that there would be trout in the streams above the cliff and the memory of the fact that Pete had reported that both Rocky Mountain sheep and goats were up there decided me to attempt to scale the wall by the fracture. It was a long, hard climb and more than once while I clung to the chance projections or dug my fingers into small cracks and looked down upon the backs of some golden eagle sailing in spirals below me, I regretted making the fool-hardy attempt, but when the top was reached and I saw signs of sheep and had a peep at a white object I took to be a goat, I felt repaid for my arduous climb.

The elevated prairie or table-land on which I found myself corresponded in every important particular with the park below; there were the same natural divisions of prairie and forests, the same erratic boulders, but on account of the difference in elevation there was a corresponding difference in plant life, and most interesting of all to me, there were the trout streams. The tablelands above the park were comparatively level in places where the stream ran almost as quietly as a meadow brook, but these level stretches were interrupted at short distance by foaming rapids, jagged rocks and roaring falls.

My angler’s instinct told me that the biggest fish lurked in the deep pools, to reach which it was necessary to creep and worm myself over the open flats of sharp stones and patches of heather, but once on the vantage ground the swish of a trout rod sounded there for the first time since the dawn of Creation.

There was an audible splash at my first cast. My, how that reel did sing! Before I realized it, my fish had reached rapid water and taken out a dangerous amount of line; still I dared not check him too severely among the sharp rocks and swift waters, so I ran along the bank, stumbling over stones, but managing to avail myself of every opportunity to wind in the line until I had the satisfaction of seeing enough line on my reel to prepare me for possible sudden dashes and emergencies.

Ah! that was a glorious fight, and when at last I was able to steer my tired fish into shallow water I saw there were three of them, one lusty trout on each of my three flies. I had no landing net so I gently slid the almost exhausted fish onto a gravel bar and as I did so I experienced one of those delightful thrills which comes to a fellow’s lot but once or twice in a life-time. But it was not because I had captured three at a strike, for I have done that before and since, but I thrilled because they were not only a new and strange kind of trout, but they were of the color and sheen of newly minted gold. Never before had any man seen such trout.I have since been informed that I had blundered on to water inhabited by the rarest of all game fish, the so-called golden trout, which has since been discovered and which scientists declare to be pre-glacier fish left by some accident of nature to exist in a new world in which all their original contemporaries have long been extinct.

Think of it! Fish which had never seen an artificial fly nor had any family traditions of experiences with them. It is little wonder that they would jump at a brown hackle, a professor or even a gaudy salmon fly. Why they would jump at a chicken feather! They were ready and eager to bite at any sort of bunco game I saw fit to play upon them. They were veritable hayseeds of the trout family, but when they felt the hook in their lips, the wisest trout in the world could not show a craftier nor half as plucky a fight. They would leap from the water like small-mouthed bass and by shaking their heads, try to throw off the hateful hook.The constant vigorous exercise of leaping water-falls and forging up boiling rapids had developed these sturdy mountaineer trout into prodigies of strength and endurance. Even now my nerves tingle to the tips of my toes as in fancy I hear my reel hum or see the tip of my five ounce split bamboo bend so as to almost form a circle.

I fished that stream with hands trembling with excitement and had filled my creel with the rare fish before I began to notice other objects of interest. Suddenly I became aware of the presence of two birds hovering over and diving under the cold water. They were evidently feeding on some aquatic creature which my duller senses could not discern.

Although they were the first of the kind that I had ever seen alive, I at once recognized the feathered visitors to be water ouzels. The birds preceded me on my way along the water course towards camp, and were never quiet a minute. They would hop on a rock in mid-stream and bob up and down in a most solemn but comical manner for a moment before plunging fearlessly into the cold white spray of the falls or the swift dashing current, where they would disappear below the surface only to reappear once more on another rock to bob again.

A ducking did not trouble the ouzels, for as they came out of the water the liquid rolled in crystal drops from their feathers and their plumage was as dry as if it had never been submerged. The wilder and swifter the cold glacier water ran the more the birds seemed to enjoy it.

The nearer I approached the edge of the precipitous walls, enclosing the valley comprising Big Pete’s park, the rougher grew the trail, and as I was picking my way I paused to gaze at the distant purple peaks and watch the sun set in that lonely land as if I was witnessing it for the first time. As my eyes roamed over the stupendous distance and unnamed mountains I felt my own puny insignificance, as who has not when confronted with the vastness of nature.I turned from my view of the sunset to retrace my steps to the valley, and peeping over the top of a large boulder, saw seated upon an inaccessible crag directly in front of me, a gigantic figure of a man clad in a hunter’s garb, and he was smoking a long cigar!

When I thought of Big Pete’s description of how the Wild Hunter was wont to sit with his long legs dangling from some rock while he smoked one of those unprocurable cigars, and when I realized that the figure before me was fully sixty feet tall, I must confess to experiencing a queer sensation.

It was a shadowy figure yet it moved, arose, held out one hand, and a bird as large as the fabled roc alighted on the wrist of the outstretched hand.

A slight breeze sprang up, the white mists from the valley rolled up the mountainside and drifted away and the man and bird disappeared from view.

It was long after dark when I reached camp and was greeted by my friend and guide with “Gol durn your pictur tenderfut, if it hain’t tuk you longer to get a pesky mess of yaller fish than it orter to kill a bar.”

“Little wonder,” thought I, “that the Wild Hunter used golden bullets in a land where even the fish’s scales seemed to be of the same precious metal”; but I said nothing as I sat down to clean my “yaller trout.”