Story
He knew they needed to crest the hill before the sun came up to get away from the bears that liked to eat crayfish and grubs by the riverbank. - Dolan Geiman
"I'll get a fire goin then we'll hunker down here for the night. Tomorrow we gotta hit the high trail out of this riverbottom and get up into the quakies before the sun cracks."
The weary family spilled out onto the soft grass near the river like a can of red beans. He had brought the family and their wagons, their oxen, their chickens, their weight, a hundred miles from Bent Willow Falls, up the Comanche trail and now through the Black Canyon. He knew they needed to crest the hill before the sun came up to get away from the bears that liked to eat crayfish and grubs by the riverbank. The family had paid him handsomely to deliver them to Telluride - they had a claim they meant to dig and needed to get there before the silver ran out.
They'd taken a longer route because he loved this river, and like an old lover he always stopped to chat with her when he was in this part of the country. He'd learned about a deep hole under a rock ledge several years ago where the dark trout who floated in the river there were thicker than a man's thigh. Years before he had tried hooking them on some elk jerky he wrapped around an old hair pin, but they didn't seem to like the taste of venison.
This trip, however, he had a new weapon. He had met a newspaper man on the train outside of Kansas City who was wrapping together pieces of bird feathers and yarn: he called it a Fishing Fly. The man handed him a large specimen, cobalt and crimson and a dash of snow white deer hair for a belly, all wrapped around a perfectly shaped hooked piece of metal. He had carried that Fly in his hat for two years, thinking about these trout the whole time.
And now he was here, and so were the trout.
