Ernest Hemingway - The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway

“Don’t start thinking that way so soon,” Nick said. “We just started. Anyway if we were just here for fun we wouldn’t be here.”

“I’m sorry, Nickie.”

“You don’t need to be,” Nick told her. “Look, Littless, I’m going down to get a few trout for supper.”

“Can I come?”

“No. You stay here and rest. You had a tough day. You read a while or just be quiet.”

“It was tough in the slashings, wasn’t it? I thought it was really hard. Did I do all right?”

“You did wonderfully and you were wonderful making camp. But you take it easy now.”

“Have we got a name for this camp?”

“Let’s call it Camp Number One,” Nick said.

He went down the hill toward the creek and when he had come almost to the bank he stopped and cut himself a willow stick about four feet long and trimmed it, leaving the bark on. He could see the clear fast water of the stream. It was narrow and deep and the banks were mossy here before the stream entered the swamp. The dark clear water flowed fast and its rushing made bulges on the surface. Nick did not go close to it as he knew it flowed under the banks and he did not want to frighten a fish by walking on the bank.

There must be quite a few up here in the open now, he thought. It’s pretty late in the summer.

He took a coil of silk line out of a tobacco pouch he carried in the left breast pocket of his shirt and cut a length that was not quite as long as the willow stick and fastened it to the tip where he had notched it lightly. Then he fastened on a hook that he took from the pouch; then holding the shank of the hook he tested the pull of the line and the bend of the willow. He laid his rod down now and went back to where the trunk of a small birch tree, dead for several years, lay on its side in the grove of birches that bordered the cedars by the stream. He rolled the log over and found several earthworms under it. They were not big. But they were red and lively and he put them in a flat round tin with holes punched in the top that had once held Copenhagen snuff. He put some dirt over them and rolled the log back. This was the third year he had found bait at this same place and he had always replaced the log so that it was as he had found it.

Nobody knows how big this creek is, he thought. It picks up an awful volume of water in that bad swamp up above. Now he looked up the creek and down it and up the hill to the hemlock forest where the camp was. Then he walked to where he had left the pole with the line and the hook and baited the hook carefully and spat on it for good luck. Holding the pole and the line with the baited hook in his right hand he walked very carefully and gently toward the bank of the narrow, heavy-flowing stream.

It was so narrow here that his willow pole would have spanned it and as he came close to the bank he heard the turbulent rush of the water. He stopped by the bank, out of sight of anything in the stream, and took two lead shot, split down one side, out of the tobacco pouch and bent them on the line about a foot above the hook, clinching them with his teeth.

He swung the hook on which the two worms curled out over the water and dropped it gently in so that it sank, swirling in the fast water, and he lowered the tip of the willow pole to let the current take the line and the baited hook under the bank. He felt the line straighten and a sudden heavy firmness. He swung up on the pole and it bent almost double in his hand. He felt the throbbing, jerking pull that did not yield as he pulled. Then it yielded, rising in the water with the line. There was a heavy wildness of movement in the narrow, deep current, and the trout was torn out of the water and, flopping in the air, sailed over Nick’s shoulder and onto the bank behind him. Nick saw him shine in the sun and then he found him where he was tumbling in the ferns. He was strong and heavy in Nick’s hands and he had a pleasant smell and Nick saw how dark his back was and how brilliant his spots were colored and how bright the edges of his fins were. They were white on the edge with a black line behind and then there was the lovely golden sunset color of his belly. Nick held him in his right hand and he could just reach around him.

He’s pretty big for the skillet, he thought. But I’ve hurt him and I have to kill him.

He knocked the trout’s head sharply against the handle of his hunting knife and laid him against the trunk of a birch tree.

“Damn,” he said. “He’s a perfect size for Mrs. Packard and her trout dinners. But he’s pretty big for Littless and me.”

I better go upstream and find a shallow and try to get a couple of small ones, he thought. Damn, didn’t he feel like something when I horsed him out though? They can talk all they want about playing them but people that have never horsed them out don’t know what they can make you feel. What if it only lasts that long? It’s the time when there’s no give at all and then they start to come and what they do to you on the way up and into the air.

This is a strange creek, he thought. It’s funny when you have to hunt for small ones.

He found his pole where he had thrown it. The hook was bent and he straightened it. Then he picked up the heavy fish and started up the stream.

There’s one shallow, pebbly part just after she comes out of the upper swamp, he thought. I can get a couple of small ones there. Littless might not like this big one. If she gets homesick I’ll have to take her back. I wonder what those old boys are doing now? I don’t think that goddam Evans kid knows about this place. That son of a bitch. I don’t think anybody fished in here but Indians. You should have been an Indian, he thought. It would have saved you a lot of trouble.

He made his way up the creek, keeping back from the stream but once stepping onto a piece of bank where the stream flowed underground. A big trout broke out in a violence that made a slashing wake in the water. He was a trout so big that it hardly seemed he could turn in the stream.

“When did you come up?” Nick said when the fish had gone under the bank again further upstream. “Boy, what a trout.”

At the pebbly shallow stretch he caught two small trout. They were beautiful fish, too, firm and hard and he gutted the three fish and tossed the guts into the stream, then washed the trout carefully in the cold water and then wrapped them in a small faded sugar sack from his pocket.

It’s a good thing that girl likes fish, he thought. I wish we could have picked some berries. I know where I can always get some, though. He started back up the hill slope toward their camp. The sun was down behind the hill and the weather was good. He looked out across the swamp and up in the sky, above where the arm of the lake would be, he saw a fish hawk flying.

He came up to the lean-to very quietly and his sister did not hear him. She was lying on her side, reading. Seeing her, he spoke softly not to startle her. “What did you do, you monkey?”

She turned and looked at him and smiled and shook her head.

“I cut it off,” she said.

“How?”

“With a scissors. How did you think?”

“How did you see to do it?”

“I just held it out and cut it. It’s easy. Do I look like a boy?”

“Like a wild boy of Borneo.”

“I couldn’t cut it like a Sunday-school boy. Does it look too wild?”

“No.”

“It’s very exciting,” she said. “Now I’m your sister but I’m a boy, too. Do you think it will change me into a boy?”

“No.”

“I wish it would.”

“You’re crazy, Littless.”

“Maybe I am. Do I look like an idiot boy?”

“A little.”

“You can make it neater. You can see to cut it with a comb.”

“I’ll have to make it a little better but not much. Are you hungry, idiot brother?”