The Black Fawn Part 7

Bud laid his rod down carefully and, dropping to all fours, crawled beside Gramps toward the water. Five feet from the edge, Gramps dropped to his belly and began to inch toward the pool.

"No fast moves and show no more of yourself than you have to," Gramps whispered.

Bud nodded and wriggled toward the water. He peered down from the ledge and saw a broad, long pool formed by the ledge and fed by rus.h.i.+ng riffles that curled around the upstream end of the ledge. On the far side the water was relatively shallow, or perhaps it only looked shallow because there was white sand on the bottom there. Schools of s.h.i.+ners and minnows swam lazily in that part of the pool and the white sand was pock-marked with driftwood that had floated down in flood time and, having become waterlogged, gone to the bottom.

At first glance the water at the near edge of the white sand seemed almost black. This was partly because the white sand ended and partly because the water was deeper there. Actually, it was green-blue, and the high-riding sun bored well into it.

Presently Bud saw a school of fish almost directly beneath him. The fish ranged in length from about five to nearly eighteen inches, and they lay very still in what appeared to be a quiet pocket of water, the biggest fish at the head of the school and the smallest at the end. Farther out, Bud saw more fish. The deepest part of the pool was too deep for the sun to penetrate it, and its invisible depths were tantalizing. Toward the foot of the pool, just before it was gathered in by the riffles that drained it, the trunk of a leaning sycamore jutted out about six feet over the water. The water near the sycamore was sun-sprayed, too. Bud saw flat stones on the bottom away from the bank, but in closer the bottom was in shadow and he could see nothing.

"The fish 'neath us are trout," Gramps whispered. "Those farther out are suckers and mullets. The shallows 'cross the pool are loaded with minnows and s.h.i.+ners. Down there Old Shark hangs out 'neath that sycamore trunk." He spoke as reverently as a fanatic Moslem referring to Mecca.

"Stay here and watch. Don't move. You do, you'll send every trout in the pool kiting under the ledge."

Gramps wriggled backward and disappeared. A few minutes later Bud saw him near the foot of the ledge standing behind a rock spire that hid him from the pool and at the same time gave him freedom of action. Gramps made a perfect cast. The fly floated lazily toward the leaning sycamore and gathered speed as the water became swifter.

Old Shark rose and Bud saw him, a great, dark shadow that left the shaded bank and rose into the clear water upstream from the leaning sycamore. Old Shark did seem more like a shark than a trout as he paused within an inch of the fly and then sank back into the shadows from which he had come.

Almost unable to tear his eyes from Old Shark's lair, Bud's attention was distracted for a moment by a ripple in the water beneath him. It was a gra.s.shopper struggling toward the ledge; before it reached safety, a twelve-inch trout from the school rose and took it.

Twenty minutes later Gramps called,

"Your turn. Take it slow and crawl away, mind you."

Bud took his place behind the spire of rock and cast. He knew how clumsy he was in comparison with Gramps, but he didn't care, for now he knew why Gramps spoke so reverently of Old Yellowfoot and Old Shark.

When Bud's second turn was over, he went back to where Gramps was sitting well back on the ledge.

"We didn't get him," Gramps said, but if he was disappointed he did not show it. "There's always another day and we'll come again. Reckon we'd better go in after this last try, though. Mother's all alone."

Bud stayed where he was and watched Gramps walk down to cast. A gra.s.shopper the old man's feet had disturbed came to rest on Bud's left arm. He clapped his right hand over it and held the gra.s.shopper until Gramps shrugged, reeled in and indicated that he was finished by hooking his fly in the cork b.u.t.t of his rod.

Then, taking up his own rod, Bud strung the gra.s.shopper on over the fly and crept across the ledge. He eased his gra.s.shopper onto the water near the school of trout and a trout, which might well have been the one that had taken the other gra.s.shopper, darted upward and sucked in the gra.s.shopper. Bud struck, and his rod bent and his line grew taut as the hooked trout tried frantically to escape.

"Keep the tip up! The tip up, Bud!" Gramps shouted.

With a heave that bent his rod double, Bud jerked the trout from the water and sent him ten feet back on the ledge, where he lay flapping.

Bud raced back to get his catch.

"You did it!" Gramps shouted deliriously. "You did it! Your first trout on a dry fly!"

"I caught him on a gra.s.shopper," Bud panted.

"What'd you say?" Gramps asked blankly.

"I caught him on a gra.s.shopper."

"A hopper?"

"Yes."

"Surely you're not going to keep him?"

Bud looked at the ground without replying.

"Well," Gramps said with an effort, "I guess that's your business."

Without another word the old man turned to start homeward. Bud followed, miserable in the knowledge that he had betrayed Gramps. But even though it was abominable to take a trout on anything except a dry fly, he couldn't have done otherwise. Gram had asked them to bring her one trout.

They took old shark on their seventh trip to the ledge. Gramps did it with a cunningly placed midge. Bud knew he would never forget the battle that followed or the plucking of Old Shark from shallow water when Gramps had finally worked him there.

They bore their prize proudly home, showed it to Gram. Then, in Gramps'

asthmatic pickup truck--a vehicle that, until now, Bud had not even suspected was on the farm--they carried the trout to Pat Haley's store at Haleyville. Old Shark was a sensation and Pat Haley began at once to freeze him in a block of ice.

"What now?" Bud asked, as he and Gramps started home.

"Find us another big trout."

"I mean, what about Old Shark?"

"Oh, him. Even if he had any flavor and wasn't tougher'n a shoehorn, he's too much for us to eat. n.o.body else'll want him for the same reasons." Gramps drove in silence for a while and then said, "Tell you what we'll do. When Pat's finished and everybody who wants a look at Old Shark has had it, we'll send him down to the orphanage. They don't often have trout there."

chapter 4

As he walked toward the road with a lunch pail dangling from one hand, it seemed to Bud that the driveway--endlessly long when he had labored up it that first day, with a chip on his shoulder and fear in his heart--had shrunken miraculously. He glanced quickly behind him to see if he was being watched and, seeing n.o.body, bent down to loosen the laces of the s.h.i.+ny black school shoes Gram had bought him in Haleyville.

Then he straightened up and walked on, trying to manage a natural gait.

But it was hopeless because after the conquest of Old Shark he had stopped wearing shoes. The soles of his feet had become so calloused that he could even run over the sharp stones around Gramps' gravel pit.

Now, at the end of the summer, it had been so long since he had worn shoes that he felt as if he were dragging a ball and chain on each foot.

His shoes pinched, too, but you could not go to school barefooted, not if Gram Bennett had anything to say about it.

The summer had been so wonderful that, looking back now that it was ending, every minute seemed precious. It had taken Bud a month to realize that there was actually only a bare minimum of work to be done and that Gram and Gramps had planned it that way. They had labored prodigiously to rear and educate seven sons and four daughters and, now that the children were grown up and had their own families, the old people had made up their minds to do the things they had always wanted to do. For Gramps that meant hunting and fis.h.i.+ng; Gram wanted nothing more than to make other people happy. There was money in the bank and very little labor was needed to provide for the two old people even now that they had taken a hungry orphan into their home.

Bud reached the blacktop road and waited for the bus to take him to the Haleyville Consolidated School, where he was to enter the eighth grade.

He had concealed it from Gram and Gramps, but he dreaded starting out in a new school. As he stood there waiting, he tried to ease his troubled mind by concentrating instead on one of the high points of the summer.

He had cast a dry fly beneath a hollow stump beside a pool thickly bordered by a jungle of willows. The fly had gone truly and he had taken a fourteen-inch brook trout. Gramps had not been effusive, but it had meant a great deal to hear him say,

"Some day you'll be a fisherman, Bud."

Bud knew that although he might have learned to cast a dry fly, a single season or a dozen seasons do not necessarily produce a dry fly fisherman. There were very few masters of the art. Still, Gramps'

approval was the next thing to achieving knighthood.

Sometimes with Gramps and sometimes alone, Bud had gone to see how the black fawn was faring. Although the fawn and doe had widened their range somewhat, they were still in the same general area. Now they were much more difficult to approach, but Bud had seen them enough times to know that the fawn was doing well. The knowledge that the fawn was flouris.h.i.+ng made Bud less uneasy about his own good fortune, for since that first meeting, he had never stopped believing that a bond existed between himself and the fawn. Bud's luck had taken its turn for the better as soon as he found the little black buck and he was sure that misfortune would overtake him again if harm ever befell the fawn.