THE OCALA EVENING STAR — SEPTEMBER 12, 1914
SCARED BY A FISH ♢ (Or Maybe It Was a New Species of Inland Sea Monster)
A VISION IN RED EAGLE LAKE ♢ It Couldn’t Have Bean a Dream, the Angler Admits That, Nor a Bear, Nor a Shark, Though It Did Look Like a Dog, but Anyhow and Luckily It Got Away.
In camp on Red Eagle lake in the Glacier National park, devoured by mosquitoes as big as cultures, as fierce as tigers and as numerous as drops of water in the Pacific Ocean!
This is a bad beginning for a fish story. The language seems to suggest that the narrator has already become unreliable. As a matter of fact, phrases which are strictly accurate may be palpably misleading.
The language of hyperbole is needed to present an adequate picture. Perhaps the mosquitoes are not quite so big or fierce or numerous as stated, but they seem to be.
But to the fish story. And the language of vivid metaphor shall be laid aside. What follows is fact — unadorned, unexaggerated fact. I could not have dreamed it. I cannot even now that I have begun to put pen to paper hope to tell it in such a way as to bring the scene with realizing earnestness before the eye of my brother anglers.
It was evening. I was on the lake alone in my little canvas boat. The fishing had been good. I was returning to camp satisfied. The sack of fish, my fishing kit, discarded tackle, the net, etc., lying at the bottom of the boat, it seemed safer to leave the rod to poke out over the stern, the flies trailing the water—out of mischief, as I thought, where they could not get tangled with any of the truck.
