驼背鳟鱼小绿树长得太近，把小溪弄窄了。这条小溪就像12845个电话亭排成一排，高高的维多利亚式天花板，所有的门都被拆掉了，电话亭的背面也被撞坏了。有时当我在那里钓鱼时，我觉得自己就像一个电话修理工，尽管我看起来不像。我当时只是一个浑身是钓具的孩子，但通过某种奇怪的方式，我进去钓了几条鳟鱼，使电话保持正常。我是社会的财富。这是一份令人愉快的工作，但有时也使我感到不安。当天空中有一些云，它们向太阳靠拢时，那里的天就会立刻变黑。然后你几乎需要蜡烛来钓鱼，在你的反射中有狐狸火。有一次我在里面，天开始下雨了。天又黑又热，还满是雾气。 I was of course on overtime. I had that going in my favor. I caught seven trout in fifteen minutes. The trout in those telephone booths were good fellows. There were a lot of young cutthroat trout six to nine inches long, perfect pan size for local calls. Sometimes there were a few fellows, eleven inches or so--for the long dis- tance calls. I've always liked cutthroat trout. They put up a good fight, running against the bottom and then broad jumping. Under their throats they fly the orange banner of Jack the Ripper. Also in the creek were a few stubborn rainbow trout, sel- dom heard from, but there all the same, like certified pub- lic accountants. I'd catch one every once in a while. They were fat and chunky, almost as wide as they were long. I've heard those trout called "squire" trout. It used to take me about an hour to hitchhike to that creek. There was a river nearby. The river wasn't much. The creek was where I punched in. Leaving my card above the clock I'd punch out again when it was time to go home. I remember the afternoon I caught the hunchback trout. A farmer gave me a ride in a truck. He picked me up at a traffic signal beside a bean field and he never said a word to me. His stopping and picking me up and driving me down the road was as automatic a thing to him as closing the barn door, nothing need be said about it, but still I was in motion traveling thirty-five miles an hour down the road, watching houses and groves of trees go by, watching chickens and mailboxes enter and pass through my vision. Then I did not see any houses for a while. "This is where I get out, " I said. The farmer nodded his head. The truck stopped. "Thanks a lot, " I said. The farmer did not ruin his audition for the Metropolitan Opera by making a sound. He just nodded his head again. The truck started up. He was the original silent old farmer. A little while later I was punching in at the creek. I put my card above the clock and went into that long tunnel of telephone booths. I waded about seventy-three telephone booths in. I caught two trout in a little hole that was like a wagon wheel. It was one of my favorite holes, and always good for a trout or two. I always like to think of that hole as a kind of pencil sharpener. I put my reflexes in and they came back out with a good point on them. Over a period of a couple of years, I must have caught fifty trout in that hole, though it was only as big as a wagon wheel. I was fishing with salmon eggs and using a size 14 single egg hook on a pound and a quarter test tippet. The two trout lay in my creel covered entirely by green ferns ferns made gentle and fragile by the damp walls of telephone booths. The next good place was forty-five telephone booths in. The place was at the end of a run of gravel, brown and slip- pery with algae. The run of gravel dropped off and disap- peared at a little shelf where there were some white rocks. One of the rocks was kind of strange. It was a flat white rock. Off by itself from the other rocks, it reminded me of a white cat I had seen in my childhood. The cat had fallen or been thrown off a high wooden side- walk that went along the side of a hill in Tacoma, Washing- ton. The cat was lying in a parking lot below. The fall had not appreciably helped the thickness of the cat, and then a few people had parked their cars on the cat. Of course, that was a long time ago and the cars looked dif- ferent from the way they look now. You hardly see those cars any more