Ahead of us a blue jay kept close watch over our movements, but at last decided that we are harmless, and with a last shriek of defiance flew away to pour out his vituperations on other hapless wanderers.

Adjusting our rods, and baiting our hooks with salmon roe, we crept down to where a little fall sent the water swirling around a rock, making a deep pool, and an ideal place for trout.  Dropping our lines into the rapids, we let the bait float down close to the rock in the deep shadows.  As soon as it struck the riffle there was a flash of silver, and the game was hooked.  Away he went, the reel humming a merry tune as he raced back and forth across the pool, the rod bent like a coach whip, the strain on the line sending a delightful tingle to our finger tips.  But he soon tired of the unequal contest, and was brought safely to the landing net.  He was by no means a large fish, as game fish are reckoned, but to my mind it is not always the largest fish that gives the keenest sport.

[Illustration:  Fishing for brook trout]

From one pool to another we passed, wetting a line in each with fair success, scrambling over logs and lichen-covered rocks, wading from one side of the stream to the other, until the lengthening shadows warned us to wind in our lines and start for home.  Well satisfied we were with the thirty-two trout reposing at the bottom of our basket.

Our long tramp and the salt sea air had made us ravenously hungry, and the sandwiches that provident wives had prepared for us were dug out of capacious pockets and eaten with a relish that an epicure might covet.  I shall never forget the trip back.  Night overtook us before we were out of the first valley, the ascent was very steep, and we had to stop every few rods to get our wind.

At last we reached the summit of Grizzly Peak, seventeen hundred and fifty-nine feet above sea level, while to our right Bald Peak, nineteen hundred and thirty feet high, loomed up against the sky.  The path on Grizzly was so narrow we had to walk single file, and a false step would have sent us rolling down hundreds of feet.

The view—­although seen in vague outline—­was magnificent.  Berkeley and Oakland lay seventeen hundred feet below us, their twinkling lights glowing through the darkness like fireflies.  Out on San Francisco Bay the lights flashed from the mastheads of ships at anchor or from brightly lighted ferryboats plying from mole to mole, while far to the left, Lake Merritt lay like a gray sheet amid the shadows.  In the middle distance off Yerba Buena Island two United States gunboats were at anchor, one of them sending the rays of its powerful searchlight here and there across the water, and making a veritable path of silver far out across the bay.

Jack rabbits and cotton-tails scurried across our path and dodged into thickets.  An owl flapped lazily over our heads and sailed away down the valley, evidently on his nocturnal hunting.  But we had little time or inclination to give to these mountain creatures, as we had to pay strict attention to our footing.