We think warm weather woke this fellow from his long winter’s nap.

Talking softly now, and paddling quietly, we progressed cautiously over tranquil water around a wide bend in the stream. And there they were, at the foot of the pool, a mother black bear and her two cubs. She had just tossed a big trout to her offspring from the rapids below this pool, and the cubs were fighting over the fish, snarling and snapping.

Rascal’s high trill diverted her from her fishing, and with a deep-throated growl she stood her ground for a few moments, eyeing us angrily. Rascal didn’t need to be cautioned against swimming to meet these big, rough cousins of his. He stood transfixed at the prow, fascinated but trembling.

The bear spoke sharply to her cubs and plunged into the willows and aspens with a great crackling of brush. And her obedient young raced after her. They disappeared as completely as the mink, and soon there was silence.

“Well, Sterling, you’ve seen your first bears.”

“And my first deer, and my first porcupine.”

Nothing could top this experience, I thought, but at the next trout pool there was one to match it. I overcast the pool into the rapids below and was retrieving my bucktail in an erratic manner to avoid a snag when a smashing strike bent my pole as though it were of willow. My line was taut, and the fish had hooked himself solidly on the wet fly and seemed inclined to take it all the way downriver to Lake Superior.

…

When at last my father slipped thenet under my fish and brought him into the canoe I found that I had a fine brown trout, one of the largest I would ever catch in a lifetime of fishing. By the scales in my tackle box he weighed just over four pounds.

“He’s as big as you are, Rascal,” I said with delight.

“He’s a beauty, Sterling.”

“Shall I try for more?”

“If you like.”

But as I put my fish on wet ferns in my creel, I decided I would leave all the other trout in the stream for that day. With pulse still beating a tattoo, I took my paddle and began the tough return journey against the current.

Somewhere it must be recorded, as insects are captured in amber — that day on the river: transcribed in Brule water, written on the autumn air, safe at least in my memory.

— excerpted from Rascal, by Sterling North