High mountain lakes packed with golden trout are magic, sometimes, given the right company, they can become even more magical.

Words: John Holt

I knew blonds could laugh. I’d seen Marilyn Monroe in The Seven Year Itch and Stevie Nicks onstage with Fleetwood Mac. Well, she wasn’t laughing. She was too busy trying to be diaphanously gorgeous, but she managed to break me up. Close enough. The discovery that my Irish wolfhound, Bonzo, also possessed this capability was not all that surprising either. Hell, all I had to do was look at his bloodlines. Canine Celtic.
The two of them, Margot and the hound, were standing off to one side of the Land Cruiser in high good humor, the human making sounds like crystalline water sailing over a high-mountain precipice, the dog roaring with a deep profundity that reaches its atavistic apex when practiced by large gaze hounds such as this one. The depth, the volume, the long-gone ancient power of Bonzo’s voice roaring through the forest defines fierce though well-tempered joy as does Margot’s jazz-rhythm mirth. What apparently seemed so damn funny was the sight of a long-haired derelict freakster hopping around on one foot simultaneously swearing in long, darkly glittering strings of invective at the latest loss by the Chicago Cubs, as relayed by a too-lengthy story and tragic box score in the Great Falls Tribune sports section, and the same fool also cursing both his apparently fractured big toe and the steel wheel that, when recently kicked, caused the injury.

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