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Show FISHERMAN'S LUCK your reel overrun. Stir him up a little, he's sulking. Don't let him 'jig,' or you 'II lose him. You're playing him too hard. There, he's going to jump again. Drop your tip. Stop him, quick! he 's going down the rapid!" Of course the man who is playing the salmon does not like this. If he is quick-tempered, sooner or later he tells his counsellor to shut up. But if he is a gentle, early-Christian kind of a man, wise as a serpent and harmless as a dove, he follows the advice that is given to him, promptly and exactly. Then, when it is all ended, and he has seen the big fish, with the line over his shoulder, poised for an instant on the crest of the first billow of the rapid, and has felt the leader stretch and give and snap! -then he can have the satisfaction, while he reels in his slack line, of saying to his friend, "Well, old man, I did everything just as you told me. But I think if I had pushed that fish a little harder at the beginning, as I wanted to, I might have saved him." But really, of course, the chances were all against it. In such a pool, most of the larger fish get away. ~60 THE OPEN FIRE Their weight gives them a tremendous pnll. The fish that are stopped from going into the rapid, and dragged back from the curling wave, DJe usually the smaller ones. Here they are,-twdv~ pounds, eight pounds, six pounds, five pounds ·.nd a half, four pounds! Is not this the smallest ·almon that you ever saw? Not a grilse, you underotand, but a real salmon, of brightest silver, hall-marked with St. Andrew's cross. Now let us sit down for a moment and watch the fish trying to leap up the falls. There is a clear jump of about ten feet, and above that an apparently impossible climb of ten feet more up a ladder of twisting foam. A salmon darts from the boiling water at the bottom of the fall like an arrow from a bow. He rises in a beautiful curve, fins laid close to his body and tail quivering; but he has miscalculated his distance. He is on the downward curve when the water strikes him and tumbles him back. A bold little fish, not more than eighteen inches long, makes a jump at the side of the fall, where the water is thin, and is rolled over and over in the spray. A larger salmon rises close beside us with a tremendous rush, !261 |