These two are so much bound up together that over net fishing must necessarily and improperly reduce the number of spawning fish, and thus injure the rivers which, by furnishing the spawning grounds, are the geese that lay the golden eggs. Kill the geese and you get no more eggs of gold. Treat the rivers unfairly, either by pollution or by over-netting, and not only will the net fishing industry suffer, but the general public also, for salmon will rise to famine price.
CHAPTER XVI.
SALMON AND FLIES.
WHY does a salmon take a salmon fly, and what does it represent to him? These are conundrums that are not readily answered. Obviously it cannot be because it represents any particular article of food to which salmon are accustomed when in the river. If one may presume to dogmatise at all upon so abstruse a question, it must be because their curiosity and predatory instincts are aroused by a queer object, moving with a series of jerks and a somewhat lifelike movement of fibres. Any salmon angler with the slightest experience will know what is meant by "hanging a fly" properly, and its taking powers as compared with a bunch of lifeless feathers floating down stream. So far we are all agreed; but when we attempt to discuss the details of the fly itself we are prone to differ amazingly.
Some years ago, on the occasion before alluded to, when I was fishing the River Clady, in Donegal, the nets having been removed for that year, the river was full of fresh-run fish—it was in July. There was a pool in which the fish lay in serried rows in the stream, which at that point ran under a steep, high bank. I lay down on the bank overlooking and a little behind the rows of salmon, and some twenty feet above them. By shading my eyes I could make out all the fish as clearly as if I were looking at them in an aquarium. I arranged a code of signals with my fishing friend, and he went some thirty yards or so up the river to fish the pool. As soon as his fly began to work over the first line I signalled that he had got the length; there was, however, no movement among the fish. I then signalled to cast again with the same length of line. As the fly worked over the fish for the second time they all seemed to shun it, dropping down stream a foot or so, with the exception of one fish, which, separating from the others, came up some three feet to follow the fly, eventually leaving it and dropping back into his former position. A third passage of the fly produced similar results, the same fish moving again. He made a break in the water, which my friend saw, but he had come short. A fourth cast secured him.
I could come to no other conclusion but that the fish had been bored into taking that fly. His curiosity had been excited at first, and in ordinary circumstances the fisherman would have known nothing and passed on. Does not this tend to show that many a fish may be moved without our knowledge, and that a subsequent fly might secure him?
It is often thought that the first fly over a pool stands the best chance, provided, of course, that it is properly offered. Personally, I would just as soon follow a good angler down a pool as precede him. Unless a fish breaks the water in his rise, the fisherman can tell little of what is happening below the water level, except when, by chance, a glimpse of a silver flash is accorded him. But he may have moved a fish with his fly, and, knowing nothing, will have moved a yard down stream, his next cast being a yard below the fish. The next fly, suitably offered, if it be about the same size, may lure our friend to his destruction. Could we all know exactly what is going on under the water out of our sight, many more fish would doubtless be brought to bank. Of course, on those days when the temperature of both air and water have attained that precise relative proportion that seems to cause a simultaneous rise of fish in every pool, the first fly will pay best, for on such happy occasions that fly, however ill delivered, may secure the best fish. And what fisherman cannot recall instances of "duffer's luck," the veriest tyro catching, perhaps, the fish of the season? I remember once trying to teach a would be angler how to cast, and in a most unlikely spot—the river being dead low—was endeavouring to instil into him the rhythm of the cast, and trying to make him get his line out well behind him. Holding the rod with him, I kept the same length of line, steadily flogging the water to the tune of "one, two," when, at about the ninth or tenth cast, a travelling fish seized our fly, and eventually came to the gaff, a clean-run salmon of 18 lb.
