“Give me the rifle,” said Earl.
Earl took the rifle and apparently did not aim at all. He fired, and almost immediately the fish began to struggle in the water and then floated to the surface. Sam pulled it into the boat.
“Now you see that it can be done quite easily,” said Sam.
“It’s easy enough if you know how,” replied Bill. “One thing is sure: either we have phony ammunition or we don’t know how.”
“You are absolutely right, it is easy enough if you know how,” said Earl. “It’s like cutting a pencil with a dollar bill. Everything is not done exactly the way it looks. Maybe the pencil is actually cut with the dollar bill and maybe it isn’t. The chances are ten to one that it isn’t, but it looks as if it was during the act. You don’t aim at where the fish seems to be, for it isn’t there. The water makes it look where it isn’t. Accordingly, you must shoot where the fish really is, and not where it appears to be.”
“Take this oar and put the end in the water. Now does it look straight? No. It appears to be bent. The water causes the light rays to change their angle and you always see a thing much closer to the surface than it really is. Therefore you must aim under the object which you expect to hit.”
“I should have known that,” said Bill. “That is simple physics, but I never thought of it.”
“We have the salmon eggs and now can start fishing,” said Sam.
They cut open the salmon and took out the eggs. They put them into a can and then rowed the boat out into the center of the river. Here they allowed the boat to drift while they fixed their lines and baited their hooks. It was a most pleasant way to fish. There was no labor connected with it. The boat floated slowly down the stream with the lines drifting behind.
It had been drizzling slightly ever since they had been out, but so much of interest had happened that neither Bill nor Bob had noticed the rain. Occasionally someone would get a strike. They had caught several small trout, but no large ones. Earl was the first to get a real strike.