The line flies out straight at last, but I have now thrown a few inches too far; my tail fly is in the bush, dangling across an overhanging bough. An impatient movement, a jerk, or a straight pull, and I am "hung up," as is the phrase, and delayed for half an hour at least. Happily there is a lull in the storm. I shake the point of the rod. The vibration runs along the line; the fly drops softly like a leaf upon the water—and as it floats away something turns heavily, and a huge brown back is visible for an instant through a rift in the surface. But the line comes home. He was an old stager, as we could see by his color, no longer ravenous as when fresh from the salt-water. He was either lazy and missed the fly, or it was not entirely to his mind. He was not touched, and we drew back to consider. "Over him again while he is angry," is the saying in some rivers, and I have known it to answer where the fish feed greedily. But it will not do here; we must give him time; and we turn again to the fly-book. When a salmon rises at a small fly as if he meant business, yet fails to take it, the rule is to try another of the same pattern a size larger. This too, however, just now Jack thinks unfavorably of. The salmon is evidently a very large one, and will give us enough to do if we hook him. He therefore, as one precaution, takes off the drop fly lest it catch in the water-lilies. He next puts the knots of the casting-line through a severe trial; replaces an unsound joint with a fresh link of gut, and finally produces out of his hat a "hook"—he will not call it a fly—of his own dressing. It is a particolored father-long-legs, a thing which only some frantic specimen of orchid ever seriously approached, a creature whose wings were two strips of the fringe of a peacock's tail, whose legs descended from blue jay through red to brown, and terminated in a pair of pink trailers two inches long. Jack had found it do, and he believed it would do for me. And so it did. I began to throw again six feet above the bush, for a salmon often shifts his ground after rising. One cast—a second—another trout rises which we receive with an anathema, [Footnote: Anathema: a curse.] and drag the fly out of his reach. The fourth throw there is a swirl like the wave which arises under the blade of an oar, a sharp sense of hard resistance, a pause, and then a rush for dear life. The wheel shrieks, the line hisses through the rings, and thirty yards down the pool the great fish springs madly six feet into the air. The hook is firm in his upper jaw; he had not shaken its hold, for the hook had gone into the bone—pretty subject of delight for a reasonable man, an editor of a magazine, and a would-be philosopher, turned fifty! The enjoyments of the unreasoning part of us cannot be defended on grounds of reason, and experience shows that men who are all logic and morals, and have nothing of the animal left in them, are poor creatures after all.
Any way, I defy philosophy with a twenty-pound salmon fast hooked, and a pool right ahead four hundred yards long and half full of water-lilies. "Keep him up the strame," shrieked a Paddy, who, on the screaming of the wheel, had flung down his spade in the turf bog and rushed up to see the sport. "Keep him up the strame, your honor—bloody wars! you'll lost him else." We were at fault, Jack and I. We did not understand why down stream was particularly dangerous, and Pat was too eager and too busy swearing to explain himself. Alas, his meaning became soon but too intelligible. I had overtaken the fish on the bank and had wheeled in the line again, but he was only collecting himself for a fresh rush, and the next minute it seemed as if the bottom had been knocked out of the pool and an opening made into infinity. Round flew the wheel again; fifty yards were gone in as many seconds, the rod was bending double, and the line pointed straight down; straight as if there was a lead at the end of it and unlimited space in which to sink. "Ah, didn't I tell ye so?" said Pat; "what will we do now?" Too late Jack remembered that fourteen feet down at the bottom of that pool lay the stem of a fallen oak, below which the water had made a clear channel. The fish had turned under it, and whether he was now up the river or down, or where he was who could tell? He stopped at last. "Hold him hard," said Jack, hurling off his clothes, and while I was speculating whether it would be possible to drag him back the way that he had gone, a pink body flashed from behind me, bounded off the bank with a splendid header, and disappeared. He was under for a quarter of a minute; when he rose he had the line in his hand between the fish and the tree.
"All right," he sputtered, swimming with the other hand to the bank and scrambling up. "Run the rest of the line off the reel and out through the rings." He had divined by a brilliant instinct the only remedy for our situation. The thing was done, fast as Pat and I could ply our fingers. The loose end was drawn round the log, and while Jack was humoring the fish with his hand, and dancing up and down the bank regardless of proprieties, we had carried it back down the rings, replaced it on the reel, wound in the slack, and had again command of the situation.
The salmon had played his best stroke. It had failed him, and he now surrendered like a gentleman. A mean-spirited fish will go to the bottom, bury himself in the weed, and sulk. Ours set his head towards the sea, and sailed down the length of the pool in the open water without attempting any more plunges. As his strength failed, he turned heavily on his back, and allowed himself to be drawn to the shore. The gaff [Footnote: Gaff: a large hook fixed on the end of a pole or handle.] was in his side and he was ours. He was larger than we had guessed him. Clean run he would have weighed twenty-five pounds. The fresh water had reduced him to twenty-two, but without softening his muscle or touching his strength.
—JAMES FROUDE (adapted).
[Footnote: Is the first part of the narrative a typical story of "fisherman's luck"? Show how the story illustrates that a real lover of fishing is enthusiastic over every detail of his experience. Is the story technical at the expense of the reader's interest? How does the element of suspense add to the interest? Is the account more interesting by being told in the first person? Why?]
ACROSS RUNNING WATER
At a running water, that comes out at a place called Srath-namara, near the sea-gates of Loch Suibhne, there is a pool called the Pool of the Changeling. None ever goes that way from choice, for only the crying of the curlew is heard there, or the querulous wailing lapwing.
It was here that one night, in a September of many storms, a woman stood staring at the sea. The screaming seamews [Footnote: Seamews: gulls.] wheeled and sank and circled overhead, and the solanders [Footnote: Solanders: a kind of wild geese.] rose with heavy wing and hoarse cries, and the black scarts screeched to the startled guillemots [Footnote: Guillemots: birds similar to the auks.] or to the foam-white terns [Footnote: Terns: a species of birds allied to the gulls.] blown before the wind like froth. The woman looked neither at the seafowl nor at the burning glens of scarlet flame which stretched dishevelled among the ruined lands of the sunset.
Between the black flurries of the wind, striking the sea like flails, came momentary pauses or long silences. In one of these the woman raised her arms, she the while unheeding the cold tide wash about her feet, where she stood insecurely on the wet slippery tangle.