HOIF TROUT TAKE THE FLY 



Standing all your wrist-knack, or they will come 

 up and look at it, and laugh at you ; and I have 

 known them to come up like lightning, two feet 

 out of water, turn a full half-circle, and come 

 down head-first, and pounce on the fly as it lay on 

 the surface of the water. It did not take any 

 wrist-knack to hook them then (this was in Wille- 

 wemoc Lake), but it did take several trials for me 

 to learn to keep my hand still for a second after 

 that lightning flashed, until the trout could turn 

 and get down on the fly ; at first I jerked the lat- 

 ter away too quickly, but after I watched a little, 

 I caught a good many in just that way. 



Then again, they will not bite at all. I have, 

 in the clear pools of the Big Indian, at low water, 

 seen twenty trout together at a time, all lying 

 motionless, head up stream, and I have put fly and 

 grasshopper and cricket and worm under the nose 

 of each one, and they were not " bold biters," and 

 did not come head on to the bait. The most I 

 could elicit was a faint wag of the tail ; it seemed 

 to me a sort of wag of recognition ; these trout 

 were evidently in a waggish humor. 



The fact is, that the only thing that you can 

 count on in a trout is, that you can't count on him 

 at all. 



I do not say that, as a rule, trout strike the fly 



247 



