SALMON-FISHING 221 
Harris. This little river flows through a chain of lakes, in 
which most of the angling is carried on by means of boats. 
The great run of fish—salmon, grilse, and sea-trout—is due 
towards the end of July annually; but in that year (it was 
somewhere in the ’eighties) so great was the drought that, 
although many thousands of fish thronged the fjord into 
which the river flows, none of them could ascend into the 
lochs. A party of five anglers waited wistfully for rain to 
carry the fish up, and at last two of the party left the island 
in despair. The remaining three set their wits to work 
and established a noteworthy illustration of what may be 
effected by judicious use of natural resources and water 
storage. As the lesson is of first-rate importance to managers 
of fisheries, I prefer to quote Mr. Hansard’s own description 
of the operation as communicated by him to the Fe/d news- 
paper (November 8th, 1902). It should be mentioned, in 
order to give a right impression of the pluck and enterprise 
of these three gentlemen, that their lease of the fishings was 
to end on September rst. 
“From the formation of the lochs it struck us that an 
artificial spate might be made by cutting away the river bed, 
and letting down water from one of the upper lakes. We 
explored all the likely places, and at last hit upon the lower 
end of Loch Langabhat as being a suitable place for the work. 
This was easier to do than it sounds, as some years before a 
hatchway had been made there, with a grating to keep the fish 
from running into Loch Langabhat. Unfortunately, this 
useful work had gone to ruin, but it was easy to grub up the 
bed of the stream where the grating had been, and so let down 
nearly two feet of the big lake, which is ten miles long by half 
to one mile across. At the bottom of our first loch, i.e., the 
one nearest the sea, we then made a dam across the river head, 
some six feet high, as solidly as we could with rocks and 
turves. All this was rather against the opinion of the gillies, 
who declared that no salmon would run up except in water 
