CLEAR WATERS 



these swirling pools. Great trout of two, three, and 

 four pounds, grown too wary for capture by any normal 

 lure, swim in their depths and take heavy toll no doubt 

 of the small trout and salmon fry. Some of us tried 

 the sink-and-draw minnow on these presumed canni- 

 bals one afternoon, if only for the good of the river, 

 dropping it through the foliage into deep water. 

 Several times it was seized by one or other of them, 

 but somehow or other, they always contrived when 

 all seemed safe to avoid the final appeal and get rid 

 of the bait without a serious scratch. Great numbers 

 of bull-trout, too, rest here in autumn, though rarely 

 taken on a rod at that season. It is in the spring, 

 when you don't want them, that they take such a 

 violent fancy to your fly. 



My first experience of the Whiteadder in the dim 

 days referred to earlier in this chapter, was almost 

 wholly concerned with these lanky bull-trout kelts, 

 strange beasts as they seemed to us at that callow 

 period. And as to that cold winter in the early 

 seventies, the frost had not long broken and the dust 

 of March had only just begun to fly behind the harrows 

 on the flat Lothian sea-coast, when the fishing fever 

 following Devonian precedents developed its early 

 spring symptoms. The climatic contrast between 

 eastern Scotland and south-western England as 

 regards the dawn of spring was a fact I had not yet 

 grasped. The Lammermuirs, which to me looked 

 exactly like Exmoor from a distance, and incidentally 

 still more so when you got into them, seemed fairly 

 to shout across the Lothian plain that the time had 

 come to be up and doing. My youthful ardour, too, 

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