294 SALMON FISHING. 



Far up the northern and northwestern branches of the river 

 it is speared constantly by the Penobscot Indians ; but the 

 white residents of that wild region, lumbermen for the most 

 part, and sparse agricultural settlers, are guiltless of the art of 

 fly-fishing — the only method, by-the-way, except the use of roe- 

 bait, whereof more anon, by which much success can be expected 

 or obtained. 



To the sportsman, that great track of grandly-timbered and 

 superbly-watered wilderness, which yet lies virgin almost and 

 unbroken, from within a few leagues of the ocean to the great 

 St. Lawrence, and from the Upper Kennebec to the Aroostook 

 and St. John's, is yet well nigh terra incognita. 



Yet well would it repay the fisherman or the hunter, to pack 

 his traps in the smallest compass, and set forth with rifle, shot- 

 gun, and long Salmon-rod, via Augusta, Norridgewock, and the 

 magnificent gorges of the Kennebec, for that land of the Moose, 

 the Deer, the Trout, and the lordly Salmon, there to encamp 

 for days or weeks, as his taste for excitement and his manly 

 hardihood should dictate, floating by day in the birch-bark 

 canoe over the bright transparent waters, sleeping by night on 

 the fragrant and elastic shoots of the green hemlock, winning 

 his food from the waters and the wilds by his own skill and 

 daring, and earning the appetite whereby to enjoy it, by the toil 

 which is to him a pleasure. 



Such in fact is at present the only mode by which the angler 

 can enjoy truly fine Salmon fishing, unless indeed he be a man 

 of such liberally endowed* leisure that he can fit his own 

 yacht, and visit the estuaries of those Salmon-freighted rivers, 

 which, from the St. John's, round all the eastern and north- 



