WHY FISH DOXT ALWAYS BITE. 100 



still water. It is a battle of muscle as well as of tact and strategem; and when 

 you finally bring your fish captive to your hand, you not only experience a natural 

 thrill of joy at your success, but you entertain such a respect for your fish as 

 will magnify your own self-importance many fold. In fishing short salmon pools 

 in heavy water there is no other resource but to "hold hard and kill quick." The 

 salmon must be worked toward the head of the pool (they almost invariably 

 take the fly at the foot), and brought to gaff at the earliest possible moment; 

 for if they are once allowed to run out of the pool into the dashing raceway 

 below, one might as well try to hold a locomotive with a clothes-line. 



In following this advice to "hold hard," there is always danger that the 

 pupil will fail to temper his strength by that delicacy of manipulation which can 

 only be acquired by frequest tests through long experience. A familiar illustra- 

 tion of this is the tendency to jerk a fish bodily out of the water as soon as he is 

 on the hook. What is meant to be sport then becomes nothing more than a 

 combined mental and physical spasm. Old anglers learn to weigh mechanical 

 forces with a keen perceptive sense, which enables them to determine when their 

 rods are overtaxed, just as they can tell, by an intimation of the spine, that they 

 are lifting too much. 



After all, there is something more in the science of angling than the agnostics 

 seem willing to admit. It can be measured only by the multiplicity of conditions 

 under which it is pursued, and he who attempts to "hold hard" when he ought 

 to touch lightly will find himself in a worse predicament than the Frenchman 

 with his head out of a car window, who cried, when he had barely escaped being 

 hit by a bridge: "What for you tell me to look out, when I should look in?" 



WHAT IS FLY FISHING? 



Don't you sometimes feel like leaving the beaten path by the river when 

 your correspondents sail up to you with their cork helmets a-cockbill and begin 

 to talk about the advantages of shotting your fly, of letting it sink a foot or so 

 beneath the surface, of using a stiff rod for better effect in casting, and all such 

 sort of loose talk? I say, is there any sense in it? 



I don't object at all to the methods, but I write to ask why their use and 

 practice is designated "fly-fishing?" That is what I am awake to know! 



What is a fly? Is it an insect which dives, which lives under the water, 

 which goes to the bottom water-logged, or double-shotted like a corpse over the 

 side, at sea? Not at all ! It is a creature of the upper air and surface ephemeral, 

 lambent, light as thistle-down, erratic as a feather, now touching the water, anon 

 darting into midair, here an instant and gone the next, restless as a humming- 

 bird, never still. Do you not perceive, then, that when you handicap an artificial 

 fly with a weight, however trifling or minute, you immediately take it out of its 

 class, because it is a fly no more? It has not even the capabilities and attributes 

 of a beetle, or grasshopper, or any other clumsy insect which happens to have 

 wings. It has no buoyancy or vitality. It cannot rise, or even maintain itself on 

 the surface unless the current be swift. It is inanimate and dead. .Fly-fishing 

 indeed ! It isn't fly at all. True fly-fishing is an art which brooks no compromise. 

 It can never be engrafted or modified. Cross it with other methods of angling 

 and you have a sterile hybrid. 



In the early days the aborigines used a bunch of feathers, hair, or deer skin, 

 arranged with rude regard to form and combination of colors, which they called 

 a "bob." They used it with a rod and short line, after the fashion which the 



