36 Circumventing the Mahseer. Chapt. i\\ 



paper, when I landed my fish, and took it out of his mouth. 

 He must have happened to catch it edgewise in his mouth as it 

 spun, and thus been able to exert his strength on it ; for had it 

 not been exactly edgewise on, it would have turned and slipped 

 away from his jaw as he pressed it, and thus it would have got 

 flat in his mouth. Probably few fish get a fair bite at a spoon at 

 the very angle of the spoon in the very part of the mouth 

 required to produce such an effect on such a hard substance ; the 

 chances must be much against it, and that would account for my 

 having seen such a result but once. But once seen there was 

 no longer room for doubt about the power of the fish ; the spoon 

 was whole and sound when cast in, was cast in deep water 

 clear of rocks, was not run against anything by him, for it was 

 well inside his mouth when I took it out directly he was landed. 

 Had I tried to produce the same effect, it would have required a 

 good downright blow, with a hammer and anvil to help me. 

 I then bethought me of the spoon of a friend which was thinner 

 than mine, and which was much indented as I had thought at the 

 time by rocks. I bethought me too of the many hooks I had 

 lost unintelligibly; I knew I had a light hand acquired by 

 killing trout on fine tackle, and yet treble hook after treble 

 hook had been smashed, sometimes before I had felt my fish at 

 all, and some of them had been curled up like a ramshora, and 

 curled inwards as from outside pressure, not outwards as from 

 tension. The murder was out; they had been crunched up by 

 tin- Mahseer' s power of compression, and the treble hooks had 

 suffered more than the single, because they had offend resist ance, 

 while the single hooks had turned in the mouth and evaded it. 

 When further considered from this point of view the object of the 

 mouth being soft instead of bony is apparent, for it would be 

 easier to hold a struggling slippery object between two com- 

 pressing sides that yielded enough for it to partially embed 

 itself, than between two unimpressibly hard sides that could get 

 no grip on the object. These my views mi the Maliseer's power of 

 compression have, like not a few others put forward in the earlier 

 edition of this little work, been only confirmed by the further 

 experience of myself and other anglers, and stand no longer on 

 comparatively few instances however striking. But it Mould be 

 tedious if I were continually pointing mj readers to confirmations, 



