198 LINES IN PLEASANT PLACES 



masses that had jammed in some eddy or rocky corner. 

 It is astonishing what a mere touch will effect. With 

 my pocket gaff last evening I lightly nudged a floating 

 spar in the ribs, and he set off right heartily, very 

 gently, yet firmly, cannoned without temper against a 

 neighbour, and in less than five minutes a block of 

 perhaps 150 logs had started off, scattering irregularly 

 over the stream, and making a noise like distant thunder 

 as they charged over the boulders of the rapids 

 below. 



There are circumstances, I have been told, under 

 which salmon will rise as well as at other times while 

 logs are drifting, but our best pools here are even- 

 flowing and stately, reminding one often of the Tweed 

 between Kelso and Coldstream. The logs in such water 

 are bad for fish. The testimony of the local men is 

 that the pools, from the piscatorial point of view, are 

 always unsettled while the logs are descending in 

 quantities, and that it is a rare thing at such times to 

 induce a salmon to take a fly. Moreover, with a 

 thunderstorm spate of this nature, and the operations 

 of gangs of lumbermen hastening to set the stranded 

 stock on its way to port, the water is rendered 

 very dirty ; in a word, until the muck has passed, 

 and the river settled, the angler's chances are poor 

 indeed. 



The danger to the angler's gear, and any fish he 

 hooks, when he finds himself amongst the logs, is well 

 known. The tenant of the beat above ours lost two 

 or three good salmon in one day by collisions of this 

 nature. Down at Lovdal we fish mostly from one of 

 the somewhat crank boats of the country, and my first 

 salmon was hooked from the stern of one of them, 

 at the moment when a score of logs that had been 

 gyrating in an aimless sort of way in a great dark back- 



