280 SALMON AND TROUT. 



the gut. Twice in my life I have come to utter grief by neg- 

 lecting this precaution, the flies being in each case only too 

 attractive, but the hooks almost rotten. In one case I lost 

 seven fish in the course of an afternoon, which would, I 

 honestly believe, have weighed very nearly two pounds apiece. 

 The other case, though less disastrous, was even more remark- 

 able, as I was using a medium-sized fly on a Scotch tarn where 

 the trout ran small. I took above a hundred, which would 

 hardly have averaged five ounces, though they were strong and 

 red-fleshed. But the way in which they * chawed up ' one par- 

 ticular batch of flies which I had had tied especially for small 

 rocky lochs was really extraordinary. It seemed as if they 

 crushed the hooks in their mouths. Full a score of my 

 favourites came home to me broken at the bend, and in many 

 cases I had scarcely felt the rise, so that several fish must have 

 had their wicked will of the defenceless fly. 



As I have already said, my losses through the breaking of 

 the gut have been comparatively few, and almost always dis- 

 tinctly due to my own fault. The point of greatest danger is 

 of course close to the head of the tail fly, where a momentary 

 check takes place in the free unfolding of the foot links, even 

 when the cast is most carefully made. The friction at this 

 weak point is naturally increased when a fish is being played, 

 since if he is firmly hooked the gut is apt to be strained when 

 forming an angle with the wire. In dressing a large or a 

 medium-sized fly something may be done to obviate this mis- 

 chief by a few turns of fine silk set with copal varnish round 

 the gut just above the head of the fly. But in mere midges 

 and it is with these that the greatest execution is now done in 

 our best trout streams this precaution is impossible. 



It only remains that the fly fisher look often and closely at 

 this critical point in his tackle, especially when the trout rise 

 boldly and the fun is fast and furious. It is a great bore, no 

 doubt, to have to change a killing fly at the first symptoms of 

 ' fraying ' ; but a far greater to put on a fresh one when the first 

 has been carried off by a good fish. 



