72 CHATS ON ANGLING. 



limited : we seek fishings where many of the pools can be commanded 

 from the bank side, or where, if wading be unavoidable, the bottom 

 is sound and shelving, and where there are no round slippery stones 

 to trip us up. Enough for most of us, if we are lucky enough to get 

 into touch with a good fish, is it that we may have a longish travel 

 over very rough ground, up and down, before we can call him 

 ours. 



One particularly bad-bottomed pool I remember very well in the 

 Aberdeenshire Dee, not very far below Aboyne. It was a long pool, 

 the head of water very heavy, the wading throughout simply vile. At 

 the bottom of the pool was a big rock, nearly in mid-stream, and by 

 that stone there generally lay a good fish. To reach him you had to 

 wade as deep as your waders would permit, your elbows almost in 

 the water, leaning your body against the swirl of the stream, and taking 

 cautious steps forward, inch by inch, to avoid being tripped up by the 

 slippery big round stones. Then the best cast you were able to produce 

 with your 18 ft. Castleconnel would just about reach him. I never 

 could resist trying for him, though I knew he would go down stream 

 if hooked, and it seemed impossible to follow him down, so I always 

 half wished that he might not come. Wading back against that heavy 

 stream, with a twenty or thirty pounder making tracks round the corner 

 into the next pool, would have been no easy job ; and, if you had 

 succeeded in reaching terra firma, there were some big overhanging 

 trees at the corner, beneath which the current had cut a deep hole. 

 Mercifully for me, though I often tried for him, he never did take 

 hold, though I rose him several times. It was always with a chastened 

 spirit of thankfulness that I gave him up and went further down to 

 try the easier waters of the Boat pool. 



There is a local story of a mighty fish, hooked in that self-same 

 spot, which took its captor down so that he was obliged, perforce, to 

 swim the deep water under the trees, and was afterwards taken down, 

 as hard as he could run, through pool after pool, until at length he 

 managed to steady it in the third pool of the next fishing water. Then, 

 after a period of sulks, during which both regained their wind, the fish 

 ran right away up again to his old haunts, where he succeeded in 

 getting rid of the hook against his favourite rock. All lost fish are 



