CHAPTER XVI. 



SALMON AND FLIES. 



WlHY does a salmon take a salmon fly, and what does it 

 represent to him ? These are conundrums that are not 

 readily answered. Obviously it cannot be because it 

 represents any particular article of food to which salmon 

 are accustomed when in the river. If one may presume 

 to dogmatise at all upon so abstruse a question, it must 

 be because their curiosity and predatory instincts are 

 aroused by a queer object, moving with a series of jerks 

 and a somewhat lifelike movement of fibres. Any salmon 

 angler with the slightest experience will know what is 

 meant by " hanging a fly " properly, and its taking powers as compared 

 with a bunch of lifeless feathers floating down stream. So far we are 

 all agreed ; but when we attempt to discuss the details of the fly 

 itself we are prone to differ amazingly. 



Some years ago, on the occasion before alluded to, when I was 

 fishing the River Clady, in Donegal, the nets having been removed for 

 that year, the river was full of fresh-run fish — it was in July. There 

 was a pool in which the fish lay in serried rows in the stream, which 

 at that point ran under a steep, high bank. I lay down on the bank 

 overlooking and a little behind the rows of salmon, and some twenty 

 feet above them. By shading my eyes I could make out all the fish as 

 clearly as if I were looking at them in an aquarium. I arranged a 

 code of signals with my fishing friend, and he went some thirty yards 

 or so up the river to fish the pool. As soon as his fly began to work 



