DISAPPOINTING DAYS. 103 



four o'clock one afternoon I saw my friend show twice in the head of 

 the pool, and determined to give him another trial with the little Popham 

 that had already risen fish. He took it grandly, with a head-and-tail 

 rise, right up in the roughish water in the neck, and then proceeded to 

 sail round the diminished proportions of the deep hole. He played very 

 heavily, but did not jigger or show any signs of being lightly hooked. 

 After some time of this kind of work, which was taking but little 

 out of him, my light cast forbidding any heroic measures on my part, 

 I began to wonder how I could manage to kill him. He could have 

 got up into the pool above, where it would have been an easier matter 

 to deal with him, but no arts of mine could induce him up stream. I 

 thought that if I could get him down into the backwater I could more 

 readily manage to play and kill him, so I walked him steadily down 

 stream, and he followed for some distance like a lamb. Suddenly, 

 however, he made up his mind for a run, or, realising the object of 

 my manoeuvre, off he went, churning his way across the wide shallow, 

 his back fin almost showing, bound for the main stream on the other 

 side. Sixty yards of line were soon gone, then seventy, then eighty, 

 and, as I could not follow, it was merely a question of when he would 

 break me, when apparently he changed his mind, turned clean round 

 and ran back through the shallow towards me for all he was worth. 

 Holding the rod as high as I could to prevent my line being cut by 

 the half-submerged, jagged rocks, and paying in line as hard as I could 

 at the same time, I got him within twenty yards of the spot where 

 he was hooked, the little Popham holding well, and with no slack line. 

 Just as my gillie and I were congratulating ourselves that we had 

 him now, up came the point of my rod, and he was gone. The light 

 cast had been terribly frayed by his mad rush across the shallow water, 

 and he retained my Popham and left me lamenting. It certainly was 

 hard lines, when all the dangers of the run had been so successfully 

 overcome and hooked fish were so scarce. 



It is useless, however, to repine in such circumstances, and after 

 all, in a very dead time, he had given me a good twenty minutes to 

 half an hour of sport. My friend S. came up just as we parted 

 company, and condoled with me. That same afternoon my host 

 managed to land a 21 lb. fish on a stouter tackle, and he was not 



