128 THE MISDEMEANOURS OF TROUT 



as I have listened to complaints by salmon-fishers about 

 the rapacity of river trout, I have hitherto declined to 

 believe that they did any damage among salmon fry 

 worth mentioning. Fish, inethought, so nearly akin as 

 trout and salmon (Scandinavian ichthyologists reckon 

 them varieties of a single species), must surely have some 

 regard for each other's families. Trout, it is well known, 

 feed greedily upon salmon spawn ; but then their excuse 

 is that salmon are so culpably careless in their nursery 

 arrangements ; they leave such a lot of ripe spawn rolling 

 about in the river-bed that, if the trout did not eat it, 

 something else would. But young salmon parr or 

 smolts from three to seven inches long are scarcely to 

 be distinguished from young trout, save by very close 

 scrutiny. Surely, whatever a trout might do in ex- 

 tremity of hunger, it would never make a practice of 

 devouring salmon smolts. 



Such was my simple faith, until the contents of that 

 jar shattered it. Live and let live is not the trout's 

 motto. The jar contained seven well-grown salmon-parr, 

 weighing together seven ounces, which my friend took 

 out of the stomach of a single trout which he killed with 

 a fly in the Helmsdale last summer (1903). The creature 

 laid claim to the respectable weight of 1 Ib. No less 

 nay, rather more than a third of its weight consisted 

 of the indigested contents of its stomach. Yet it had the 

 hardihood to rise at a fly afterwards. 'Tis as though a 

 man of twelve stone should consume 56 Ib. of meat at 

 a sitting and remain disposed for any light refreshment 

 that might come his way. 1 



1 See p. 136 for a parallel case to this in a Norwegian river in the same 

 season. 



