Up on the Connecticut River at Enfield Dam, say it goes this 

 way. Two men are fishing side by side; one doing a terrific busi- 

 ness with the shad, the other coming to a slow boil. Finally the 

 desperate one speaks. 



"What color are they hitting?" he asks, hating the question. 



The busy one squints at the sky a moment for inspiration. 

 "Guess you'd call it an off-shade of lavender." 



Now the luckless one hauls out a tin box and paws through it 

 no off-shade of lavender. Who'd think of a silly color like lav- 

 ender when they wanted mother-of-pearl yesterday? He can now 

 continue the torture of fishing the wrong color, or quit tempo- 

 rarilythe smart thing to do, for soon the shad might switch to 

 carnation red. That's why it would be so risky to dash into town 

 for the lavender; the show might be over by the time he returned. 



If you imagine that this matter of color is concerned mostly 

 with a fly or a lure, you're wrong. The bauble that shad are inter- 

 ested in along the Connecticut is a bead or two riding on the 

 leader just above the lure. With the right beads, you can catch a 

 barrelful of shad on a bare, silver-colored hook. 



Each spring, from the unknown depths of the Atlantic and the 

 Pacific, shad ascend our coastal streams in unbelievable hordes 

 to spawn. It is perhaps because they seek little if any food that 

 they are so choosy about hitting the small-winged flies, the tiny 

 spinners, spoons, and fluttering lures that fishermen tease 

 through their ranks. 



As they go up-river, the shad pause in pools and eddies, whirl- 

 ing and chasing one another in flashing schools. Now, if you 

 watch, you can see their inconsistencies. They seem unable to 

 follow one leader. They split up, flow together again, reverse 

 themselves in silvery confusion. Small wonder then that fishing 

 for them is erratic: a channel may be overcrowded one moment, 

 deserted the next. 



Fishermen with rods crowd these resting places along the Con- 

 necticut, especially the big concentration points below dams like 

 Enfield. Watching them here is almost as diverting as fishing. 

 They're faddists and individualists in the extreme. One man will 

 insist upon standing on a certain rock. If it's occupied when he 



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