182 MOSTLY ABOUT TROUT 



would be deceived by artificial flies, heavily 

 winged as ours were, attached to too-stout gut. 

 The water was alive with small trout, and it 

 is not far wrong to assume that the amount 

 of food in any given trout-stream will support 

 a certain weight of fish, so the numbers vary 

 with the weight, the fewer the bigger. We 

 caught plenty of little ones, and the memory 

 of that long day by running water and rank, 

 green vegetation helped us afterwards through 

 many days of baking heat when the sun smote 

 through the awning to the decks, and made 

 the pitch-caulking bubble between the white 

 planks. 



In the evening, when the best fishing began, 

 we no longer had the river to ourselves. In 

 the afternoon the usual officers' boats had put 

 off, bristling with rod-cases, from our own and 

 from other ships. Before long there were waving 

 rods, from little ones of eight or nine feet to 

 salmon rods of eighteen feet, within fifty yards 

 of each other all the way up both banks of the 

 little river. Some of those wielding them had 

 fished before, some had not. All were keen, 

 and those who had the good luck to flog a bit of 

 water first were generally rewarded. I noticed 

 one shipmate, a lieutenant, at a moment when 

 a four- ounce trout, attached to salmon gut, 



