lOTBODUCTIOISr 



IT is more than two years from the present time of 

 writing that I last experienced the thrilling sensation 

 imparted by feeling a lively five-pound ouananiche skip- 

 ping and darting about at the end of my line. It was 

 an afternoon in the end of August, and the scene was a 

 pool of the Metabetchouan River, which flows into the 

 Lake of St. John on the southern side. Unfortunately, 

 my friend Mr. E. T. D, Chambers, the author of this 

 work, who had previously been my partner in many a 

 peril on the far rapids of the Peribonca River, had been 

 obliged to leave me for Quebec, and therefore he was not 

 able to join us in the fun. For I was accompanied by 

 our mutual friend Mr. Albert Patterson, so well known 

 as a good all-round sportsman; and although he had 

 that day given up fishing himself in disgust, as the 

 ouananiche positively refused to take the fly, a very jolly 

 time we had of it together, so constantly were his ser- 

 vices required with the landing-net, and from the rocky 

 nature of the banks it required a really active fellow 

 like himself to land the fish. Armed with an old but 

 somewhat stiff trout-rod, which already in 1892 had seen 

 twenty years' good and faithful service, I had scrambled 

 out along a log, which proved the connecting-link between 

 the shore and a small, solitary rock just large enough to 



