68 ANGLING FOE OUANANICHE 



have drawn your cast through one of these patches, 

 and are perhaps about lifting your flies from the sur- 

 face of the water, when a violent strike tells you that 

 a prompt responsive jerk will make fast to your hook 

 one of the gamest of American game-fishes. Or, 

 perhaps, he has securely hooked himself, and almost 

 before you have ceased wondering at the length of 

 line that is being run from off your reel, a bright, 

 arched gleam of silver darts out of the water a hun- 

 dred feet away from your canoe, as suddenly as an 

 arrow shot from bow, and deliberately turns a somer- 

 sault three or four feet up in the air. If you are a 

 novice at the sport, or he has taken you unawares, 

 you may never see him more. If he managed by his 

 superior dexterity and cunning to get the slack of the 

 line, he probably shook the hook from his mouth and 

 is free. If, in your excitement, you gave him the 

 butt too quickly, you perhaps tore the hook out of 

 his delicate mouth. Or, matching his agility and 

 strength against the endurance of your casting-line, 

 or the pliability of your trusty rod, he has made ship- 

 wreck alike of your tackle and your happiness. Some- 

 times his leaps are made in such rapid succession that 

 you are fighting your fish alternately in air and 

 water. At others, if he be a large fish, he goes down 

 and sulks like a salmon from the sea. His different 

 methods of defence would appear to indicate that he 

 possesses the combined finesse of the salmon and the 

 bass. When impaled upon the hook he has not in- 

 frequently been known, in the course of his prodigious 

 leaps, to alight in the bottom of the angler's canoe. 

 A Montreal judge was enjoying a brief canoe ride 



