A Sportsman 449 



the familiar flow of its water may be detected and ap- 

 peal to its motive in pushing on. 



Thomas Tod Stoddart, an English author-fisherman, 

 relates that while fishing on a stream with spawn-bait 

 during the day, at the close he caught several 

 black-bellied trout not frequenting the stream, ex- 

 cepting in a muddy-bottomed pond connecting, sit- 

 uated between two and three miles below, which had 

 undoubtedly been attracted to follow up the stream 

 by the odor of the spawn bait. 



My friend Walter M. Brackett, the veteran salmon 

 fisherman and distinguished fish painter, with whom 

 for nearly half a century I have compared fishing notes, 

 is as strongly convinced as I am of the extraordinarily 

 acute sense of smell possessed by the Salmo family, 

 and relates in his own experience at his own Canadian 

 salmon stream, where he has never used any attraction 

 other than a fly, of noting large numbers of salmon and 

 trout as having been attracted and drawn up from 

 considerable distances down the stream, from a quan- 

 tity of spawn being attached to the stem of a canoe 

 fastened at the river bank above. 



After the ice disappears in the spring, and at the 

 spa'WTiing season, these habitating trout leave their 

 localities more or less, but by no means lose their 

 reckoning. 



Trout, if removed from their habitats and dropped 

 in any parts of the lake, will speedily return home; of 

 this I have had abundant evidence. This is especially 

 evinced during the spawning season, when trout taken 

 away from a spawning bed will return with celerity. 

 A particularly thin and slabby milter weighing about 

 two pounds I purposely experimented with, by carrying 



