3o6 SALMON AND TROUT. 



The first and most obvious method, then, for counteracting 

 the causes to which I have pointed as tending to reduce the 

 volume of our streams and the amount of trout food which 

 they supply, hes in deepening and widening portions of those 

 streams. This can be easily done in many of our brooks, by 

 raising barriers to hold up the water, and by enlarging and 

 deepening portions of their courses at the small sacrifice of a few 

 square yards of poor soil adjoining a natural hollow in their beds. 

 The fish in the artificial pools thus formed will be better fed and 

 consequently larger than those in the ordinary shallow course 

 of the brook or ' pelting river ' — to borrow Shakespeare's phrase 

 — which favours the multiplication of trout but fails to supply 

 them with abundant food. 



Of course we must remember that trout water, whether pool 

 or river, may easily be overstocked. In the course of a 

 ramble through an unfrequented part of Lochaber, I once came 

 upon a tiny tarn, fed by a burn which, though of the smallest 

 size, afforded excellent gravelly bottom for ' redds.' I made a 

 few experimental throws over it, and each time landed a fish 

 on every fly. I added two small hackles to my ordinary cast 

 of three, and had five troutlings hooked in as many seconds. 

 I made a dozen more casts, and each time took five fish. They 

 were so greedy that they would have the hook, so small that I 

 had no difficulty in sending the whole quintett flying. Had I 

 had any object in further slaughter — a feud with the cook at 

 Inverlair, or an extensive contract for potted trout — I could 

 easily, with the aid of my gillie to unhook the fish, have taken a 

 thousand brace of these hungry fry in a day. Mine were 

 perhaps the first artificial flies they had ever seen, for the tarn 

 in question lies quite off the beaten track, though near Lochs 

 Treig and Ouchan, which would have naturally attracted any 

 wandering angler in those regions. But such a case of over- 

 stocking I never witnessed. 



Within a mile or two, and on the same stretch of moorland, 

 but at a lower level and where the depth of peat was far greater, 

 lay another tarn of four or five acres in extent, which had no 



