THE GAME FISHES OF THE WOELD 



apparently, as fresh as ever, and I was reluctantly compelled to 

 acknowledge that my theory of a medium-weight trout rod was 

 not adapted for this fish ; at least, with the reel at the end of the 

 butt. 



But I did not give in at once. I temporized with the enemy, 

 in the language of the ring, playing for wind literally ; and I 

 confess that I needed it, as the effort to hold the impossible rod 

 was work of the hardest kind. At last, after nearly three-quarters 

 of an hour, playing and being played, I told Tom to row inshore. 

 I landed in a little beaver clearing where I stood a moment, then 

 began a new attack. Sometimes the rod had a gallant bend, 

 again it would point directly at the game, but in fifteen minutes 

 I had the sulker coming, and as he shot along the bank I held him 

 and called for the net. The moment the salmon saw it, he dashed 

 off twenty or thirty feet, and tried to sulk again. Time and 

 again I brought him to the bank, and as many times missed him. 

 We had no gaff and the net was a smaU afEair for trout of a few 

 pounds. But eventually I held him and Tom lifted him in, a 

 blue-back, spotted grilse of twelve pounds fresh from the sea. 

 Not a large salmon ; not half the size of the one an Indian in a 

 dugout held up to us, which must have weighed twenty-five 

 pounds. But I confess that a smaU fish never before had so 

 much sport with me, and all due to my faith in trout rods for 

 salmon. Even now I contend that with the reel above the grip 

 I might have made a fair showing, though my long slender tip 

 was outclassed. When I fish again for salmon on the Williamson 

 I shall have a rod that wiU at least lift a fish from the bottom of 

 the pool. 



On another day my wife hooked a salmon of unknown size 

 in the old Indian pool twenty miles upstream at the first rapid. 

 After a battle of twenty or thirty minutes, when bringing it to 

 the gaff, it made a rush around the stern and broke the line, a 

 melancholy ending of a gallant contest. This salmon had entered 

 the Klamath Eiver above San Francisco and, doubtless, was a 

 member of the big school that lies in Monterey Bay in Jidy and 

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