BAINBOW TEOUT AND ITS COUSINS 



old Modoc squaw who sat on the bank watching this fish plwy 

 me. We were directly below the rapids, and the splendid trout 

 would course around the pool, go into the air, then plunge to the 

 bottom, giving me the battle of my life, with trout. Slowly it 

 came in, and time and again it dashed away at the sight of the 

 net. It was only taken at last by a sort of angling miracle, the 

 hook holding by a mere sliver. Tom Littlefield, my boatman, 

 weighed it, and pronounced it an eight-pounder. 



Anywhere else this would have been an extraordinary event, 

 but an eight-pounder was no rarity here, and Colonel Gay of 

 San Diego, who is smoking on the lodge veranda, has a record of a 

 nineteen and one-half pound rainbow. My best rainbow was 

 a ten-pound fish, and a nine-pounder hangs in the Tuna Club 

 to prove another story. 



The following day I took fourteen rainbows in this river. 

 The largest weighed seven pounds and none below three or four 

 pounds. A day later when rowing alone in a little blind river 

 in the snipe country near Pelican Bay, I hooked a fish in a big 

 pool, which fought me an hour. I think he was an eleven- or 

 twelve-pounder, but he weighed but ten an hour later. On 

 another occasion my companion, Mr. Joseph Eeed of Pasadena, 

 landed four-, five-, six-, seven-, eight- and ten-pound rainbows 

 after remarkable contests, and Mrs. Eeed an eleven-pounder. 



The record fish of this locality was taken by Mr. J. B. Lippin- 

 cott of Los Angeles. It weighed twenty-two pounds, and scores 

 have been caught ranging upward from five to fifteen and twenty 

 pounds. 



In this region there were, to the eye, two distinct rainbows ; 

 he of the deep river pools, dark, heavy and brilliantly coloured 

 with flesh-pink or white. This was the ty^jical, finely propor- 

 tioned Salmo irideus, called the rainbow by Dr. David Starr 

 Jordan years ago. Whenever I look at a rainbow I recall the 

 fish, and when I land the fish I think of a rainbow, as he is one, 

 if you can imagine delicate filmy old-rose lace drawn over the 

 living rainbow. The rainbow is, all in all, the game fish of the 



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