I30 THE DRY-FLY MAN'S HANDBOOK 



in ■ this way until they have settled down to rise 

 continuously at one and the same place. 



When a trout has poised itself near the surface and 

 is steadily taking duns or other 

 Fish in position. flies without any great move- 



ment laterally or up or down 

 the stream,, it is said to be in position. When a fish in 

 position is lying close to the bank and is rising freely, 

 the angler on the same bank has found one under ideal 

 conditions for the dry-fly fisherman, and may con- 

 fidently expect a rise to his fly, if he is using the right 

 pattern and succeeds in presenting it at the right 

 moment and in such a way that the fish does not 

 realize that it is being fished for, and its. suspicions 

 are, therefore, not aroused. 



The rise of the fish is generally contemporaneous 



with a good hatch of duns, 



Rise usually dependent smuts, and other flies, with the 



on hatch of fly. fall of the spinners after ovi- 



position, or of the sedges either 

 at the time of oviposition or after this the most im- 

 portant part of their life's work has been completed. 

 It is, however, by no means safe to predict that the 

 angler's bag will be in proportion to the number of 

 rises he sees. On some days every trout or grayling 

 in the river seems to be feeding madly on the fly, and 

 besides the difficulty of judging the size of fish from 

 the nature of the rise it would seem that on such a 

 day the fish appear to be endowed with an unusual 

 degree of perception. They will take the natural flies 



