13° 



Fish Stories 



jowl with cherry and plum ; a fruit lover's paradise was this 

 trout stream running through some of the finest orchards in 

 California, where ranches had trees centuries old. In fish- 

 ing one wades down through ranches and farms, through 

 the town of Soquel, then to Capitola by the sea, where, from 

 the fine beach, the bay of Monterey, and the finest salmon 

 fishing on the coast reaches away for fifty miles. 



The steelheads, which found a place in my creel, were 

 attractive in appearance on the line, or served after the 

 fashion of the mistress of the little inn, not two minutes 

 from a trout pool of the Soquel. They told me on the 

 ranch that, in the old days, twenty-pounders were not un- 

 known in the mouths of many streams from the Santa Inez 

 to the Russian River. In many of these streams, this fish 

 rises to the fly under some new name, as in the Fraser it is 

 the stit-tse, and in the splendid reaches of other streams of 

 the range, the kamloops. Indeed, the keen discernment of 

 a magician is required to distinguish the steelhead from the 

 rainbow, which replaces it throughout the interior of Cali- 

 fornia. 



The fishes which enter the little lagoons at the mouths of 

 these Southern California rivers, linger in them until the 

 rains of the fall or winter begin to fill them. Perhaps they 

 have learned this in Southern California, where, before the 

 rains, the San Gabriel ends after six or eight miles, in sand, 

 the river running along beneath the surface; but after the 

 rain, a wide and often turbulent stream reaches far back 

 into the canons of the Sierra Madre, and up this the steel- 

 head goes to spawn, then returning to the sea. 



In April or March, the rivers being protected during this 

 time, the fry of these fishes, often of several seasons, re- 

 main in the pools and reaches of the river, lying in the 

 shallowest riffles, until they are fingerlings, when they go 

 down stream, and lie in the lagunas, or the salty waters at 

 the mouths of the rivers, going up stream with the run of 

 adult fish in the fall, and in the following spring going to 



