182 “ SALMON AND TROUT. 
effect on the appetite of a salmon. I have found this to be 
the case upon almost every river I have fished. It matters 
little whether the fish are fresh-run or stale : they are indifferent 
to taking food, and it is quite exceptional to get a good day’s 
sport during those months. They begin again, however, to 
take at the latter end of September and up to the time of 
the close season ; but these are mostly gravid fish, and hardly 
worth the trouble of fishing for.! 
After a salmon has spawned he is at his lowest ebb—thin, 
emaciated, and unsightly to behold. He then gradually makes 
his way to the sea, but, as it is necessary to recruit his strength 
before he finally leaves fresh water, Nature seems to have pro- 
vided hm with ample means for so doing at this particular 
season, as on his downward journey he is accompanied by 
millions of the fry of his own species, and it is supposed he 
makes such havoc amongst them that it has been in contem- 
plation to alter the salmon laws, making it legal to take spent 
salmon after a certain date. I have seen spent salmon in such 
a condition that it has been difficult to distinguish them from 
newly run fish.? 
It is commonly believed, because nothing has ever been 
1 In all rivers August is the worst. ‘Soolky Agust’ (sulky August), the 
Irish fishermen call it, the warmth of the water making fish sick and idle—in 
Canada the latter half of July is as bad—but throughout Scotland, Ireland, and 
Wales I have found fishing to be worst in August.—Ep, 
2 In 1879 I got to our camp on the Natasquham on the borders of Labra- 
dor, a Lower Canada province of Quebec, on June 9. The river was full of 
thousands of fish bright as silver, and apparently in first-rate condition. They 
were every one of them mended kelts, i.e. fish of the previous year that had 
spawned in October or November, and, for some unaccountable reason, had 
not returned to the sea. Usually at that season there are zo fish in the water, 
but just within a week, sooner or later, the new fish come up. That year the 
old fish did not go down till about June 20, and no new fish came up before 
July. The mended kelts are useless for food, and scarcely any of them would 
rise. 1 went away across the gulf to the Ristigouche between New Brunswick 
and Lower Canada on June 27, not having seen a fresh-run fish, and only killed 
half a dozen kelts on the Natasquham. One of my friends who stayed through 
July often killed twenty-five fish a day. From June 10 to the 2oth I could sit on 
a rock and count from sixty to eighty fish jump in a pool within an hour. No 
one could account for this unusual delay in the going down of the old and 
coming up of the new fish.—Eb. 
