188 WILD SPORTS OF THE HIGHLANDS. [cuap. xxu. 
nearly perpendicular rocks are clothed with the birch and the 
ladylike bird-cherry, the holly and bright-berried mountain-ash 
growing out of every niche and cleft, and clinging by their 
serpent-like roots to the bare face of the rock; while in the 
dark, damp recesses of the stone grow several most lovely 
varieties of pale-green ferns and other plants. In the more 
sunny places you meet with the wild strawberry and purple fox- 
glove, the latter shooting up in graceful pyramids of flower. 
Between Logie and Sluie are some of the highest rocks on the 
river, and from several hundred feet above it you can look 
straight down into the deep pools and foaming eddies below you. 
At a particular gorge, where the river rushes through a passage 
of very few feet in width, you will invariably see an old salmon- 
fisher perched on a point of rock, with his eye intent on the 
rushing cataract below him, and armed with a staff of some six- 
teen feet in length ending in a sharp hook, with which he 
strikes the salmon as they stop for a moment to rest in some 
eddy of the boiling torrent before taking their final leap up the 
fall. Watch for afew moments, and you will see the old man 
make a peculiar plunge and jerk with his long clip into the 
rushing water, and then hoisting it into the air he displays a 
struggling salmon impaled on the end of the staff, glancing like 
a piece of silver as it endeavours to escape. Perhaps it tumbles 
off the hook, and dropping into the water, floats wounded away, 
to fall a prey to the otter or fox in some shallow below. If, 
however, the fish is securely hooked, there ensues a struggle be- 
tween it and the old man, who, by a twist of his stick, turns 
himself and the fish towards the dry rock, and having shaken 
the salmon off the hook, and despatched it with a blow from a 
short cudgel which he keeps for the purpose, covers it carefully 
up with wet grass, and lowering the peak of his cap over his 
eyes, resumes his somewhat ticklish seat on the rock to wait for 
the next fish, On some days, when the water is of the right 
height, and the fish are numerous and inclined to run up the 
river, the old man catches a considerable number; though the 
capture of every fish is only attained by a struggle of life and 
death between man and salmon, for the least slip would send the 
former into the river, whence he could never come out alive. 
Inever see him catch one without feeling fully convinced that 
