84 
WILD NORWAY. 
no special pressure—indeed humouring the captive in 
all his little runs and lunges—the rod dew up, and the 
fly came home, unharmed. The fight was over and 
the fish the victor. 
A few days afterwards, in the same Stein-pool, 
I hooked a third monster. I felt him come, struck at 
the right moment, yet in rather less than a minute, for 
some reason unexplained, the hook came away. During 
his short captivity he had made one long surface-run, 
thus showing us his size. 
The conclusions we came to are these: that these 
very heavy fish, given the best of holds on single gut, 
may take an hour to kill and possibly more; and that, 
during so prolonged a pressure, the hold of a small hook 
(and in fine water no other is of any use) must almost 
necessarily wear itself out. 
I give for what it may be worth, the quality and 
rank of the two above-named fish, these points being set 
down by estimate of the local experts as (1) the Sam- 
komme fish, 40 lbs., fresh from sea the night before. 
(2) Stein-pool—a larger salmon, probably from 45 to 
50 lbs., but of some fourteen days’ sojourn in the river. 
These estimates I take to be fairly near the mark. 
After handling heavy fish, one comes to know the 
strength and style of the twenty-pounder, and of fish 
ranging between that and 30 lbs. These two, as well 
as that other monster of Nedre-Baksnyden, whose fight 
for life is described later, presented an altogether 
different problem. 
There are among anglers, as in other sports, experts 
and “ old hands,” who never fail or lose a fish. They 
may smile at this record of disaster, pointing out things 
