94 
WILD NORWAY. 
The moon, full to-night, but pale as at midday, looked 
coldly down on two miserable mortals. There was no 
sympathy in her orb, nor in the great silent snow-fjelds ; 
the midnight melody of the redwings and distant 
laughter of a loon simply mocked us—the chance of 
a lifetime was gone.^ 
“ That fish will now go back to sea,” presently 
remarked Ivar, “and in fourteen days we’ll get him 
in Galten ! ” The prophecy was not fulfilled, but it 
evidenced my gillie’s correct knowledge of the habits of 
salmon, as the following incident shows. In a previous 
year, another angler, spinning with spoon-bait from a 
boat, in this same pool, hooked, played and eventually 
lost a very large fish, whose weight, he confidently 
asserted, was 40 lbs. It was suggested, since no proof 
was possible, that the luckless angler might as well put 
his fish at 60 lbs., but he insisted on the correctness 
of his estimate, which was verified three days later, 
when the salmon was caught in the fjord nets with the 
spoon still in his mouth, and found to scale 39 lbs. 
The incident serves to show that salmon, if hard hit 
when running, do return to the sea; but this only 
applies to compound lures, since fish hooked and lost on 
fiy have afterwards been killed higher up the rivers 
with the fly still in their jaws. 
On examining the line, the treble gut was found to 
be broken about one foot above the hooks; and from 
the worn and frayed state of each of the three strands, 
the breakage had evidently been caused by contact with 
* It will have been observed, from a previous chapter, that the 
same lifetime has already since afforded two similar chances: alas ! 
so far, with similar results. 
