Nov. 29, 1913. 
FOREST AND STREAM 
68 L 
The Fish That Have Been 
By W. R. GILBERT 
T HERE is a respectable adage which tells that 
we cannot eat our cake and have it too, 
and a world which loves wisdom in easy 
tabloid form has got on 'to the habit of assum¬ 
ing that the truth compressed into the words is 
of universal application. 
It would scorn all past delights as dead and 
irrevocable, and would consign the pleasures of 
memory to the dim twilight land of poetry, a 
land which of course nobody enters now. 
But as a matter of fact there are plenty of 
things which are beyond the scope of the adage, 
although they may bear some affinity to cakes. 
Trout, for instance. You may eat your trout 
and still have him, and that is because you first 
caught him. 
It may be that if you made a superlative 
cake, and then ate it, you might still have it, or 
if perchance you stole—but I had better be done 
with the adage; it is not my business to bolster 
it up. 
As I have said the trout is of marvelous 
enduring quality. Only the other evening my 
good friend Ingrove was telling me about his 
4k2-pounder, caught now several long years ago, 
eaten—no, put in a glass case, but anyhow a 
dead delight, irrevocable, never to cause a thrill 
more so wisdom would assert. 
Ingrove was quite calm—it was a mere ques¬ 
tion of restocking that occupied us—and we were 
discussing the respective merits of yearlings and 
two-year-olds dispassionately, when I happened 
to observe that there must be quite a lot of big 
fish at the bends. 
“Like my 4l4-pounder,” said he. I led him 
on; I will not deny it. 
Where did he catch it precisely? And was 
it on a dry-fly? The eye of Ingrove brightened 
as he recalled the circumstances of that great 
fishing to his mind. And straightaway he began 
his tale. How, marvelous to relate, he found 
the great fish rising in the morning—no, that was 
the odd part of it; it was not in the Mayfly time 
—and how—no, there seemed to be no definite 
hatch of fly of any kind—and how he crept up 
and looked over and then withdrew into the 
meadow; and how he cast once, and twice, and 
yet again, and each time the great fish rose 
warily and would do no more than inspect the 
fly. 
“I am quite sure,” he went on, “that he could 
see me, and that was why he came short.” So 
the story went on to tell how Ingrove crept 
cautiously away and spent intervening hours on 
the lower water, and how he met Ephemeris, who 
had a 2-pounder, and said gayly to him: “You 
wait, I shall do better than that,” and thus we 
approached evening and the great moments. The 
eye of Ingrove flashed, his form stiffened, his 
arm took on the motion of one who casts a fly 
underhand. 
“I lay down quite flat.” For a little Ingrove 
would have done it again, there and then on the 
carpet. ‘And then I got the zulu over him and 
he took it the moment it fell. There followed 
an animated description of the battle—for a cent 
Ingrove would have followed the trout across 
the room, and for two cents I, holding imagina¬ 
tion’s landing net. would have been hard at his 
heels-and so the story drew to its triumphant 
conclusion, and to the artistic finale in which 
Ephemeris was reminded that many a word 
spoken in jest has an earnest result. 
The adventure was simply relived, from start 
to finish. Of course you can catch your trout 
and have.it, too. What is perhaps more remark¬ 
able is that you can have a trout that you never 
caught. 
This was revealed to me also. We were 
seated at tea, and conversation, since Caradoc 
was there, had the Penydwddwr for its starting 
place, its middle, and its end. 
He is quite passionately addicted to the 
Penydwddwr, from which we catc'h extremely 
small quantities of extremely small trout every 
spring, and so am I addicted to the same water. 
Several years ago there was a really nice day 
there and he filled his basket. 
Therefore, we go each year now in the hope 
of another. This, however, is a digression, and 
so was Caradoc’s dream about being back at 
college, which he told at great length. 
I merely mention it because it evoked remi¬ 
niscence of a dream from the third member of 
the company, who also joins in the annual ex¬ 
pedition. This dream was much more pertinent, 
for in it the dreamer had actually been beside 
the Penydwddwr, captured a fish—no, in reply 
to Caradoc, not a “breakfast” fish, but quite a 
good one-—and was engaged in subjugating an¬ 
other of great size when the dream ended. 
I have related the dream very badly, but 
there was much more finish in the original ver¬ 
sion, passages about how the fish jumped, and 
how it weighed three-quarters of a pound (this 
elicited from Caradoc a complacent remark that 
he had once caught a trout there which really 
weighed three-quarters of a pound; we whittled 
it down to half-pound after a little argument) 
and how annoyed the dreamer was on waking up 
too soon. 
I cannot hope to convey a just impression 
of the animated manner in which it was all de¬ 
scribed, so 1 shall not try. But the narrative 
clearly showed that the fish was just as real to 
the dreamer as an actual fish would have been. 
It will be remembered as vividly as an actual 
fish, and will be added to the store of experi¬ 
ences in the happy valley. This, then, proves my 
second point. 
You can have a trout which you never 
caught. Other proofs could be adduced, but it 
might be invidious to enlarge on the theme of 
that too vivid imagination which ultimately leads 
to complete faith in its creations. 
There may be really a man here and there 
who has invented some large fish with which 
to entertain his friends, and has done it so thor¬ 
oughly that he now believes that it was so. I 
am all for charitable interpretations. 
I now come to the last pleasing point in this 
inquiry. It is possible to have a fish which is 
no concern of yours at all, which you never even 
saw, much less caught—which you never even 
dreamed. That explains, and I hope excuses my 
feeling of proprietorship with regard to Ingrove’s 
big trout. He described the incidents of its cap¬ 
ture so vividly that I could see myself the pro¬ 
tagonist in the drama, getting the short rises, 
prophesying at tea time, lying prone, running 
wildly in the wake of the hooked fish, enacting 
the whole affair. 
If at some future date attentive listeners 
shall find me relating how I caught a 4l4-pound 
trout one evening on a zulu in circumstances 
very similar to those which have been here de¬ 
scribed, I beg that they will bear in mind the 
value of the charitable interpretations aforesaid. 
Most anglers, however, will understand and sym¬ 
pathize, for at some time or other they will in 
like manner have become possessed of somebody 
else’s faith. Harry Otter’s first grilse, for in¬ 
stance, which is so poignantly described in “Days 
and Nights of Salmon Fishing,” or the fish which 
caused the pupil’s delighted cry, “Look, you, 
master, what I have done! That which joys 
my heart; caught just such another chub as 
yours was.” A very fortunate thing is this 
power of appropriation. 
We cannot always be fishing; some of us 
can be fishing scarcely ever, but we can all have 
the pleasure that attended the fishing of other 
folk. From the lips of a friend, or the pages 
of a book we can live battles. Even that battle 
with the dream fish in the Penydwddr—but 
enough. 
The Wonders of a Salmon Run 
The world’s greatest salmon runs are to be 
found along the shores of the North Pacific 
Ocean, in the States of Washington, Oregon, and 
California, the Province of British Columbia, 
and Alaska, on the American side, and Siberia 
and Japan on the Asiatic side. So far, however, 
but few salmon have been canned on the Asiatic 
side. 
To one who has never witnessed these annual 
runs it is almost an impossibility to convey an 
adequate impression of the countless numbers 
of fish that swim in from the sea in the late 
spring and summer, all imbued with the same 
desire—to gain suitable grounds in the upper 
reaches of the rivers, some of which are from fif¬ 
teen hundred to two thousand five hundred miles 
in length, where they may perpetuate the species. 
No obstacle appears to be too great to be sur¬ 
mounted in this feverish rush. Jumping falls, 
shooting rapids, dodging nets, bears, birds, mink, 
otter, and other enemies, fighting with other 
males, whom the near approach of the breeding 
season renders especially savage, all these are 
taken as a matter of course. And yet one some¬ 
times wonders if the heroic struggle is worthily 
repaid, for the moment of victory is also the 
moment of death, as, sad to relate, these valiant 
voyagers can breed but once and then must die, 
their wasted bodies, which have received no nour¬ 
ishment since leaving salt water, becoming the 
prey of any prowling bear or carrion bird which 
may chance upon them. Why these fish should 
all die after spawning still remains one of the 
great unsolved mysteries of the scientific world. 
Forest and Stream undoubtedly has the 
most exclusive clientele of any outdoor maga¬ 
zine. 
