Where Barefoot Boys Look for 
Trout.—VI. 
Since the principal object of these chapters 
is to deal with the question of locating the trout, 
nothing has been said upon the subjects of either 
rods, lines or flies. Of course it is very im- 
' portant that the angling student should thor¬ 
oughly understand these implements, but none 
of our company has experimented with them 
sufficiently to make our experience of particular 
value. Perhaps I can serve the 
young angler best by referring 
him to writers whose suggestions 
have been helpful to us. 
If one wishes to study flies he 
may look for some time before 
he finds a man more thoroughly 
acquainted with them than Theo¬ 
dore Gordon. Many of the most 
useful suggestions I have ever 
read occur in his “Little Talks 
About Fly-Fishing.” 
Probably Perry D. Frazer has 
studied the subjects of rod and 
line as closely as any amateur, 
and in his works he explains 
them so lucidly that one can 
scarcely go astray. 
Leaving the question of per¬ 
fect tackle to those better pre¬ 
pared to give instructions con¬ 
cerning it, I will mention some 
of the absurd objects which it 
has'pleased the whimsical trout 
to rise to in our experiences. 
Once when we were boys, 
Robert Bruce worked for a long 
time with an angleworm to coax 
a trout from under a clump of 
willow roots. At length, despair- 
r ing of success, he dropped his 
birch pole and invaded a barn¬ 
yard. Around and around that 
reeking track he chased a duck, 
until he either picked or scared 
a feather from it. Stripping a 
little of the vane from this 
feather he tied it on to his bait 
hook with a bit of thread drawn 
from his coat lining, and in a 
few minutes had the first trout 
that any of us ever took with an 
■ artificial fly. 
On a June afternoon, some seasons ago, I 
wandered-down to the creek more for the sake 
of looking around than with any hope of catch¬ 
ing fish. There had been several days when 
nothing would tempt the trout to rise, and I 
did not believe the spell was yet broken; in 
fact, it was not broken, and I whipped vainly 
for more than a half hour. It seemed too bad 
to waste good muscle and tackle so wantonly, 
and I sat down upon a rock to engage in a 
general thinking spell. 
Having reviewed the trail of human affliction 
all the way down from Adam, I was going 
ahead a few hundred years in the future, when 
there was a splash near me that sounded as if 
someone had dropped a washtub into the water. 
I grasped my rod quickly, as one picks up his 
rifle when he hears a crackling in the bush. A 
monster trout had come and gone, but he came 
again in less than a minute. I promptly cast 
a tempting fly in his direction, but it was to no 
avail. Fle kept on rising, as it seemed to me, 
almost continually. Then another fish near by 
appeared to be attacked by the same form of 
insanity. In less time than it takes to tell it 
there were more trout leaping out of the water 
than I would have believed lived in any single 
mile of the Esopus. Once in glancing straight 
across the creek I saw four fish above the sur¬ 
face at the same time. It appeared to be some 
royal game in which only the lords of the water 
participated, for there were no small fry in 
evidence. 
I nearly had buck fever and hurriedly cast 
here and there at any one of the half dozen 
which were rising within reach of my line. I 
might as well have been fishing for the boulders 
along the creek, so far as any impression it 
made was concerned. I could neither attract 
the attention of the trout nor stop their rising 
by repeated casts. 
Of course I looked about for the reason of 
this sudden call to mess, but it was several 
minutes before the greedy fish left a sample 
of- their feast in sight long enough so that I 
discovered it. It turned out to be a large fly 
which was hatching and riding down the cur¬ 
rent. The insect had a fat, succulent looking 
body about three-quarters of an 
inch long, which at a little dis¬ 
tance looked to be of a pale yel¬ 
low color. The wings were 
darkly mottled and stood up 
close together, giving the creat¬ 
ure a saucy, yacht-like appear¬ 
ance. It was evidently going 
with the current from choice, for 
its head was always down stream 
and it gave no sign that it was 
being carried against its will. 
I tested such of my flies as 
approximately imitated this sweet 
meat, but found them useless. It 
was one of those cases where 
my time could have been as 
profitably spent at fishing for the 
moon, so I sat down to enjoy 
the spectacle. 
From about 2 o’clock until 
nearly three there was little or 
no abatement of the leaping. 
During that time I do not think 
I saw a single one of the flies 
pass far enough down stream to 
be out of sight before it was de¬ 
voured. The insects were numer¬ 
ous enough, so that by looking 
across the creek in front of me 
one or more could be seen at al¬ 
most any time. I had only to 
pick out a fly and watch its 
course for a little distance to see 
it taken. Each individual trout 
seemed to keep quite closely to 
a space perhaps fifteen feet in 
diameter, and many of them 
must have risen as many as fifty 
times during the hour. 
In all my fishing I have never 
met with anything which threw 
so much light upon the numbers 
of trout which inhabit our streams. The creek 
here was something more than a hundred feet 
wide and in a distance of perhaps four hundred 
feet along it I was able to count upward of 
forty trout which would run much over a foot 
in length. Before I saw this display I would 
have doubted there being ten such fish in the 
stretch. This is the same section that Robert 
was fishing the day he took only small rain¬ 
bows while I was catching large brown trout 
less than a mile away. 
Another feature that came out very vividly 
was the fact that each fish held closely to his 
THE FRENCH ANGLER AT THE PONT DE NEUILLY. 
From an old print in the Woodward Collection. (See page 300.) 
