594 
FOREST AND STREAM 
the driver acts you make up your mind he knows 
what he is about, and you don’t bother on that 
score any more. 
You trot along up the road for about a mile 
or so, when the driver jumps a little fence round 
a field and you crawl after him. You cross the 
field, crawl over another fence made of brush, 
and there’s the East branch. The driver takes 
three flies out of his pocket to put on the leader, 
and while he is fastening them he tells you the 
names of them. He points out one that he him¬ 
self made, and says he doesn’t know any name 
for it but “chicken tail.” After the flies are 
all fastened to the leader, he wades out into 
the stream and says to you: 
“Now you watch me cast a few times, and 
then you can try it.” 
He clicks some of the line off the reel, and 
keeps slowly wading farther out into the stream. 
Just at that place there’s a little bend, and where 
the water runs close to the bank about five feet 
high, it is pretty smooth and quiet, and bushes 
hang down over the water. The driver swishes 
the line back over his shoulder, and out it flies 
toward the still water. He appears to think the 
line isn’t long enough and clicks more of it 
off the reel. When he casts the next time the 
leader reaches to the farther side of the still 
water, and the flies skitter along the surface 
There’s another swish and the line goes back 
over his head again. You think he is going to 
snap off the flies as the pole darts forward 
again; but they merely follow the curve of the 
line as nicely as a trotter makes the turn on a 
track, and fly out over the water as lightly as 
dandelion fluff bounces along the grass on a 
windy day. 
A dozen times the driver drops the leader 
over the water, and you begin to wonder why 
he doesn’t let it lie still long enough for a trout 
to see it and bite at one of the flies. He casts 
again, and just as the flies start to move to¬ 
ward him, you see a good sized trout leap up 
into the air at least a foot, and then drop back 
into the water with a little splash. 
“There,” you think, “if he would only let the 
flies stay in one place a little while, he d catch 
that trout. The trout wants them so badly he’s 
even jumping out of the water after them. 
As the trout jumps up the driver jerks up 
the hand that holds the pole, but only a little 
bit. He doesn’t swish the line back again this 
time, and you guess one of the hooks is caught 
on a stone or a stick under the water; for the 
line is taut and the pole is bent over so much you 
make up your mind it is altogether too limber to 
fish with. It strikes you about this time, that 
the driver doesn’t know much about fishing after 
all, and you wish you had a chance to show him 
how you handle a fifteen foot bamboo pole along 
the Sandburg, when you are after chubs. A 
fellow can’t catch any chubs if he keeps jerking 
the line out of the water every few seconds, and 
doesn’t give them a chance to grab the grass¬ 
hopper bait. 
You don’t think more than that far, when the 
line begins to fly round in the water and the 
driver starts reeling it in. The pole stays bent 
till, suddenly the line flies upstream middling 
fast, and while you are wondering what makes 
It do that, up jumps a trout into the air. Jingo! 
That trout is fast on the second fly; but how 
ke happened to get there is a sticker to you. 
The driver keeps on reeling in the line till it is 
pretty short and then wades for the shore, pull¬ 
ing the trout that is near the top of the water, 
Wiggling hard, toward him. In another second 
he pulls the fish into shallow water and then 
gets him in a dinky little net about the size of 
your hat, that has a bundle about two feet long. 
My! Isn’t a trout pretty when you first pull 
him out of the water. All the red and blue 
spots show up clear and bright on his glistening 
skjn, and he has a shape that makes a bullhead 
or a sunfish look as bad as a pollywog in com¬ 
parison. When you want to get a trout ready 
for the frying pan, you don’t have to scale nor 
skin him; and when he’s browned in butter and 
flour and dropped on your plate, you pull out 
the backbone and all the other bones come with 
it. Daddy says you must break a fish’s neck 
as soon as you pull him out of the water, so 
that he won’t needlessly suffer. 
After the driver stows away the trout in his 
creel, he looks over the flies on the leader and 
then begins casting again. He gets another one 
at the third or fourth cast, and after he takes 
him off the hook, hands the pole to you and 
tells you to try it. By this time you find out 
what a ninny you were in thinking that driver 
didn’t know how to catch fish, and learn in ad¬ 
dition that a trout will jump for an artificial fly 
that is moving over the water, but would only 
look at it and swish water at it with his tail, if 
it were held still for him to grab. Of course, 
if a real fly or a bug were to come along, he 
would grab it quickly enough. He knows a fly 
with a hook in it from a real fly, if he gets 
a chance to look at it, as well as Tom Gifford 
knows hay seed from fine cut. 
When you get hold of the pole, the driver 
tells you to reel in and cast with a short line 
at first. You get the line upstream all right; 
but the way you whip it down stream makes him 
yell at you: 
“Hi, there! Easy! Easy! You ain’t killin’ 
snakes. You’ll snap the flies off the leader if 
you thrash that way.” 
You try to take it easy as the driver says, 
but make a pretty poor job of it for a while. 
By and by he says you are doing better and tells 
you to let out more line. You can let out more 
line easily enough, but you don’t handle your 
pole very briskly, and at the next cast the line 
merely drags on the water in front of you a 
little way. You have to let it float down stream 
in order to get a fresh start, and this time you 
get it back upstream all right. The driver has 
to say “Easy” at you again when you try to 
whip it down stream over the still water; but 
you pay attention to what he says, and after a 
while can make a pretty fair cast with a mod¬ 
erately long line. 
“Now,” says the driver, “we’ll work along 
down stream. You see that rock in the water 
down there, with a clear place each side of it? 
You cast below that and maybe you’ll get a 
rise.” 
You catch trout in all sorts of places. Of 
course, you don’t catch them on dry land nor 
up a tree; but they are in all kinds of water 
that you would think wouldn’t be interesting to 
a fish. There’s generally one below a rock in 
a stream, and in the still places close to the 
bank there are always more than five or six. 
Just about sundown, in a little, shallow mill 
pond, they will rise to a fly as fast as you can 
take them off the hooks. 
Well, you do as the driver tells you and try 
to cast for the little, smooth place below the 
rock, but don’t get the leader there. All you 
do is to swing the pole and get the flies all 
caught in the back of your flannel shirt. The 
driver laughs at you and cuts out the hooks 
with his knife. Then he tells you once more 
to take it easy. He says you are excited, and 
when you stop to think a moment, you know he 
is right. You cast again, and this time the flies 
go pretty close to the rock. At the next cast 
you do so well that a trout rises, but you don’t 
get him. The third time he doesn’t rise; but at 
the fourth cast he is hooked. You forget to 
jerk your wrist and help hook him the way 
the driver says; but he is an accommodating 
fish and hooks himself. As a matter of fact, 
all the trout you ever caught, hooked them¬ 
selves. The fellow that can jerk his waist 
quickly enough to do any good, must be quicker 
than chain lightning. Of course, if anyone wants 
to jerk his wrist when a trout rises and strikes 
the fly, it doesn’t make any difference to you; 
and so long as he thinks it does any good there 
isn’t any use arguing the matter. 
When you hook your first trout on a fly, you 
feel as if you are about the smartest boy in that 
part of the country; but when you stop to think 
over the matter, you can’t see that there is so 
very much in the trick after all. Of course, 
you don’t stop to think about this when the trout 
is on the hook; you do your thinking afterward 
on the way home. When you see the trout on 
the hook, you try to do as the driver told you, 
and to work your fish as he did; but your fish 
doesn’t act as his did. The first thing he does 
is to rush upstream about forty miles an hour, 
and while you are watching him go you let the 
line get slack. That’s his chance and he gets 
rid of the hook before you know it. You feel 
pretty sick and foolish when you find he’s gone. 
The driver grins at you and tells you to keep 
your eyes and hands working as soon as you 
hook a trout-. “Don’t give him any slack line,” 
he says. 
All the rest of the afternoon the driver sticks 
by you and gives you pointers. You hook a trout 
now and then, and land him. Just before sun¬ 
down the driver tells you to come with him, and 
you follow him down stream to a place where the 
water rushes along very fast between two big 
rocks that block the stream, except for the pass¬ 
age through which the water tears its way. A 
short distance below the rocks the rapids end in 
a big, quiet pool that you can easily reach with 
your pole from the rocks themselves. The 
driver tells you to get to work, and you can now 
cast well enough to reach the middle of the 
pool with the leader. At about the fourth or 
fifth cast you get a strike, and in a second you 
have lively business on hand. 
When you hook a trout in a pretty good sized 
pool and have a pole that is hardly bigger round 
than the handle of a parasol, and though springy 
is as limber as a horse whip, you can’t jerk a 
trout up into the air the way you do a bullhead 
at the end of twenty feet of line tied to a 
bamboo pole, and fling him thirty feet back from 
the bank of the creek. Till you saw the driver 
catch a trout you didn’t know any other way 
to fish than that, and thought you knew a* much 
about fishing as the next boy; but now you think 
differently. 
After you hook that trout in the pool, the 
