850 
FOREST AND STREAM. 
[June 3, 1911. 
entire satisfaction the greatly enlarged possi¬ 
bilities of the dry fly. 
“Primarily man fishes for the pleasure to be 
had from the sport, and as a delightful pastime 
the use of the dry fly far exceeds the wet. My 
master holds that there is greater pleasure in 
catching a few nice fish in nearby streams, where 
the fish are scarce and difficult to catch even 
with the most approved methods, than can be 
had in far distant waters where fish are so 
plentiful that their capture is merely a question 
of propinquity.” 
Gun: “Your master, however, makes many 
trips to those far distant waters.” 
Rod: “Yes, but not merely for the fishing. 
It is to enjoy the ‘pleasures in the pathless 
woods,’ the rapture of the near-to-earth life, 
where even you can be used to some advantage. 
And besides, you must remember that the dry 
fly is equally seductive in swift water. Follow 
my master up to the head of the pool and watch 
him catch that first fish that rose. Here we em¬ 
ploy different tactics, for we do not know ex¬ 
actly where that fish is located, as we were too 
far down stream to mark the exact spot where 
he rose, and hence we plan this attack so as to 
reach as far as possible all the waters in his 
immediate neighborhood, but we must confine 
our efforts to dropping the fly only on those 
spots where the surface of the water is smooth, 
because rough water is not friendly to the dry 
fly. 
“You will notice my master is using a shorter 
line as he begins casting the same fly he used 
before. This is because the cast is made very 
much more rapidly, as the fly is dropped time 
and again upon one of those small spaces of 
smooth water which are in the vicinity of our 
fish. You need not smile when I say ‘our fish,’ 
for he is almost certain to find a resting place 
in our creel. Given a known rising fish, the 
proper dry fly patiently and properly cast, and 
the result is victory. That smooth spot is small, 
jay about a foot long, so that the fly has little 
time to float before it is retrieved and recast 
at the head of the smooth bit of water. This 
is done several times, and then my master dis¬ 
covers another smooth bit nearby upon which 
the same program is continued. Note particu¬ 
larly that the fly is let to float only on the 
smooth surface, for as soon as it comes in con¬ 
tact with the rough water, if not retrieved at 
once it will become partly submerged, a condi¬ 
tion to be avoided as far as possible. 
“Cast after cast is made, now here, now there, 
and by this time our trout must surely conclude 
that there is a swarm of flies hovering over the 
water awaiting his approval. Right here I 
demonstrate my high standing in the rod world, 
when my pliant action, subservient to every 
motion of my master’s well trained hand and 
wrist, is so great a factor in the proper plac¬ 
ing of that fly upon the water, for therein lies 
the success of the dry fly, it being due almost 
entirely to the proper placing of the fly upon 
the water. I am of the highest class and well 
made, and great is my master’s pride in me, 
for full well does he know all that he can ac¬ 
complish with me, and the pleasure he derives 
from being enabled to place the fly properly 
upon the water, and in just the spot he selects 
is a great part of the game. And so every cast 
is made with confidence, and it is not long be¬ 
fore the expected rise is had, then a quick strike, 
a short struggle and our fish is in the net. And 
strange to say he is not as large as the one we 
caught in the lower end of the pool, and we 
are not even sure that he is the fish which rose 
at first, but we are content. 
“And now for lunch and a talk. Can such 
blissful surroundings be had by your followers 
as are found here in this inspiring balm of an 
ideal summer’s day? The bright sunlight every¬ 
where, the sparkling water with its babbling 
music, the trees waving acknowledgment to the 
blue sky overhead, and here among the rocks 
the joyful companionship of our crackling little 
fire, whose every breath of smoke further whets 
the appetite. And what feast can equal this 
crisp trout and slice of bacon just out of the 
frying-pan, and this baked potato fresh from the 
ashes? Verily this is complete happiness, and 
the memories of such days are a priceless pos¬ 
session. 
“And many are our happy memories of the 
olden days when master and I fished the Beaver- 
kill, when Livingston Manor was Morsston and 
Lew Beach was Shinn Creek. Those were the 
days of sawmills and mill ponds, when it was 
worth while to make the trip up to Jones’ mill 
to fish that magnificent stretch of water above 
the dam. But alas for the good fishing, the mill 
ponds are no more. They and the mills dis- 
A N inevitable sequence of the invasion of a 
primitive country by civilized man is the 
destruction of natural things, and those 
first destroyed are the wild creatures useful for 
food. Of these the largest are first to go—the 
big game, the big birds and the big fishes. The 
smaller creatures persist longer, because they 
are less valuable for food and are less easily 
secured. As these animals, birds and fishes grow 
fewer, those who in the past have developed on 
them complain of their scarcity and seek for its 
cause, but the question is very easily answered 
by thoughtful people. 
We have reached the stage in this country 
where we are complaining now of the scarcity 
of small game birds and small fish, and are 
puzzling our brains to know why they are al¬ 
most extinct. Many explanations are advanced, 
and we are all anxious to put the blame for this 
destruction on someone besides ourselves, yet 
we all know that of the enemies of birds and 
fish, man is by far the most destructive. 
It is perhaps worth while to consider some 
of the natural enemies of our game birds, and 
to try to weigh in some just measure the dam¬ 
age and the good done by the different classes 
of these enemies. 
In primitive times there was room enough in 
North America for all food animals, birds and 
fish, and for all the natural enemies that preyed 
upon them. If we go back 250 years, we find 
from the writings of the explorers of that time 
that the prairies were covered with buffalo, while 
the woods were full of deer, bears and wild 
turkeys. Thus, in the year 1680 Father Allouez, 
appeared shortly after the tanneries shut down, 
for there was no timber left to saw. When 
‘spudding’ bark for the tanneries was the order 
of the day, the waste of timber was simply awful 
and many are the hillsides which were literally 
covered with the felled hemlock, which 
after having been stripped of the bark were 
left there to rot. The casual house was made 
of logs with hemlock slabs for the roof; meat 
was almost unknown in many households, buck¬ 
wheat being the staple article of diet, the first 
crop to be raised on every burnt fallow. The 
fences were also made of hemlock slabs, which, 
however, was a slight improvement on the en¬ 
tangling barbed wire of to-day. When you 
drove you were in a buckboard, but it was 
pleasanter to walk and quicker. The air, heavily 
laden with the odor of hemlock, was wonder¬ 
fully invigorating. Partridges were plentiful 
with a few woodcock; in fact, it was an ideal 
land for the sportsman. But all is not lost, there 
are a few birds left, and there are good fish in 
the Beaverkill on the lookout for a dry fly, and 
you may still trudge home at dusk to the 
rhythmic music of the whippoorwill.” 
Suddenly there was a violent commotion with¬ 
in the hemlock boughs, the owl pitched forward 
and fell to the ground with a thud, for he was 
sound asleep. 
DeGROOT 
recounting the journey of La Salle to the Mis¬ 
sissippi River, says: 
“There are also certain dry countries of ex¬ 
cellent soil filled with an incredible number of 
bears, elk, deer and turkeys, against which the 
wolves make terrible war and which are so little 
wild that we were several times in danger of 
not being able to keep them away from us ex¬ 
cept by shooting at them,” and this was only 
230 years ago. 
All this sort of thing is pretty well known 
now by anyone who is willing to take the 
trouble to look it up. The elk of the North, 
near Lake Champlain and Canada, were so 
abundant that the Indians used to drive them 
into pens, as in later times the Indians of the 
plains drove buffalo into the pounds which the 
Blackfeet called piskun. If these great food 
animals were abundant, not less so were the 
smaller fur-bearing animals whose skins were 
used for clothing or for ornament, or the birds, 
the wild turkey, the grouse which the Indians 
used to shoot out of the trees with blunt-headed 
arrows, or the wild pigeons whose myriads made 
the sound of a rushing wind and whose num¬ 
bers broke down the branches of the trees on 
which they alighted. 
Where have they all gone? In the early 8o’s 
the plains Indians of the North, when in suc¬ 
cessive years they found no buffalo, where al¬ 
ways before there had been buffalo, believed 
that the white men or some bad spirits had gath¬ 
ered together all the buffalo and shut them up 
in some place underground. In the same way 
and about the same time, men who had always 
Nature’s Disturbed Balance 
By W. G. 
