1032 
FOREST AND STREAM. 
<¥ 
[Dec. 24, 1910. 
KENTUCKY CHAMPIONSHIP 
(LIVE BIRDS) 
Won at Ryland, Ky., December 8, by Mr. J. E. Schreck, by a score of 23 out of 25, and 5 straight 
on the shoot-off. He used 
Messrs. J. S. Day, C. O. Le Compte and O. J. Holaday each scored 24 ex 25 with PETERS Shells, 
but neither was eligible for the title. The excellent scores made by these four gentlemen attest the 
killing power and general dependability of PETERS ammunition—qualities that have commanded 
the approval and secured the patronage of shooters in every nook and corner of the country. 
THE PETERS CARTRIDGE COMPANY. CINCINNATI. OHIO 
Haw Tark: 98 Chamber* St. T. H. KELLER. Manager New Srleana: 821 Magazine St P. R. LITZKI, Manager 
San Franciaee: 608-612 Newark Street, j. S. FRENCH. Manager 
THE GREAT DRY-FLY MYTH. 
It is popularly supposed that dry-fly fishing is 
excessively difficult—difficult, I mean, beyond 
every other form of the art. I do not know 
who is responsible for this imposture. I 
imagine it must be the genius or genii who first 
applied the words “chuck and chance” and 
“fine and far off” to the wet and dry methods 
respectively. I cannot think that any two 
epithets have ever more successfully exalted 
one set of men at the expense of another. You 
would suppose that any fool can go and throw 
a blue upright into the Barle at Dulverton and 
pull it out again with a trout on it. You would 
imagine that no chalk-stream fish may be lured 
at a less distance than seventy yards. There is 
no especial merit in fishing with a long line. 
No good fisherman, wet or dry, gives a trout 
an inch more than is absolutely necessary. Per¬ 
haps, of the two, the wet fly man uses the 
longer line, and lie certainly, if he means to 
catch fish, throws as “fine,” by which I under¬ 
stand “light,” as the wet condition of his lure 
will let him. But “fine and far off” remains the 
special property of the dry-fly school, and the 
wet-fly men continue to go about under the im¬ 
putation of “chucking it and chancing it.” This 
shows how important it is to be first in any 
field, even of mutual recrimination. The arro¬ 
gant dry-fly school has fastened chuck and 
chance it on the other fellows for ever, and no¬ 
body pays any attention to their answering 
creeping and crawling beyond stamping it 
vulgar and jealous abuse. 
This cheap sneer at the wet-fly man has 
proved so successful that he himself has come 
to believe that it is true. He forgets that his 
knowledge of the trout’s habits is infinitely 
larger than that of his self-constituted superior. 
He forgets that if the two of them (grant me 
two fishermen of a sort of hypothetical mathe¬ 
matically abstract character, each knowing noth¬ 
ing of his rival’s method) are placed on the 
bank of an unknown fast stream, that knowl¬ 
edge will enable him to give the dry-fly man 
first fishing over every pool and run, and that, 
after the dry-fly man has laboriously and vainly- 
flogged every inch of water, he (the wet-fly¬ 
man) can come along and take a brace or more 
in a dozen casts, placed deftly in the twelve 
spots where, from the condition of the water, 
the state of the weather, the season of the year, 
and a hundred other things about which the 
dry-fly man knows nothing at all, he suspects 
the good fish are lying. He forgets similarly 
that, placed on the bank of an unknown chalk 
stream, he and the dry-fly man are in this re¬ 
spect reduced to an equality that a rise break¬ 
ing the surface of the water speaks to both of 
them with the same sound, and that a fish lying 
in midstream is equally visible to both of them. 
He does not realize that a knowledge of the 
fishes’ habits is (I speak comparatively) prac¬ 
tically no part of a dry angler’s equipment. 
The mere fact on a chalk stream he can jettison 
the best part of the lore which it has taken him 
many years to acquire, without doing his 
chances of sport any harm whatever, should 
cause him to think better of himself. But he 
does not know this. Again, he does not realize 
that the dry-fly man owes half his vaunted ac¬ 
curacy of casting to the rodmaker and the line 
spinner, and that in this particular also they 
are pretty much on a level (it is understood 
again that I speak of the skilful of both 
schools). He does not realize that to be the 
dry-fly man’s equal, if not superior, he has only 
to buy a certain kind of apparatus, to learn not 
to work his fly, to avoid drag, to pull in his 
slack, and to distinguish between a number of 
unfamiliar artificial patterns—all matters, surely, 
within his competence. 
No; he accepts the estimate which the world, 
taught by the dry-fly man, has formed of his at¬ 
tainments, and, until he has tried a chalk stream 
for himself, imagines that he might as well fish 
in his mother’s pail as in the Test. He is all 
wrong, and here is an incident to encourage 
him. 
In the early part of this century a man, whom 
I will call MacArthur, came upon me out of the 
East, demanding a chalk stream and instruction 
in the dry-fly business. As he made it clearly 
understood that he was to pay for the chalk 
stream, I undertook to introduce him to a water 
which I had fished during the three previous 
seasons, and, because I was poor, had given up. 
My anxiety to return to that water, plus the 
deep affection I had for MacArthur, blinded me 
to the second part of his demand. In the 
course of a few posts MacArthur was the better 
by a rod for the season and I by twelve guest’s 
tickets. During those early days, while we 
waited for May to come around, MacArthur’s 
confidence in and reverence for my knowledge 
and skill were highly gratifying. He had never 
used a dry-fly, and though he has not his equal 
as a wet-fly fisherman, he was filled with that 
fear of the chalk stream, and that humbleness of 
spirit of which I have spoken. He looked upon 
those who do their business in clear waters as 
belonging to an order of beings higher alto¬ 
gether than his own. He abased himself before 
me as an initiate-designate of some esoteric cult 
might abase himself before its Grand Lama. 
He received my lightest word on dry-fly angling 
as if it were a revelation, and permitted me to 
spend many pounds of his money on the pur¬ 
chase of a valuable rod, reel, line, and other 
things without a word of complaint. He said 
that if he were permitted by Heaven’s help and 
mine to slay one trout out of that river before 
he returned into the Orient, he would die bless¬ 
ing my name. 
Nothing that I could say would persuade him 
that chalk-stream fishing is pure skittles com¬ 
pared with that he was accustomed to find in a 
tiny-shrouded brook near Midlnirst (a place in 
which he could catch trout all day long while I 
should have spent my time cutting down trees). 
Nor could I get him to understand that, easy 
though it might be, I am extremely unhandy at 
it. He said that I only talked like that to en¬ 
courage him, whereas I was really trying to 
encourage myself. For I had discovered that 
I possessed a reputation to which nobody could 
possibly live up, and as the day approached 
when I should have to “show him how to do it” 
at the expense of those fish under whose con¬ 
tempt I had writhed three summers long, I 
wondered sometimes if I had not better per¬ 
haps break my right arm in two places, and so 
preserve to MacArthur the last ideal that he 
was ever likely to cherish. 
At length the first day of May dawned, and 
my right arm was still, as much as it ever had 
been, at my service. I made, as the newspapers 
relate of the condemned, a hearty breakfast of 
sausages and bacon, and smoked a cigarette, 
while MacArthur greased his line for the third 
