
Nov. 2, 1907.] 

[he Vagaries of Trout and the 
Vicissitudes of the Angler. 
itor Forest and Stream: 
tvery angler of any experience has learned 
it his success or failure with trout is fre- 
lently determined by factors outside of his 
In skill, efforts or knowledge of the fish. He 
; gone fishing when wind and water were ap- 
‘ently in his favor, has worked faithfully from 
‘ly morn till starry eve, has exhausted all the 
lources of his knowledge and skill, and has 
vaked home with such a small basket of fish 
lit he has run the risk of losing the respect of 
; wife and neighbors. Again he has gone 
en the signs were apparently against him, and 
ithout any great effort has loaded his basket 
lth trout and marched home to receive the 
irises of his family and friends and the plaudits 
| the local press. True, in fishing, as in all 
her sports, patience, perseverance, fortitude, 
lergy, a knowledge of the game, and the skill 
|play it win in the long run. But it is of those 
casions when the most expert angler finds 
his hard-earned fishing lore at fault that I 
sh particularly to speak. 
There are times when the trout seem to play 
th the angler, actually to have sport at, his 
lpense. How well 1 remember such a time! 
te one evening in early June I fished a mile 
mountain water in which, with even fair luck, 
would have caught two dozen trout and in 
hich I did not catch one. In every quiet 
tle pool two or three good trout rose one 
-er another, nipped my fly, and dropped back. 
lccasionally a trout so far forgot itself as to 
ild the fly a fraction of a second too long, and 
got slightly scratched, but none made the 
listake of taking the fly inside the mouth and 
inning the risk of being hooked fairly. If it 
sre not that hope springs eternal in the angler’s 
‘east, I should have given up after fishing the 
ist half mile; but, as it was, I pursued the task 
| the bitter end, always repeating the same 
irmula of a cast, a rise, a miss. Finally, it 
gan to work on my nerves and I imagined I 
muld see the larger trout smile at me as they 
rned to depart. My strikes became vicious, 
d if by any chance I had hooked and landed a 
lout, I might have slammed it on the stones or 
irown it against a tree. In other streams and 
ider other conditions I have duplicated this 
\yperience until I have been forced to the con- 
jusion that there are days when the trout turn 
é tables and make game of the angler. 
|The bait fisherman occasionally, although 
jay be not so frequently, has the same thing 
ippen to him. ‘The trout will not “hold on,” 
he expresses it. I recall a beautiful day in 
irly spring that I had set aside to fish with 
innow some fine water of a large stream that 
knew to be in perfect condition. I started in 
ith high hopes; but when the first and the 
‘cond trout bit and let go, I began to have 
yme misgivings; and when the third, fourth 
id fifth trout played me the same trick, my 
subt became a certainty. Finally a trout bit 
id did a somewhat unusual thing. It came 
rectly toward me and settled down on the 
ottom not more than four feet away. The 
ater was very clear, and by keeping absolutely 
totionless, I was able to see that the trout, 
hich was fully fifteen inches long, was holding 
le minnow crosswise in its mouth. It made no 
‘tempt to swallow the bait, but after retaining 
a minute or more, deposited it on the bot- 
m and leisurely swam away. Can it be pos- 
ble that this trout intended to tell me that the 
ame was off for the day? 
The Old Angler occasionally meets this diffi- 
alty and makes a tolerable score by attaching 
n extra hook of small size near the tail of the 
linnow in such a manner as to spring a sur- 
rise on the playful trout. But this has always 
2emed to me to be taking an unfair advantage 
f an adversary that at best can have only its 
ccasional day of sport. 
Sometimes, instead of playing with the angler, 
ie trout affects an air of disdain for him and his 
tiles that is particularly exasperating. Once 
t middle June after an especially trying day dur- 
ig which I had caught only a few small trout 


I came near dusk to a large round pool below 
an old pole dam in which a lot of fine trout 
were rising for a gray stone fly. I could watch 
the fly so perfectly and the trout seemed to be 
feeding so greedily that I began at once to plan 
an imposing entry into town with my fish. 
The continual splashing and flopping of the big 
trout on the surface of the pool so excited me 
that I could hardly rig my cast properly. But, 
to make a long and painful story short, the only 
trout that struck a fly for me was one that rolled 
on my dropper while slapping at a real fly. 
At another time near mid-day under a bright 
sun I saw some large trout begin to rise in a 
wide shallow riffle. The water appeared to be 
full of them, and every half minute the broad 
back or the round, red side of a lusty trout was 
displayed on the surface of the current. My 
companion was an expert angler who used the 
most delicate tackle in the most skilful manner. 
He was also a persistent angler and would not 
believe that where trout were feeding in such 
numbers he could not catch some of them. But 
at the end of an hour the trout were still rising 
and the fishermen were down and out. Nota 
trout had been caught—not one even hooked. 
Now, the water was quite clear, the sun very 
bright, and the trout in the shallow water lay 
so near the surface that it is very likely that 
the dryest fly on the finest leader could easily 
be distinguished from the real fly. But what 
explanation is there for the occurrence ar the 
pole dam where the water was deep and not 
clear, where the light was so dim that the bushes 
and trees three rods away appeared only as a 
dark green mass, and where the trout were so 
eager to feed that they frequently rose within 
a yard of my feet. Pure malevolence on the 
part of the fish seems to me the only reason- 
able explanation. 
Occasionally trout will experience a change 
of heart, and after a period of indifference, grow 
quite friendly and familiar. One of my favorite 
fishing places is the head of very long placid 
pool that has an average depth of four feet and 
a uniform width of nearly a hundred feet. To 
enter the head of this pool on a warm, foggy 
morning when the trout are feeding and to fish 
down the quiet and almost smooth current that 
can be traced for a hundred yards before it loses 
itself in the still water of the pool is to spend an 
hour of unalloyed bliss. I had planned to fish 
this place early one morning, but was belated 
and came to it after the sun was several hours 
high. The fish were still feeding, however, and 
after selecting a cast of flies that I knew to be 
all right I began work. There were at least 
twenty-five large trout scattered up and down 
the head of the pool, each of which rose every 
two or three minutes in the same place so as 
to be easily located. Not one of these trout 
would touch my flies until I had gone over all 
of them faithfully once. But when I began my 
second trip, wading down along the edge of the 
current and casting so that the stream swept my 
flies down and diagonally across below me, they 
began to take notice, and the operation was re- 
duced to a cast, a rise, a strike, and then an ex- 
citing fight with a heavy, strong trout. And 
with what a thud they struck the fly! Nothing 
could have loosened them, and I landed every 
one I hooked. The tenth trout, the largest of 
all, was rising below a little swell, made, evi- 
dently, by a large boulder in the bed of the 
stream. I waded in a little above it, so that 
I might have the help of the current in hook- 
ing the trout. At my second cast it struck with 
a vengeance, and when hooked, it leaped from 
the water like a bass and kept me guessing for 
several minutes before I was able to slide it out 
on a little bar. The trout remaining were still 
rising, but I decided that it was not wise to 
push my luck too far; better stop and spend 
some time looking over and admiring the fish 
that were caught. 
An angler who lived in a country drained by 
trout streams once told me that when trout 
were lying in some place in numbers,,as they 
sometimes lie around a spring or the mouth of 
a mountain brook, and would not rise to a fly, 
they might show an entirely different disposition 
as soon as there was a change in the water. 
Before long I had an opportunity to prove his 

7Ol 
statement correct. Near my camp I discovered 
a small school of trout lying in the shade of a 
big hemlock around a spring just in the edge 
of the creek. I could not coax these trout to 
notice my flies until after a small freshet, when 
they rose so briskly that I could have caught 
the last one, had I been in need of fish. At an- 
other time a team crossing a stream above me 
started a school of trout to rising for my flies 
where I had been fishing several hours with 
no success. A young man of my acquaintance 
who went to fish, at a dollar an hour, a pre- 
served pond full of educated trout, found that by 
stirring up the mud in the little river that 
entered the head of the pond he could easily 
get the worth of his money. The old farmer 
who owned the pond, and who had had much 
fun at the expense of the city anglers, was horri- 
fied at the size of the catch. 
All anglers know what a tremendous ad- 
vantage a knowledge of the stream gives to its 
possessor; trout cannot always be found in that 
part of the stream where we have every reason 
to think they ought to be. A native fisherman 
always fished the shallow water off to the side 
of a certain riffle, where I always expected to 
find the trout in or near the swift current. But 
since he caught trout at this place, while I did 
not, I concluded that his practice was worth 
more than my theory and followed suit, with 
most satisfactory results. Another local fisher- 
man used to fish the middle of a broad riffle 
shallow that I could not see where trout 
could hide in it, but on investigating, I found 
that there was just a slight depression in the 
bottom of the creek at this point, and that this 
little piece of quiet water in the midst of rapids 
usually contained five or six nice trout. The 
stream was so broad at this place for the long 
cast that was necessary, and the trout rose to 
my flies in the shallow water with such prompt- 
ness, that there was always special pleasure in 
fishing it. The Old Angler used to mystify me 
by fishing carefully certain apparently unlikely 
places. He could always be counted on to fish 
diagonally across the pool above a large mill 
dam; but when, during an extremely low stage 
of water, I discovered that a ledge of rocks 
formed the bottom at this place, and that some 
large trout usually lay just under this ledge, 
this mystery was made clear. Once when he 
had given more than ordinary time to an un- 
likely piece of water, I went back and found 
that a large log partly buried in the bed of the 
stream made a fine harbor for two or three 
trout. 
so 
Sometimes I would detect him weighting 
his line heavily, and then I knew that the pool 
was very deep and the trout on the bottom. It 
was his possession of this occult knowledge of 
the stream and its inhabitants that made him 
such a formidable antagonist. 
How the trout are affected by the color of 
the water, phases of the moon, direction of the 
wind, etc., are questions that, for the welfare of 
the trout and in the interests of the angler, 
ought not to be too definitely settled. A stream 
that I occasionally fish is sometimes made 
brown by rains in the swamps in which it heads. 
When in this condition it furnishes very poor 
fishing. On the other hand, a smaller stream 
that I know is at its best for the angler when 
somewhat discolored. As for the phases of the 
moon, when younger and wiser, I felt that they 
affected the fishing about as much as they 
affected the growth of the pumpkin vine or the 
way in which shingle nails stay in the roof; but 
now, I am not so set in my opinion. One spring 
a friend asked me to delay our fishing trip 
until the moon changed. I laughed at him, 
went off alone, and caught nothing. Ten days 
later he went, and with the same sort of weather 
and the same stage of water, made a fine catch. 
Maybe in the light of the moon the fish feed 
too well at night to feed much during the day. 
And, as for wind, after thirty years of trout 
fishing, I am unable to prove or disprove the 
old rhyme of Izaak Walton’s time: 
“When the wind is south 
It bloweth your bait into a fish’s mouth,” etc. 
However, is not the uncertainty one of the 
pleasures of trout fishing? Who would care to 
go if he knew in the morning just how many 


























































































