Having sufficiently indulged in admiring this host of trout (the like of which I had never seen before), I began the war. Dropping my ‘sensation-fly’ into the little stream, I let it sink and drift into the pool. Twenty open mouths rushed at it ravenously, and trout after trout was rapidly landed on the shingle. I continued this scheme until a heap of magnificent fish were piled at my side, and the pool was rapidly thinning. One crafty old fellow, however, that looked about three pounds in weight, defied all my efforts to tempt him. I let the fly drift over him, under his nose, above his nose; but he scorned it, and, if he could, I felt he would have winked his eye derisively at me.
To have him I was determined: so sitting down, I scooped out the eye of a fish, and put it on the point of the flyhook, then let it drift down the stream and into the pool; steadily it neared his nose, and in breathless expectation I awaited the result. He was evidently uneasy, and knew not what to do. It floated past him, and I thought my bait had failed; when round he turned, and dashing viciously at it, seized (pardon the joke) the hook and eye, and I had him fast. Being far too heavy to risk jerking, I let him get over his furious fit, then towed him ashore hand over hand gathering up my line, I got close to him, and seizing him behind the gills, brought him upon the shingle; and a beauty he was!
I have tried various expedients—more as experiments than anything else—to find out what bait these trout really preferred. Grasshoppers they took readily, and I have often caught a trout when only one leg of the insect remained on the hook; the white meat from the tail of the river crayfish is also a very favourite diet. Earth-worms I could not try, because they do not exist in British Columbia. But all my trials and experiments failed signally in discovering anything that could at all compare with my ‘first fly.’
The trout spawn about October, or perhaps a little later, depositing their ova in gravel in the lesser streams.
SALMON TROUT.—_Salmo spectabilis_ (Red-spotted Salmon Trout), Grd. Proc. Acad., Nat. Soc. Phild., viii. 218.—_Sp. Ch._: Head a trifle more than a fourth of the total length; maxillary extending to a vertical line drawn posterior to the orbit. Colour of the back dark-greenish, inclining to grey, a lighter shade of the same colour on the sides—beneath silvery-white; thickly marked above the lateral line with yellowish spots, interspersed with others that are bright red.