; and his Honour
did nothing but grunt. From his point of view he could neither deny nor
affirm this safely, and so our interview came to an end.
TROUT FISHING IN BRITISH COLUMBIA AND CALIFORNIA
At that time I acknowledge that trout-fishing as a real art I knew
nothing of; whipping English waters had been almost entirely denied me,
and with the exception of a week on a river near Oswestry, and a day in
Cornwall, I had never thrown a fly over a pool where a trout might
reasonably be supposed to exist. But in British Columbia I used to catch
them in quantities and with an ease unknown to Englishmen. I am told (by
an expert) that using a grasshopper as a bait is no better than
poaching, and that I might as well take to the nefarious "white line,"
or _Cocculus indicus_. That may be so according to the deeper ethics of
the sport, but I am inclined to think many men would have no desire to
fish at all after going through the preliminary task of filling a small
tin can with those lively insects.
Owing to the fact that I was working for my living on a ranch at Cherry
Creek, I had no chance of fishing on week-days, but on Sundays, after
breakfast, I used to take my primitive willow rod from the roof, where
it had been for six days, see that the ten or twelve feet of string was
as sound at least as my frayed yard of gut, examine my hook, and then
start hunting grasshoppers. That meant a deal of violent exercise,
especially if the wind was blowing, for they fly down it or are driven
down it with sufficient velocity to make a man run. Moreover, near the
ranche they were mostly of a very surprising alertness, owing,
doubtless, to the fact that the fowls, in their eagerness to support
Darwin's theory of natural selection, soon picked up the slow and lazy
ones. But after an hour's hard work I usually got some fifty or so, and
that would last for a whole day, or at anyrate for a whole afternoon.
Then I went to the creek, fishing up it and down it with a democratic
disregard of authority.
Cherry Creek was only a small stream; here and there it rattled over
rocks, and stayed in a deep pool. Now and again it ran as fast as the
water in a narrow flume; and then the banks grew canyon-like for fifty
yards. But for almost the whole of its length it went through dense
brush, so dense in parts that it defied anyone but a bear to get through
it. But when I did reach a secluded pool and manage to thrust my rod out
over the water a
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