I cannot try
for these for I have neither battery, guides, nor camp equipment.

At Tagaung, stopping-place for the ruby mines, we tie up for the
night--a charmingly wooded country.

In "Wild Sports of Burmah and Assam," by Col. Pollock and W. S. Thom,
published in 1900, you read that "some of the best big game shooting in
the world, with the least possible trouble and expenditure, can be had
in Upper Burmah," and this is the place to set out for it--from
Mandalay, some seventy-seven miles. Mercifully, I did not read this till
after we had left Burmah, or I'd have felt frightfully unhappy passing
it all. Even now, as I read their descriptions, I feel vexed, to a
degree, that I did not know more about the possibilities of sport in
Upper Burmah before starting North. The above book must be invaluable to
any keen sportsman who goes to Burmah; but keen he must be, and prepared
to _hunt_ for his quarry; game is not driven up to him, the jungle is
too dense.

I will now proceed to write about fish. As the sun set they were rising
beside us, making rings in the golden flood, and the reflected woods of
the far side of the river, so I put on a Loch Leven fly cast, and got a
beauty right away, of about one pound; a shimmering, silvery fish,
between a sea-trout and a whiting as to colour, and I missed other
rises. A Woods and Forests' man on board told me he had recently caught
a similar fish on a small fly rod; it weighed five pounds and leapt like
a sea-trout, but no one apparently knows much about the possibilities of
fishing here with rod and modern tackle. We then got a hand-line and a
cod-hook from the engineer, and baited with squeezed bread, the size of
a pigeon's egg, and fished on the bottom, and almost at once had on a
heavy fish. It pulled tremendously and got a lot of line out, and
wandered up and down the middle of the river; on a salmon rod it would
have played long and heavily. We got it hand over hand alongside, aft
the paddle-box, and a Burman in a canoe hitched a noose over its tail,
and we hoisted it on board. I couldn't see the beast very clearly, as it
was growing dusk, and all hands crowded round us to give advice. It
looked rather like a cod, and weighed thirty-five lbs. I'd have guessed
it to be eighteen lbs., but its weight was quite out of proportion to
its measurements. Shortly after we got another--twenty lbs. They have
red firm flesh, and to eat are like sturgeon, they say. The sporting
silvery fish