Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III A NOT UNEQUAL CONTEST The roughly outlined picture in the last chapter of an angler killing the first trout of the day, will serve to show that the capture of a fish by the Dry Fly method is quite a little history in itself. The trout had to be first of all discovered, then stalked, exactly located, and finally lured to his doom by the well-delivered first cast of a single dry, floating, and "cocked" imitation of the natural fly attached to the finest of gut. In this instance everything went right. The precise position of the fish was correctly ascertained, and the stalk, though needing care and the use of knees as well as hands, simple enough to an accomplished angler. Then the fish was evidently fairly on the rise; not taking a fly casually, and then for the next ten minutes leaving half-a-dozen other ones to float over his nose untouched. There was no hostile current to cause a "drag"; no difficult wind to drown thefly, or prevent its being neatly presented to the trout; whilst, to cap it all, the trout took well and was securely hooked. If everything always, or even often, went so well, the trout would stand but a very poor chance against the cunning angler. Fortunately for the fish, and in our opinion for the angler too—though one is not wont to look on the matter in this philosophical spirit at the moment of failure—it is not so. Indeed, it is on the whole no unequal contest between trout and man, and in the case of big wary old fish in awkward places the odds are all against the rod, however skilled the hand that drives it. There are multitudinous little agencies in Dry Fly fishing constantly militating against the angler, which help to make the sport such an absorbing, fascinating one. Dry Fly fishing, like the game of chess, becomes more and more engross...