ndous creature caught with a
line no thicker than a lady's hair-pin! I looked at my watch: it was
eleven o'clock, just four hours and a half. "Well, I have done enough
for to-day, Joe: let us go home to breakfast." Arrived at the camp, we
weighed the salmon and measured him--twenty-four pounds, and forty
inches long--a male fish, fresh run from the sea, the strongest and most
active of his kind. It had been my luck to hook these big ones: I wished
that my first encounters should be with fish of ten or twelve pounds.
Rodman came in with two--fourteen and sixteen pounds.

That evening I went again to the same pool, and soon hooked another good
fish with the same fly; but though he was nearly as large as the first,
weighing twenty-two pounds, I killed him in thirty minutes. He fought
hard from the very first, running and vaulting by turns without any
stop, so that he soon tired himself out. Rodman got another this
evening, and Kingfisher brought seven from the Patapedia, and the
Colonel one. Thirteen is our score to-day.

_July 9._ Rodman and I went this morning to the Patapedia, but raised no
salmon. Either some one had been netting the pool that night, or
Kingfisher had killed all the fish yesterday. I got a grilse of four
pounds, which made a smart fight for fifteen minutes, and Rodman hooked
another, but lost him. That evening we went again to the pool, and I
killed a small but very active salmon of nine pounds, which fought me
nearly an hour: Rodman got a grilse of five pounds. Strange to say,
neither Kingfisher nor the Colonel killed a fish to-day, so that I was
for once "high line."

Having killed four salmon, I concluded to retire. I found the work too
hard, and determined to go to Dalhousie and try the sea-trout fishing in
that vicinity. So, after an hour's fly-fishing at the mouth of the brook
opposite our camp, in which I got a couple of dozen, hooking two at a
cast twice, and twice three at a cast, I started at seven o'clock on the
10th, and ran down with the current and paddles forty miles to Fraser's
in seven hours--the same distance which it took us two days and a half
to make going up stream.

Of all modes of traveling, to float down a swift river in a bark canoe
is the most agreeable; and when paddled by Indians the canoe is the
perfection of a vessel for smooth-water navigation. Where there are
three inches of water she can go--where there is none, a man can carry
her round the portage on his back. He