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My friend Ponsonby Smith, who is one of the oldest fly-fishers in the three kingdoms, said to me once: Take my word for it, there are only four true salmo; the salar, the trutta, the fario, the ferox; all the rest are just varieties, subgenuses of the above; stick to that. Some writing fellow divided all the women into good-uns and bad-uns.
I think Salmo Salar has very greatly over-estimated the quantity of Salmon fry that go down to the sea from the rivers. He speaks of them going down by millions.
There was one that looked like a black bass, and others like white perch and sunfish; and one kind was very much like a grayling. But they were not really of the salmo family, I knew, for none of them had the soft fin in front of the tail.
What says the poet? There's an accommodating fish, In pool or stream, by rock or pot, Who rises frequent as you wish, At "Popham," "Parson," or "Jock Scott," Or almost any fly you've got In all the furred and feathered clans. You strike, but ah, you strike him not He is the Salmo irritans!
Closely allied to Salmo salar both in appearance and habits is the genus Oncorhynchus, commonly known as Pacific salmon. It contains six species, is peculiar to the North Pacific Ocean, and is of some importance to the angler, though of not nearly so much as the Atlantic salmon. The quinnat is the largest member of the genus, closely resembles salar in appearance and surpasses him in size.
Under the black, shattered peaks of Ben Laoghal, where I saw an eagle poising day after day as if some invisible centripetal force bound him forever to that small circle of air, there was a loch with plenty of brown trout and a few salmo ferox; and down at Tongue there was a little river where the sea-trout sometimes come up with the tide.
I fear that very few of the five millions which Salmo Salar says are deposited in the Hodder will be left to grow into Salmon. In addition to these, ducks, both wild and tame, eat them greedily. When Ramsbottom was in Galway he saw that the tame ducks frequented the spawning ford, and the superintendent bought one, and found its crop quite full of Salmon roe.
They have cost us no end of casts and flies already this season, not yet a month old. Experience proves, however, that ordinary salmo fario, or common brook trout, are the best for turning down; for the Loch Leven trout require deep water to grow to any size. When a boy, I made a strange recovery of an eel that I had hooked and lost three weeks before.
The Salmon Par is neither a Hybrid nor a distinct species of the genus Salmo, but a state of the common Salmon. Some conjecture that it is a Hybrid between the Salmon and Trout, because it is only found in rivers which are frequented by Salmon.
I allude more particularly to the Capelin or Salmo arcticus which we found in large shoals in Bathurst's Inlet and which not only abounds, as Augustus told us, in the bays in his country, but swarms in the Greenland firths.* The portion of the sea over which we passed is navigable for vessels of any size; the ice we met, particularly after quitting Detention Harbour, would not have arrested a strong boat.
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