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My rod and cap were drifting rapidly away; but, after divesting myself of half my dripping garments, I recovered the rod in a backwater below the neighbouring wood. All my line had been taken out, the gut collar had been snapped, and the fly had undoubtedly been carried off by the grilse.
They hold that the young salmon stay in the upper waters for a year, and go to sea about eighteen months after hatching; and it is not uncommon, I believe, for fishermen hereabouts to catch grilse weighing from two to four pounds. These bite sometimes at the fly. The salmon bite, too, when much smaller, for I caught one day a young salmon not more than six inches long.
A lively young grilse plunged headlong at the second fly and, thanks to my strong leader, I played him out in the current and led him listlessly, all the jump and fight gone out of him, to the foot of the cliff. There was no apparent way to get down; so, taking my line in hand, I began to lift him bodily up.
"If he goes quietly or goes gaffed like a grilse, it's all one on the street. Out-bye the place is hotching with the town-people. Do you think the MacNicolls could take a prisoner bye the Cross?" "It'll be cracked crowns on the causeway," said I. "Cracked crowns any way you take it," said he, "and better on the causeway than on Madame Brown's parlour floor.
The capture of a 4-lb. grilse in the Thames estuary in December, 1901, raised some hopes that we might in course of time see salmon at London Bridge. Mr. R. Marston, a great authority, in an article on "The Thames a Salmon River," in the Nineteenth Century, has given many reasons why he fears that this will not be realised.
Salmon do not now appear to be so numerous in Tweed as apparently they were eighty or a hundred years ago; it is said that in 1824, when the nets had been off the lower reaches of the river for the Sunday, sometimes as many as five hundred salmon and grilse would be taken at Kelso of a Monday morning by the net and coble. It is a prodigious haul of fish.
Here they are, twelve pounds, eight pounds, six pounds, five pounds and a half, FOUR POUNDS! Is not this the smallest salmon that you ever saw? Not a grilse, you understand, but a real salmon, of brightest silver, hall-marked with St. Andrew's cross. Now let us sit down for a moment and watch the fish trying to leap up the falls.
Over his shoulder he was saying to her: "Sea-trout and grilse don't belong to Isla, but they come occasionally, Lady Yellow-hair." "Like you and I, Kay we don't belong here but we come." "Where the McKay is, the Key of the World lies hidden in his sporran," he laughed back at her over his shoulder where the clan plaid fluttered above the cairngorm. "Oh, the modesty of this young man!
It seems to be the opinion of many, indeed of most persons, that the Salmon spawns from November to February, that the young fry, or Smolts, go down to the sea in the April or May following; my own opinion is that they stay in the river much longer. The Grilse is by many believed to be a distinct species, whilst others stoutly maintain that it is a young Salmon.
On another occasion, in early days when my ignorance of the river and of fishing sorely troubled both Ianto and myself, as I was wading down-stream along the edge of a pool a grilse rose, "head and tail," about twenty yards below my fly. Using my long gaff-handle as a staff, I walked slowly towards the fish, casting carefully all the way.
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