Dog Days
Everyone who has fished regularly knows the dead days of July and August when trout go off their food, or to be correct, when they, will no longer rise to the fly with the eager-' ness they displayed in April and May. The water is often tepid and the air heavy. If there is a rise, it never happens while one is at the water. If one is on a lake, conditions of this sort make an afternoon seem endless, an evening full of hungry midges and the trudge home longer and harder than it ever was before. The. answer to it all is to stay at home, but a disease like fly-fishing keeps a man restless. The half-hearted excuse of going ' just to wet a line' in March comes out again. There is always the faint hope that in that tepid water, in the lee of a boulder in some corner beneath a frowning cliff, a monster trout that has lost his wits will rise and take the fly, running with it halfway across the quiet lake and coming to the net at.length, a hook-jawed old campaigner who has lived to outwit less hopeful anglers, such as those who sit smoking at home, waiting for September and the cooler air that brings life to the water,
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