To be sure, every fisherman who prides himself on the distance he can cast, and who owns a splendid outfit, will despise the spirit of that French Canadian's speech; yet up in that country many a scientific angler has endured a failure of "bites" for a long and weary time, while his guide was hauling in fish a-plenty, and has come to question "science" for the nonce, and follow the Indian custom. For gray trout (the namaycush, or lake trout) they bait with apparently anything edible that is handiest, preferring pork, rabbit, partridge, the meat of the trout itself, or of the sucker; and the last they take first, if possible. The suckers, by-the-way, are all too plenty, and as full of bones as any old-time frigate ever was with timbers. You may see the Indians eating them and discarding the bones at the same time; and they make the process resemble the action of a hay-cutter when the grass is going in long at one side, and coming out short, but in equal quantities, at the other. The namaycush of Nepigon weigh from nine to twenty-five pounds. The natives take a big hook and bait it, and then run the point into a piece of shiny, newly-scraped lead. They never "play" their bites, but give them a tight line and steady pull. These fish make a game struggle, leaping and diving and thrashing the water until the gaff ends the struggle. In winter there is as good sport with the namaycush, and it is managed peculiarly. The Indians cut into the ice over deep water, making holes at least eighteen inches in diameter. Across the hole they lay a stick, so that when they pull up a trout the line will run along the stick, and the fish will hit that obstruction instead of the resistant ice. If a fish struck the ice the chances are nine to one that it would tear off the hook. Having baited a hook with pork, and stuck the customary bit of lead upon it, they sound for bottom, and then measure the line so that it will reach to about a foot and a half above soundings--that is to say, off bottom. Then they begin fishing, and their plan is (it is the same all over the Canadian wilderness) to keep jerking the line up with a single, quick sudden bob at frequent intervals.