And there are evenings on which the fish take greedily small transparent
ephemeræ. But, did you ever see large fish rise at these ephemeræ? And
even if you did, can you imitate the natural fly? And after all, would
it not be waste of time? For the experience of many good fishers is,
that trout rise at these delicate duns, black gnats, and other
microscopic trash, simply _faute de mieux_. They are hungry, as trout
are six days in the week, just at sunset. A supper they must have, and
they take what comes; but if you can give them anything better than the
minute fairy, compact of equal parts of glass and wind, which naturalists
call an Ephemera or Bætis, it will be most thankfully received, if there
be ripple enough on the water (which there seldom is on a fine evening)
to hide the line: and even though the water be still, take boldly your
caperer or your white moth (either of them ten times as large as what the
trout are rising at), hurl it boldly into a likely place, and let it lie
quiet and sink, not attempting to draw or work it; and if you do not
catch anything by that means, comfort yourself with the thought that
there are others who can.
And now to go through our list, beginning with—
1. The caperer.
This perhaps is the best of all flies; it is certainly the one which will
kill earliest and latest in the year; and though I would hardly go as far
as a friend of mine, who boasts of never fishing with anything else, I
believe it will, from March to October, take more trout, and possibly
more grayling, than any other fly. Its basis is the woodcock wing; red
hackle legs, which should be long and pale; and a thin mohair body, of
different shades of red-brown, from a dark claret to a pale sandy. It
may thus, tied of different sizes, do duty for half-a-dozen of the
commonest flies; for the early claret (red-brown of Ronalds; a Nemoura,
according to him), which is the first spring-fly; for the red spinner, or
perfect form of the March-brown ephemera; for the soldier, the
soft-winged reddish beetle which haunts the umbelliferous flowers, and
being as soft in spirit as in flesh, perpetually falls into the water,
and comes to grief therein; and last but not least, for the true
caperers, or whole tribe of Phryganidæ, of which a sketch was given just
now. As a copy of them, the body should be of a pale red brown, all but
sandy (but never snuff-coloured, as shop-girls often tie it), and its
best hour is always in the evening. It kills well when fish are gorged
with their morning meal of green drakes; and after the green drake is
off, it is almost the only fly at which large trout care to look; a fact
not to be wondered at when one considers that nearly two hundred species
of English Phryganidæ have been already described, and that at least half
of them are of the fawn-tint of the caperer. Under the title of
flame-brown, cinnamon, or red-hackle and rail’s wing, a similar fly kills
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