Page:Narrative of the Discoveries on the North Coast of America.djvu/382

352 at deer, we reached the Bloody Fall in the course of the night.

The following day was spent by the whole party in the unwonted amusement of angling. The setting-poles were converted into ponderous fishing-rods, and with hooks baited with pieces of fat meat, or fish, we succeeded in taking several Arctic or Hearne's salmon in the boiling eddies at the foot of the fall. This surprised me, for I had hardly ever heard, whilst pursuing this favourite sport at home, of the common salmon being captured with bait, except when out of season.

On the 28th we descended to the island lying just without the mouth of the Coppermine, where we halted until the 3rd of July, when the first slight opening in the ice took place. A single net, set in a narrow channel that a man might almost wade across, furnished more salmon than the whole party could consume. None of these fish exceeded twelve or fifteen pounds in weight, and the largest measured exactly three feet from the snout to the tip of the tail. They seemed to me not at all inferior in flavour to the salmon of our Scottish waters.

Ooligbuck and Sinclair went to the river to the eastward, where the latter saw Esquimaux last year. On the banks of a lake some distance beyond it they found eight tents, containing