Democratic Sentinel, Volume 13, Number 20, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 7 June 1889 — A Canadian Game Fish. [ARTICLE]

A Canadian Game Fish.

In appearance a fresh-run salmon and a fresh-run winanishe do not differ much more than salmon from different rivers. The back of a winanishe is greener blue, and in a fish just out of water can be seen to be marked with olive spots, something like the vermiculations on a trout; the silvery sides are more iridescent, the X-marks are more numerous and less sharply defined; the patches of bronze, purple, and green on the gill-covers are larger and more brilliant, and with them are several large round black spots. As the water grows warm the bright hues get dull, and toward autumn the rusty red color and hooked lower jaw of the spawning salmon develop. As the winanishe, unlike the salrron, feeds continuously, and in much heavier and swifter w ater than salmon lie in, it has a slimmer body and larger fins, so that a five-pound winanishe can leap higher and oftener than a grilse and fight like a tenpound salmgn. The variety of its habits, which are a compound of those of the trout and those of the salmon, with some peculiarities of its own, gives great charm to winanishe-angling, and opportunity for every style, from the “floating fly” on tiny hooks to the “sink and draw ” of the salmon cast. It takes the fly readily when in the humor, though wary and capricious like all its relations, and fights hard, uniting the dash of the trout with the doggedness and ingenuity of the salmon. In railway aud hotel prospectuses the winanishe weighs from five to fourteen pounds. In Lake St. John and the Decharge the average is two and a half; four-pounders are large and not too plentiful, while six-pounders are scarce.—Dr. Leroy M. Yale and J. G. Aylwyn Creighton, in Scribner's.