It consists of a very long, cheap rod, stout enough to smash through
bushes, and with the stiffest tip obtainable. The lower end of the
butt, below the reel, fits into the socket of a huge extra butt of
bamboo, which R. carries unconcernedly. To reach a distant hole, or to
fish the lower end of a ripple, R. simply locks his reel, slips on the
extra butt, and there is a fourteen-foot rod ready for action. He
fishes with a line unbelievably short, and a Kendal hook far too big;
and when a trout jumps for that hook, R. wastes no time in manoeuvring
for position. The unlucky fish is simply "derricked,"--to borrow a word
from Theodore, most saturnine and profane of Moosehead guides.

"Shall I play him awhile?" shouted an excited sportsman to Theodore,
after hooking his first big trout.

"----no!" growled Theodore in disgust. "Just derrick him right into the
canoe!" A heroic method, surely; though it once cost me the best
square-tail I ever hooked, for Theodore had forgotten the landing-net,
and the gut broke in his fingers as he tried to swing the fish aboard.
But with these lively quarter-pounders of the Taylor Brook, derricking
is a safer procedure. Indeed, I have sat dejectedly on the far end of a
log, after fishing the hole under it in vain, and seen the mighty R.
wade downstream close behind me, adjust that comical extra butt, and
jerk a couple of half-pound trout from under the very log on which I
was sitting. His device on this occasion, as I well remember, was to
pass his hook but once through the middle of a big worm, let the worm
sink to the bottom, and crawl along it at his leisure. The trout could
not resist.

Once, and once only, have I come near equaling R.'s record, and the way
he beat me then is the justification for a whole philosophy of