Part 16
Many an idle hour of the long winter evenings may be pleasantly passed by the angler in “going over” his tackle, oiling his reels, airing his lines, and re-arranging his flies, freeing them from the moth and rust that do corrupt. He is but a slovenly worshipper at the shrine of the good Saint Izaak, who casts aside his panoply after the last bout of autumn and gives no thought to it again till spring makes her annual jail-delivery of imprisoned life. Constant care of the belongings of his art, be he fly or bait fisher, is characteristic of the faithful angler, and only simple justice to the tackle maker. There is nothing sadder or more dejected-looking than a crippled rod and a neglected “kit” full of snarled lines, rusty hooks, and moth-eaten flies.
In the matter of winter angling, the fly-fisherman has a decided advantage over him who uses bait alone. The art for him has more side issues. He may, if he can, learn to tie flies or contrive and construct newfangled fly-books. The effort to learn will probably ruin his temper and break up his domestic relations if he has any, but it is not for me to say that “_le jeu ne vaut pas la chandelle_.” If no domestic ties trend him toward caution as yet, and he dreads none in the future, he may even venture the attempt to make his own rods.
Let me say a word here of amateur tackle-making from the standpoint of personal experience. It is agreeable—it is even fascinating, but it does not _pay_; very few have the mechanical deftness, the patience, taste, and judgment combined to really excel in any of its branches. No young man with a career to make for himself by dint of constant toil or close application to a business or profession has any right to devote to these arts the time and attention they demand if even a fair degree of skill is to be attained. For the angler of “elegant leisure” this has no weight perhaps, but he too will, as a rule, find better tackle than he can make, readily at his command at a cost so inconsiderable as to quite justify me in saying that his amateur work will not _pay_—for, if he be young, out-of-door sports will far better serve to lay up in his still developing frame the treasures of health and vitality for future use. There are those, indeed, for whom it is a proper employment of time and who are endowed with the peculiar faculties required. To such it is a charming occupation, a delightful distraction, and a choice factor in the enjoyment of the winter angler by the fireside.
Every angler ought to keep a record or diary of his angling bouts. Most anglers do so, I think. Therein should be recorded not only the weight and size of daily catch, the number saved, and the number _thrown back_, (I look back with especial pride upon my record in this direction), but also some jottings of scenes, impressions, and incidents. Reading therefrom years after at the fireside he will detect a faint perfume of old forests in the winter air, and hear again in fancy the swirl of swift waters sweeping among mossy rocks.
I take up my own, quoting from it almost at random note, if you please, how, in untamed words, have expressed themselves the exhilaration of the stream—the tingling of healthy blood through ample veins—the joy in nature’s aspects, and the delightful sense of unrestraint that comes only of fresh air, of wholesome exercise, of angling.
“May 20th.— * * * The streams hereabout lack two important elements which are the charm of my favorite —— kill, to wit, picturesqueness and the possibility of large trout—large, I mean, for our mountain brooks where still found _au naturel_. I went over the other day to Bright’s Run. I don’t know exactly where it is, and I consider it (next to Bright’s disease of the kidneys) the very worst thing Bright has developed. It is a stream such as might properly empty into the Dismal Swamp, and find itself quite at home there. It is totally devoid, of romantic beauty—and nearly so of trout. I never worked so hard in my life for twenty-two little ones, that put me to the blush as I put them in the basket. I was perpetually in a row with the overhanging thickets and the underlying logs, and my thoughts were a monologue of exclamation points. I would not angle in Bright’s turgid waters again for all the trout the most minute analysis might discover in them.
“Yesterday I had a much more agreeable day without a seven-mile ride on a pesky buck-board. I went quite alone, up the Buckhill as far as the Fall. This is a pleasant stream full of nature—and sawdust—with here and there a speckled trout and here and there a black snake. (By special permission of mr. Tennyson.) There really are now and then cool little nooks which make one envy the trout; and an occasional spring dripping with a fresh _rat-tat-tat_ over rocks and moss and into one’s whiskey in spite of all one can do. This sort of thing is what makes a trout-stream after all. You may catch a whale in a goose-pond but it isn’t angling. To me much depends upon surroundings. I like to form a picturesque part of a picturesque whole. Even when there is no audience in the gallery.
“Given, a dark glen fringed with pines that sigh and pine high up aloft—a pool whose sweep is deep, around which rocks in tiers, mossy as tombstones centuries old, bow their heads in mourning—heads crowned with weeds, and grave-mounds of mother earth, and pallid flowers, pale plants and sapless vines that struggle through shadows of a day in coma, laid in the hearse of night, without a proper permit, and I am happy. I don’t know just why, but if I meet an undertaker I mean to ask him. All these deep, dark hiding spots of nature seem but so many foils to the keen sense of life and thrills of vitality that fill me. My nervous system sparkles against such sombre backgrounds.
“Then, too, the Fall was lovely. Next to Niagara, the Kauterskill and Adams’, this Buckhill Fall is one of the most successful, in a small way, that I know of. It might be bigger and higher and have twenty-five cents worth more water coming over it out of a dam; but for a mere casual Fall gotten up inadvertently by nature, it is very good, in an amateurish sort of away, you know!
“There is, I believe (hang it, there _always_ is!) a romantic legend connected with—but stay!—you already guess it. Big Buck Indian—years ago—in love with mother-in-law—commits suicide—jumps over the ledge—ever since on moonlight nights, water the color of blood (probably tannery just above the Fall), Buck Kill, now corrupted into Buckhill. In the march of civilization the last _impedimenta_ to be left by the wayside are the beautiful superstitions of ignorance.
“I am now quite alone here. A young music composer, hitherto my companion, left yesterday, so I am handcuffed to nature in solitary confinement.
“By the way, my composer was a voluntary exile from the domestic arena. He had but recently married—to formulate it by proportions—say about a ton of mother-in-law to about an ounce of wife, and when the contest waxed fiercer than became the endurance of a sensitive nature, he packed his bag and came a-fishing. He was a capital angler—a phenomenal musician and had an appetite and digestion like one or more of the valiant trencher men of England’s merrie days, so he solaced his grief with Sonatas and buckwheat cakes in the mornings and tears and ginger-bread in the evenings. He was a born genius and as beautiful as a dream, so I advised him to go home, choke his m-in-l, kiss his wife and live happily all the days of his life. I think he has gone to try the plan.
“Speaking of buckwheat cakes, you can go out here most any time and catch a nice mess running about a half a pound and _game_ all the way through. No! No!
“I’m thinking of the trout! I mean they are light as a feather, and taste to me just as did those I never had half enough of when I was a lad with my good old Presbyterian grandmother, who would not ‘set’ the batter on Saturday night lest it should ‘work’ on the Sabbath.
“Just here I wish to record an event which has happened to me while yet each detail is fresh in my memory.
“The day had been showery, yet the fishing had been very poor, so I went at sunset to try my luck in the stream near the house, where are some fair pools and a semi-occasional trout.
“The darkness had begun to gather, indeed it was so dark that I knew only by the instinct of habit where my flies fell upon the water, for I could not fairly see them. I had just made a cast across a little rock which protruded somewhat above the surface into a small pool behind, and was slowly drawing my line toward me, when I perceived a frog seated upon the rock, watching the proceedings with some apparent anxiety. Hardly had I made out his frogship in the gloaming, when pop! he went into the water. ‘Kerchung!’ At this instant I felt a _strike_ and returned the compliment sharply, so as to set my hook well in and make sure of my trout. He was very _game_, and I was obliged to play him with a five and a half ounce rod for some time, but finally landed him in good form, only to discover that instead of a trout I had taken froggy on a black hackle fly, setting the hook firmly into the thin membrane which connects the two hind legs and just where the tail _ought_ to be. This left him the fullest freedom of action and gave him so good a chance to fight me that I never suspected him of being anything less than a half-pounder. He must have jumped from the rock directly on to the fly trailing behind it and been thus hooked by my ‘strike.’ Mem. —This story is true as gospel, but better not tell it where you enjoy an exceptional reputation for veracity.
“_July 19th._ * * * Nothing has happened! Nothing ever does happen here. Delightful existence, free from events! I remember hearing Homer Martin once say that it was the height of his artistic ambition to paint a picture without objects. The confounded objects, he said, always would get wrong and destroy his best effects. How far this was intended to be a humorous paradox and how far the suggestion of an artistic ideal, I know not, but I surely somewhere have seen a painting—from whose brush I cannot say—which quite nearly fulfilled this strange condition. It represented an horizon, where met a cloudless, moonless, starless summer sky and a waveless, almost motionless sea—these and an atmosphere. The effect was that one could hardly perceive where the sea ceased and the sky began. I wonder if it would not be thus with a life quite devoid of events—would one be able to distinguish such from Heaven?
“The charm of it is that it leaves both the physical and intellectual in one to develop freely. When a cow, grazing in a woodland pasture, comes at noonday to the brook to drink and then calmly and not without a certain ungainly majesty of movement, crosses the deep pool and climbs the steep hank on the other side, by no apparent motive urged save of her own sweet will, she always looks refreshed and filled in some sort with the stolid bovine expression of great contentment. Mark how different it all is when the same cow crosses the same brook driven by the barefooted urchin with a gad and shrill cries and a possible small dog in the background. How wearily and breathlessly she wades, and with what distressful pan tings she climbs, and how unhappy and enduring and long-suffering she appears, as you watch her shuffle away down the cow-path homeward! It’s the Must that hurts. It’s the barefooted urchin Necessity with his infernal gad Ambition and his ugly little cur dog Want, always chasing and shouting after one, that makes it so tiresome to cross the stream.
“Then, too, as to the mind. Shall not one gain better intellectual growth when beyond the reach of the imperial ukase of daily custom which fixes the mind upon and chains the tongue to some leading event of the passing hour?
“In swift and endless succession come foul murders, robberies, revolutions, sickening disasters, nameless crimes, and all the long list of events, and are as so many manacles upon the mind.
“I hate Events. They bore me. _All except taking a pound trout_.
“Alas! what a rent these last words make in the balloon I have been inflating! Logic (another troublesome nuisance, evolved, probably, at Hunter’s Point) forces me from the clouds to earth and insists that I shall accept a trite aphorism: ‘Little events fill little minds; great events for big ones.’
“Then if I take refuge in the cowardly device of saying I don’t want a big mind, what becomes of my theory of intellectual development as the outgrowth of an eventless life!
“I decline to follow out more in detail this or any other line of argument. One can’t argue in the face of such an event as the thermometer in the nineties away up here in the mountains.
“This chance allusion to logic reminds me that I have recently heard from a dear old angling friend. He writes incidentally that since his return to his active professional duties he has made money enough to pay many times over the expenses of his recent two weeks’ fishing bout with me. I have written him that he might find it well to start at once upon another trip. I have no doubt there exists a certain correlation of forces whereby a week’s fishing, with its resultant increase of oxygenation, and rebuilding of gray tissue, accurately represents a certain amount of possible mental labor and thus, indirectly, a fixed sum of money.
“It is then alarming to think how abnormally rich a man might become if he fished all the time.”
If I have thus quoted somewhat at length vaporings of other days from my note book it has been only to suggest to others, whose angling experiences are and have been wider and more varied than my own, how readily they can organize a “preserve” for winter angling. Believe me, no event, no feeling, no passing observation of your surroundings can be too trivial to record, and each written line will, in years to come, suggest a page of pleasant memories when as “Nessmuk” says—
“The Winter streams are frozen
And the Nor’west winds are out.”
“Mr. Webster’s sport of angling has given him many opportunities for composition, his famous address on Bunker Hill having been mostly planned out on Marshpee Brook; and it is said that the following exclamation was first heard by a couple of huge trout immediately on their being transferred to his fishing-basket, as it subsequently was heard at Bunker Hill by many thousands of his fellow-citizens: ‘Venerable men! you have come down to us from a former generation. Heaven has bounteously lengthened out your lives that you might behold this joyous day.’”—_Lan-man’s Life of Webster._
“How, I love fishing dearly. There is no sport like it for me, but there is a vast deal in fishing besides catching fish.”—_H. H. Thompson._
13. The Triumph.
14. Alexandra.
15. Seth Green.
16. Jungle Cock.
17. Fitz-Maurice.
18. Caddis.
19. Davis.
“When fish are basking during the mid-day hours in the hot summer months, they are not always to be drawn to the surface. But the combination more suitable for this method is the dressing known as the ‘Alexandra Fly.’”—_David Foster._
“The exertion of crossing the Atlantic for fly-fishing will be amply repaid the sportsman by the quantity and weight of the fish he will capture; for there the fish are not troubled with the fastidiousness of appetite which in Great Britain causes it always to be a source of doubt whether the water is in proper order, the wind in the east, or thunder overhead, either of which, or all combined, too frequently cause the most industrious to return, after a long and laborious day, with an empty basket.”—_Parser Gilmore._
“Of all places, commend me, in the still of the evening, to the long placid pool, shallow on one side, with deeper water and an abrupt overhanging bank opposite. Where the sun has shone all day, and legions of ephemera sported in its declining rays; the bloom of the rye or clover scenting the air from the adjoining field! Now light a fresh pipe, and put on a pale Ginger Hackle for your tail-fly, and a little white-winged Coachman for your dropper. Then wade in cautiously—move like a shadow—don’t make a ripple. Cast, slowly, long, light; let your stretcher sink a little. There, he has taken the Ginger—lead him around gently to the shallow side as you reel him in, but don’t move from your position—let him tug awhile, put your net under him, break his neck, and slip him into your creel. Draw your line through the rings—cast again; another and another—keep on until you can see only the ripple made by your fly; or know when it falls, by the slight tremor it imparts through the whole line down to your hand—until the whip-poor-will begins his evening song, and the little water-frog tweets in the grass close by not till then is it time to go home.”—_Thaddeus Norris_.
“You may always know a large trout when feeding in the evening. He rises continuously, or at small intervals—in a still water almost always in the same place, and makes little noise—barely elevating his mouth to suck in the fly, and sometimes showing his back-fin and tail. A large circle spreads around him, but there are seldom any bubbles when he breaks the water, which usually indicates the coarser fish.”—_Sir Humphry Davy_.
“It is not difficult to learn how to cast; but it is difficult to learn not to snap the fins off at every throw.”—_Charles Dudley Warner._
NOT ALL OF FISHING TO FISH
By A. Nelson Cheney.
“We cast our flies on many waters, where memories and fancies and facts rise, and we take them and show them to each other, and, small or large, we are content with our catch.”—_W. G. Prime_.
The commonly accepted definition of fly-fishing is the casting—with a light, strong, elastic, pliant rod—of two, three or four artificial flies, on a delicate leader attached to a fine tapered silk line over the surface of waters inhabited by the lordly, silver-coated salmon; that aristocratic beauty, the speckled trout, or the more sombre-colored but gamy black bass.
This, in truth, is called the acme of fishing, the highest degree attainable in the school of the angler. But of what a small portion, comparatively, of the pleasure of angling does the mere casting of the fly, however artistic, and the creeling of the fish, however large, consist.
If it were all of fishing to fish; if fish were only to be obtained in pools, in a desert waste that never reflected leaf or twig; from walled-in reservoirs, where fish are fattened like a bullock for the shambles; from sluggish, muddy streams within the hearing of great towns, redolent of odors that are bred and disseminated where humanity is massed between walls of brick and mortar, or even from a perfect fish preserve, where everything is artificial except the water; or if the beginning of fishing was making the first cast and the end the creeling of the last fish, would the gentle art under such conditions have been a theme for the poet’s pen, a subject for the artist’s brush, or a topic for the interesting story during the centuries that have passed since the first line was written, or the first words sung? I think not.
Fishing for the fish alone would not have inspired Dame Juliana Berners, Izaak Walton, Charles Cotton, Sir Humphry Davy, John Bunyan, Sir Walter Scott, “Christopher North,” and other and more modern writers to tell of the peace, the quiet, the health and the pleasure to be gained in the pursuit of this pastime.
The skill exercised and the delicate tackle used by a past master of the art would have been unnecessary to cultivate or fashion, solely to supply the brain with food through the alimentary canal.
An angler’s brain is fed by absorption as well as by assimilation.
There might be reason in calling a fisherman with an eye simply to the catching of fish, a “lover of cruel sport,” but the cruelty would be of the same kind, but in a less degree, as that displayed by the butcher who supplies our tables with beef and mutton.
To an angler the pleasures of the rod and reel are far-reaching and have no boundary save when the mind ceases to anticipate and the brain to remember. I have had the grandest sport on a midwinter’s night with the snow piled high outside and the north wind roaring down the chimney, while I sat with my feet to the blaze on the hearth, holding in my hand an old fly-book. The smoke from my lighted pipe, aided by imagination, contained rod, fish, creel, odorous balsam, drooping hemlock and purling brook or ruffled lake. I seemed to hear the twittering birds, leaves rustled by the wind and the music of running water, while the incense of wild flowers saluted my nostrils. The heat of the fire was but the warm rays of the sun and the crackle of the burning wood the noise of the forest. Thus streams that I have fished once or twice have been fished a score of times.
I had nothing to show for the later fishings, but I could feel that God was good and my memory unimpaired. The fish in the pipe-smoke has been as active as was the fish in the water, and afforded as fine play. My reel has clicked as merrily in the half-dream as on the rod in the long ago, and my rod has bent to the play of the fish as though it were in my hand instead of lying flat on a shelf in a cool room up-stairs. I have had in my musings all the pleasure of actual fishing, everything but the fish in the flesh.
When Winter comes and the ravages in tackle have been repaired and all is in perfect order for another season, I put my rods where they will not be injured by the modern furnace heat, each joint of each rod placed flat on a shelf. But the tackle trunk, securely locked that no vandal hand may get to its treasures, is where my eye rests upon it daily, and my fly books are in one of the drawers of my writing desk where I can easily reach them. ‘When I take one of the books out of an evening, or at any time during my walking hours in early winter, I generally seek out some tattered fly that is wrapped carefully in a paper and placed in one of its pockets. The book may be full of flies, sombre or gorgeous in all the freshness of untried silk, mohair, feathers and tinsel; but take for instance this one with the legend written on its wrapper:
“Puffer Pond, June, 1867.—Thirty-five pounds of trout in two hours. The last of the gentlemen that did the deed.”
This, to me, tells the story of a very pleasant week spent in the Adirondacks. I remember, as I hold the ragged, faded fly in my hand and see that it still retains something of the dark blue of its mohair body and the sheen of its cock-feather wings, that it was one of six flies that I had in my fly-book that June day that stands out from other June days, in my memory, like a Titan amongst pygmies. The fly had no name, but the trout liked it for all that, and rose to it with as much avidity as though they had been properly introduced to some real bug of which this was an excellent counterfeit.
That glorious two hours’ time—with its excitement of catching and landing without a net some of the most beautiful and gamy fish that ever moved fin—comes back to me as vividly as though at this moment the four walls of my room were the forest-circled shores of that far-away pond, and I stand in that leaky boat, almost ankle deep in the water that Frank, the guide, has no time to bail, occupied as he is in watching my casts and admiring my whip-like rod during the play of a fish, or fishes, and in turning the boat’s gunwale to the water’s edge to let my trout in when they are exhausted. It is sharp, quick work, and the blue-bodied fly is always first of all the flies composing the cast to get a rise, until I take off all but the one kind, and then one after another I see them torn, mutilated and destroyed. Later they will be put away as warriors gone to rest and the epitaph written on their wrappings:
“Thy work was well done; thy rest well earned.”