Part 6

The forests were just developing their autumnal hues, the air was fresh and bracing, and all nature seemed to conspire to make one realize that there was health in every breath inhaled, and beauty in every phase of land and water. Having secured a first-rate guide and boat, and partaken of a trout breakfast, which was relished immensely, such as can only be appreciated by one who has left the haunts of civilization and gone into the wilderness for recuperation, I considered my first duty was to pay my respects to Mr. Allerton, who was in camp at Bugle Cove. From this location Lake Mooselemeguntic lies spread out before you, while Mt. Washington in the distance rears its snowy peak, overtopping Jefferson, Monroe, and the other giants of the White Hills of New Hampshire.

The crystal waters of the lake tempt us to cast a fly, and a suitable place having been secured, we proceed to business. After making several casts in a manner more or less scientific but without success, my former unbelief came creeping over me, and, as my arm became tired and almost refused to do its duty, a sense of despondency overcame me, which I am sure sensibly affected the beauty if not the efficacy of my casts. But suddenly I am awakened to the realization of the fact that a big fish has seized the fly and is making the reel hum in its frantic endeavors to secure its liberty. Fathom after fathom of the dainty line disappears beneath the water, and at last prudence dictates a gentle snub, which finally terminates in a decided check to the mad career of the quarry. Having succeeded in turning his head in a different direction, another rush is made across stream, making the line whiz as it cuts through the water; then suddenly he takes a downward course and ceases from all apparent effort to free himself. He now sulks for a long time, and impatience begins to take the place of the excitement with which the fight began. The guide, who, during the fray had hoisted his anchor, got ready his landing-net, and was now holding his boat in position with the oars, suggested that I had better send him a telegraphic message, which was accordingly done by striking the rod with a key. The first few strokes seemed to make little or no impression, but presently he convinced us that he was still there, although we had some forebodings that he had escaped by winding the line around a log or some other object at the bottom of the stream. He was up and alive in every sense, and performed the same tactics for liberty with apparently more vigor than at first. These were kept up for about half an hour, when he again took a turn of sulking, but this time of shorter duration, and when he again began his rushes it was with an evident loss of strength, but no diminution of determination and pluck.

A friend who was watching and timing me from his boat came over to inquire how the battle was progressing, and pertinently asked, “Whether the fish was going to take me or I the fish.” At last the strength of the tackle, the pliability of the rod, and the determination of the rodster overcame the pluck and strength of the fish, and he was brought to the boat turned upon his side and was beautifully landed by the guide. The scales were at once applied, with a result of eight pounds full weight.

My inquiring and interested friend informed me that I had been two hours and twenty minutes in the fight, and as I sat down in the boat I, for the first time, realized that I was tired.

Now, my dear reader, do not think that this kind of sport is of common occurrence, for from that time to this, I have taken but two fish of equal weight; the average, however, has been much larger than trout from any other locality in which I have fished. Any fish under half a pound is considered unfit to land, and is again committed to the water to grow larger. The number of trout does not seem to be falling off; but this can be accounted for by the annual plant of fry from the Hatching House of the Oquossoc Angling Association, who have for years past turned about one million fish into these waters, and now contemplate increasing the amount to five million; still I think there is a sensible diminution of the size of the catch, which now run from one-half to four pounds, and anything over that weight is the exception. This would seem to confirm the supposition of Professor Agassiz, made many years ago, that these large fish possibly may have reached an age of from 100 to 200 years, as they were evidently very old.

Any one who has been thrilled with the vigorous strike of one of the ordinary sized fish would be almost beside himself when one from three to five pounds rose to his fly, and if his tackle was good, the sport derived therefrom, would serve him a lifetime; and when the shades of night had fallen upon the camp, and he with his fellow-fishermen collected around the great fire, point and vigor would be given to his recital of how he caught and played the monster he that day had brought to his creel.

“Let it be seen that a love of the ‘gentle art’ openeth first the heart, then the fly-book, and soon the stores of experience and knowledge garnered up through long years, wheresoever we meet a ‘Brother of the Angle’; and that to us ‘angling is an employment of our idle time,’; that therein we find ‘a rest to the mind, a cheerer of the spirits, a diverter of sadness, a calmer of unquiet thoughts, a moderator of the passions, a procurer of contentedness, and that it begets habits of peace and patience in chose that possess and practice it.’”—_Thaddeus Norris_.

“Fly-fishing holds the same relation to bait-fishing that poetry does to prose. Not only the fly, but every implement of the fly-fisher’s outfit is a materialized poem.”—_James A. Henshall, M.D._

“Between the tyro and the proficient grayling fisher there exists a wider gulf than is the case with the experienced and inexperienced in any other branch in the whole art of fishing. Practical skill and general artistic bearing are more fully exemplified in fishing for grayling, than for trout and salmon, whilst upon the same ground the unskilled efforts of the bungler stand at a yet more glaring contrast.”—_David Foster_.

“Hooking a large grayling, I had good evidences of his plucky qualities; the pliant rod bent as he struggled against the line, curling his body around columns of water that failed to sustain his grasp, and setting his great dorsal fin like an oar backing water, while we cautiously worked him in, his tender mouth requiring rather more careful handling than would be necessary for a trout; making a spurt up stream, he requires a yielding line, but after a time he submits to be brought in, rallying for a dart under the boat, or beneath a log, as an attempt is made to place the landing net under him.”—_Professor Milner_.

13. Bee.

14. Tomah Jo.

15. “No Name.”

16. Blue Bottle.

17. Grasshopper.

18. Canada.

“Do not despair. There was—alas! that I must say there was—an illustrious philosopher, who was nearly of the age of fifty before he made angling a pursuit, yet he became a distinguished fly-fisher.”—_Sir Humphry Davy_.

“Fly-fishing for grayling and trout are not altogether identical. Both are frequently found in the same water, and are to be taken with the same cast of flies. Finer tackle, as a rule, is required in the case of the former, as also smaller and brighter flies.” —_David Foster_.

“The grayling generally springs entirely out of the water when first struck by the hook, and tugs strongly at the line, requiring as much dexterity to land it safely as it would to secure a trout of six times the size.”—_Dr. Richardson._

“Grayling will often take the fly under water, rising so quietly that you will scarcely see any rise or break of the water at all. It is desirable, therefore, to watch the line narrowly, and to strike whenever you think it stops or checks, and you will now and then be surprised, although there is no break in the water, to find a good grayling on the hook. For, as is often the case with trout, the big ones are very quiet risers.”—_Francis Francis._

“To be a perfect fisherman you require more excellencies than are usually to be found in such a small space as is allotted to a man’s carcass.”—_Parker Gilmore_.

“The trout has, so to speak, a Herculean cast of beauty; the grayling rather that of an Apollo—light, delicate, and gracefully symmetrical.”—_H. Cholmondely-Pennell_.

THE GRAYLING.

By Fred Mather.

The very name of my beloved fish calls up a host of recollections that form themselves into a picture that, above all others, is the most cheerful one adorning memory’s wall. We old fellows live largely in the past, and can afford to let younger men revel in the future; and in my own case, I can say that, having filled Shakespeare’s apothegm of “one man in his time plays many parts,” there are often retrospects of life as a boyish angler, an older hunter, trapper, and general vagabond on the frontiers; a soldier; and a later return to a first love. Of these glances over the shoulder of time, a few trips to Northern Michigan and its grayling streams mark the journey of life with a white stone.

When Prof. Cope announced, in 1865, that he had received specimens from Michigan, the English anglers in America were incredulous, and there was some spicy correspondence, in the sportsmen’s papers of those days, concerning the identity of the fishes. As usual, the scientist discomfited the angler, and proved his position. The fish had long been known to the raftsmen and natives of Michigan by local names, but had never been identified as the historic grayling. Some eight years after the discovery of Prof. Cope that we had the grayling in American waters; Mr. D. H. Pitzhugh, Jr., sent some of them to Mr. Charles Hallock, then editor of _Forest and Stream_, and they were shown in New York to the doubters, who even then were not convinced.

Mr. Pitzhugh took great interest in the new fish, which, as a lumberman and an angler, he had long known as a “Michigan trout,” but had never recognized as the gentle grayling, and he has since done more than any other man to popularize it and introduce it to anglers.

He invited Mr. Hallock, Prof. Milner, and myself to come up and fish for it, and we each extolled its attractions in the press. As a consequence, the fish has been nearly exterminated by vandals who fish for count, and the waters where we fished at first are nearly barren.

Of all game fishes the grayling is my favorite. It is gamy but not savage; one does not feel the savage instinct to kill that the black bass or the pike raises in him, but rather a feeling of love for a vigorous fighter for its life who is handicapped with a tender mouth. To me the fish is always thought of as the “gentle grayling,” and the “golden-eyed grayling,” although the latter epithet is not always a correct one, owing to the changes in the iris.

In fishing for grayling it is well to use a mediumsized fly of a subdued color; a yellow body and a brown wing is the fly that should be used if only one is recommended; it is a most killing combination. Brown Hackles, Bed Ibis, Professor, Queen of the Water, and other trout flies are also killing; but the first-mentioned fly, whose name I do not know, owing to a defective memory and the vagaries of fly nomenclature, is the most killing, and a cast into the upper edge of a pool below a rapid is usually most successful. *

* Oak-fly.

The beauty of the grayling is of a kind that is better appreciated after some acquaintance. The bright colors of its “magnificent dorsal,” as the phrase went a few years ago, are not its chief claim to admiration. Its shapely contour, striped ventrals, iridescent caudal, and its beatific countenance win the heart of the angler and make him love the grayling, and feel that it is a fish to respect for the higher qualities expressed in its physiognomy, and not one that it is merely a satisfaction to kill as he would a savage pike. True, we kill the grayling, but we do it in a different spirit from that in which we kill some other thing. It was not only my good fortune to know “Uncle Thad” Norris, but to have fished with him. The dear lovable old man, who long since paid his fare to the grim ferryman, once said: “When I look into a grayling’s eye I am sorry I killed it; but that feeling never prevents me from making another cast just to see if another will rise.”

In another century Norris will be more read and appreciated than he is to-day. Of all American angling writers of this century he will stand foremost, and yet he never wrote as fully as he intended of the fish that he told me had afforded him more pleasure than any other. He had not revised his “American Angler’s Book” for some time before his death, and so his remarks on Back’s grayling must stand as he wrote them before the era of the Michigan grayling. He there says of the Arctic grayling: “The grayling being a fish in the capture of which the American angler cannot participate, we give no account of the manner of angling for them, but refer the reader who may have interest or curiosity on that score to English authors.” He intended to revise that sentence and give his own experience, but the Reaper judged him ripe for the harvest before he did it. In my opinion he was one of those who should never have been ripe for that harvest, and his loss to our angling literature was a severe one.

That the grayling will take bait, truth requires the admission; would that it were not so. I would prefer that its food was the soaring insect, or even the floating thistledown, with an occasional feather from an angel’s wing dropped in the moonlit flood; but science has laid bare its interior with the searching scalpel, and the Caesarian operation has brought forth the lowly caddis-worm and other larvae, and the bait-fisher has taken advantage of the knowledge and pandered to the baser appetite of the fish.

That the grayling does not eat other fish is proved by its small month, as well as by its known habits. It is not a leaper, like the trout, but takes the fly from the surface with merely an exposure of a portion of its head. When struck, it makes a rigorous rush, and, if it does not fight as long as the trout does, it gives much resistance at the last moment by the sidelong movement it makes when being reeled in, which is due to the size and curvature of its dorsal fin. It inhabits only the coldest of streams, and while the grayling of Europe is found in the trout streams, it is not to be found there in Michigan.

We have several species of grayling in America. Two of these only are accessible to anglers, the Michigan grayling, _Thymallus tricolor_, and one at the head waters of the Yellowstone, the _T. Montanus_, The other species are Arctic.

The Michigan fish is reported to grow to nearly two pounds weight; I never saw one that I thought would weigh much over a pound, and I have taken them in spawning season for the purpose of procuring their eggs. Whether this fish will bear acclimatization to other waters, I cannot say. I raised a few until a year old at my former trout farm in Western New York, and when I left them I opened the pond and let them into the stream below, but none have ever been taken there, as far as I know. It seems a pity to allow this elegant fish to become extinct, as it will in a few years in its limited habitat, and if opportunity offered I would again try to domesticate it.

The trout-fisher needs no special directions nor tackle to fish for grayling; he may cast in the usual manner, only remembering that the fish has a very tender mouth, and must be treated with this fact ever in mind. The Michigan grayling streams are not suited for wading, and, therefore, fishing from a boat is the rule. This may not suit some anglers, to whom I can only say, every one to his fancy, but no wading for me; dry feet are more comfortable than wet ones, and boat-fishing or bank-fishing are more suitable to my taste, than to be immersed up to my hips in cold water for half a day.

I have killed, I believe, every game fish in America east of the Rocky Mountains, except the salmon, for which I have a rod in readiness, that I hope to use soon, and I can say that while I do not think the grayling the superior of all of them for gameness, yet there is something of romance in the remembrance of the grayling, a kind of sentimental retrospect, that endears the fish to me above all others. Whether it was owing to the pine woods and the genial companionship, I do not care to consider; but each year there comes a longing to repeat the pleasant experiences of the Au Sable and its delicate grayling.

TROUT FLIES

“The trout-fly does not resemble any known species of insect. It is a ‘conventionalized’ creation, as we say of ornamentation. The theory is, that, fly-fishing being a high art, the fly must not be a tame imitation of nature, but an artistic suggestion of it. It requires an artist to construct one; and not every bungler can take a bit of red flannel, a peacock’s feather, a flash of tinsel thread, a cock’s plume, a section of a hen’s wing, and fabricate a tiny object that will not look like any fly, but still will suggest the universal conventional fly.”—_Charles Dudley Warner_.

“When you fish with a flie, if it be possible, let no pary of your line touch the water, but your flie only.”—_Izaak Walton_.

1. Coachman.

2. Leadwing Coach.

3. Royal Coachman.

4. Coachman red tip.

5. Gilt Coachman.

6. Cowdung.

7. Fern.

8. Blue Jay.

9. Abbey.

10. Red Ant.

11. Black Ant.

12. Seth Green.

13. Professor.

14. Blue Professor.

15. Dark Stone.

“A combination of English Jay is one of the most effective flies in the world, as it can be put into as gay a fly as you please, and also into as plain a one as you like.”—_Capt. Peel (“Dinks”)_.

“When I think of the great secrets of Nature locked up from our knowledge (yet under our eyes at every turn of your daily duty), and imagine what a mine of intellectual wealth remains to be opened out by quickness of sight, clearness of intellect, and the pickaxe of hard work, a great panorama opens before me. How ignorant—how terribly ignorant—are we of God’s great laws as applied to the creatures that live in the element in which we are forbidden to exist!”—_Frank Buckland_.

“The ancient belief in the stoppage of sport during a thunderstorm is not strictly true.”—_David Foster_.

“A fish will _hook himself only_ in cases where the fly first touches the water at the end of a straight line, or when the line is being withdrawn smartly for a new cast. In all other cases the skill of the angler must be employed.”—_Charles Hallock_.

“We had determined on a feast, and trout were to be its daintiest dainty. We waited until the confusing pepper of a shower had passed away and left the water calm. We tossed to the fish humbugs of wool, silk and feathers, gauds such as captivate the greedy or the guileless. The trout, on the lookout for novelty, dashed up and swallowed disappointing juiceless morsels, and with them swallowed hooks. Then, O Walton! O Davy! O Scrope! ye fishers hard by taverns! luxury was ours of which ye know nothing. Under the noble yellow birch we cooked our own fish. We used our scanty kitchen-battery with skill. We cooked with the high art of simplicity. Where Nature has done her best, only fools rush in to improve. On the salmonids, fresh and salt, she has lavished her creative refinements. Cookery should only ripen and develop.”—_Theodore Winthrop_.

“As a general thing, it is a waste of time to be forever changing your flies. If the trout are not rising, it is entirely useless to fling an assortment of flies at them.”—_T. S. Up de Graff, M.D._

“In taking the fly, I award the palm to the trout, as he usually throws himself out of the water to do so. The salmon does not, he scarcely more than shows himself; but after being hooked the sport commences, and it is all activity to the death, rarely any sulking.”—_Charles W. Stevens_

A TROUTING TRIP TO ST. IGNACE ISLAND.

By W. Thomson

Towards the end of August, 1877, I had become pretty well fagged out with office work and felt that I must have a week or two of out-door recreation or sport of some kind, so I naturally decided upon a troutfishing expedition; and I selected, as the scene, the island of St. Ignace, in Lake Superior, of which I had heard most excellent accounts in regard to fish products. I had, it is true, caught a great many brook trout throughout the summer, in small streams close at hand; but these were mostly fish of inferior size, few indeed reaching one pound in weight; while I was assured by an ancient fisherman of repute, that at the Island, the real _Salmo fontinalis_ often attained to four, five, and even seven pounds.

This was the kind of ground I had been, for many years, anxious to find, and I made up my mind to try it at all events.

The first thing to do was to secure two suitable companions, and a man or boy of all work. The former I quickly enlisted in the persons of a genial M.D. and an overworked limb of the law. The latter opportunely turned up in the shape of “Jim,” a colored youth of sixteen, as black as the ten of spades, but no less celebrated for his culinary skill than for his impish tricks and imperturbable good humor and honesty. To banish formality once for all, and put things upon an easy and familiar footing at the start, I christened the M.D. “Squills” and the lawyer “Bluffy,” out of compliment to his usual style of treating witnesses in court. In deference to my advanced age and _general good looks_, the boys called me “Governor,” I being then about fifty-three and neither of them thirty. Our supplies, consisting of a ten by twelve tent, three camp beds and bedding, two small boats, a stock of provisions for six men for two weeks, one rifle, two fowling pieces, and our fishing tackle, were soon got together, and in twenty-four hours from the first proposal, we were ready to take the cars for Collingwood. At that point we secured an ample supply of ice; and then embarked with our traps on board a steamer bound for Duluth and intermediate ports, and touching at St. Ignace on her way.