Did you never go fishing when a boy, and come home at the close of a
Saturday without so much as a single chub dangling on a string to
console you for the anticipated dressing because of your interdicted
absence? I have. But the chagrin of the ten-year-old is nothing in
comparison to the mortification of the middle-aged boy under similar
circumstances. However, there were no inquisitive bores in our camp. The
Doctor was determined to again try his luck in Williams’ Fork; nothing
but the remembrance of my early experience could have induced me to join
him.
The day after our successful failure, equipped as before, we took our
way over the hills and through the sage brush, reaching our destination
about nine o’clock. The tackle was quickly adjusted, and keeping out of
the way of that infernal pine, I dropped a brown-bodied gray hackle
gently upon the placid water. The fly had hardly touched the surface,
when suddenly from out the depths there flashed an open-mouthed beauty,
and that hackle disappeared as, turning head down and revealing his
glittering side, its captor plunged again into the till then silent
pool. It made my pulse throb a little quicker, but I was not paying as
much attention to that as to the trout. He made a dart up stream with
the hook firmly fixed; I brought him gradually round and coaxed him to
the surface to ascertain what sort of a leviathan I had encountered;
then I got excited and felt that if I did not get him ashore very soon
he was not my trout. Just below the pool, ten yards or so, was a
shelving beach a few feet in length, and I gradually worked my way to
it, keeping a taut line on my bonanza. While I was doing this I
remembered having read a whole column of imagination, written by
somebody named Murray, wherein he described his “happiness” under like
circumstances; cracking bamboo and spinning silk, with a half dozen
Johns with landing nets, were the burden of his effusion, and he wound
the matter up after a three hours’ fight, with a trout seventeen inches
long, when I expected to learn at least of a ten-pound salmon lifted out
by one of the Johns above mentioned. I wanted to hit the fellow with a
club for making an ass of himself. I was hungry for trout, and inside
five minutes I had drawn my prize up to and on that gravelly beach, had
him by the gills, and he was seventeen inches flush, big as Mr. Murray’s
and no fuss about it. Just as I got my fish secured I heard the Doctor
threshing round in the willows, about two rods away, and in a moment
after he held up to my envious gaze more than a match for my capture.
Our exchange of congratulations was hurried; the Doctor cast in his
hopper; I stuck to the gray hackle, and inside half an hour I had landed
a dozen good-sized trout, and the Doctor had “yanked out” as many more.
The pool and the Doctor were redeemed; we had not quite “fished it out,”
had only taken those with sharp appetites. But that kind of success
demoralizes one for the time being, so we moved off down the creek,
trying the eddies and below the riffles; now and again dropping the fly
under the lee of the larger boulders in mid stream, with varying
success, until we reached our horses. Our creels were full enough to
carry with comfort and we started for camp, discussing the causes of the
failure of the day before, but arriving at no satisfactory solution.
The rapidity with which news of success in trouting will travel through
the various camps in one’s vicinity is somewhat singular, and is only
equaled by the celerity with which the reports of the quantity captured
is multiplied. Having more than we could consume, we gave some to our
nearest neighbor, who came over to see our catch. We learned the next
day that we had caught anywhere from twenty-five pounds to a hundred,
and I am unable to say how many went exploring for trout on the day
following. That some were unsuccessful I know, because several swore to
me that there was not even a minnow in Williams’ Fork. There was one
young gentleman in particular who appealed to me in a tone of
remonstrance after a day spent in unsuccessful labor down the Grand. He
was dressed in light drab pants, cheviot shirt, and a broad-brimmed felt
hat, the band of which was stuck full of flies of all sizes and a
multitude of colors. He had a fifty-dollar rod and a fifteen-dollar reel
of wonderful combination; his eyes, emphatic with disgust, glaring
through his glasses, he avowed there were no fish in the Park. He held
up a crimson fly that would have driven crazy any fish except a sucker,
and would have scared a sucker if sunk to his level, and wanted to know
of me if I didn’t think it a fine fly. I told him I did. He said he had
whipped five miles of water with that fly and could not get a rise. I
told him that the trout was a queer fish, and that perhaps he had better
try a blue flannel rag, and offered to give him a piece of my shirt, but
he got mad, tore around, and threatened, in popular parlance, to take
off the top of my head. Believing this to be a more painful operation
than scalping, I apologized, and the difficulty was promptly adjusted.
Then I gave him a gray hackle and told him that that was to the trout
what bread was to civilized man, a staple article of which he seldom
grew tired, or if he did, to try the brown hackle, which, still like the
bread, was a wholesome change; that if he could get neither the gray nor
the brown, then to take a grasshopper, pull off his legs and wings, and
string it upon a number six Kirby; that such a hook would take a three
ounce or a three pound trout with equal facility.
The next evening I saw my new acquaintance; his drab pants were ruined,
his rod had been shivered into kindling wood, his reel lay in a pool of
the Grand twenty feet deep. He had cast that gray hackle with a brown
body into that pool; it had been seized upon by a trout something “near
a yard long;” the angler had succeeded in landing its head upon the
rocks, then his rod gave way and he fell on the fish, rolled into the
river, lost the remains of his tackle and his hat with the flies, and
some other tenderfoot who happened providentially that way, had pulled
him out by the collar. He was happy, and said he would write to his
mother, for which I commended him. This morning I saw him following a
trail down the Grand; he had provided himself with some hackles and had
a pole cut from a plum bush. I predicted for him success or a watery
grave.
In tender consideration of the tyro in these waters, I may be permitted
to make a few suggestions as to tackle, based upon my own experience. In
the matter of lures the taste of the trout must be considered; as to all
else you may consult your own. It is well to have in your fly-books a
_little_ of everything, but of gray and brown hackles, as already
intimated, coachmen and professors, an abundance. The best reel is one
that combines lightness and durability, and is incapable of fouling your
line, no matter how negligent you may be; a click reel of hard rubber
and metal, with a revolving disk, the handle fixed upon the outer edge,
and weighing, with thirty yards of line, about five ounces, will answer
well. For lines there is, to my mind, nothing equal to the braided and
tapered water-proof silk (size F); being the best, they are the
cheapest, easily managed, and less liable to snarl or call for a tax
upon your patience. For a rod always select one of three joints; they
hang more evenly and have a “better feel.” Ash butt and second joint,
with lancewood tip; Greenheart or Bethabara; try any and all; break them
on the least provocation, which means a ten-inch trout or less, but
wreck two or three by the “yanking process,” or otherwise. Then, when
you feel that you can handle a rod with the same deftness a mother her
first-born, save up your money and buy a first-class split bamboo. When
you get it have faith in it, for if properly made it will bend, if
necessity demands, till the tip touches the butt, yet do not needlessly
try that conclusion with it; neither must you attempt to lift your fish
out of the water with it. When you have fairly exhausted your trout,
take the line in your disengaged hand; there are moments between
struggles when you can swing your catch safely to land, without a
movement on his part; when he will came out as straight as the plumb
line Amos saw. If in his struggles his troutship should clear the water,
something I never saw a trout do, bow the rod to him, of course, as he
returns, so that he may not get his unsupported weight upon the
beautiful toy. Keep a taut line upon your prey—by this I do not mean
that you should give him no line, but let the strain be steady, giving
only when you must. After the first few rushes, you may generally with
safety press your thumb upon the line, and let him feel the spring of
your rod; that will kill him quickly. The climax in the poem of trouting
is the spring of the split bamboo. In striking, remember you have not a
plum bush sapling and that it is not incumbent upon you to bail the
stream with an artificial fly; let it be done with a quick motion of the
wrist; a motion which, if you should miss the game, would move your fly
but a little way. If your catch is too large to lift out as I have
suggested, in the absence of a landing net, you can generally find a
place, always down stream, where you can safely, if you go about it
gently, snake him out, or get your finger under his gills. Much more
might be written, and what I have said is by no means new, but the
purpose is to put you in the way merely of avoiding the calamity that
befell the tackle of my acquaintance in the drab pants. Have a taste for
the sport, “let your own discretion be your tutor,” and you will work
out your own salvation more surely than by a library of directions,
remembering this for an axiom, that: The true sportsman does not go down
stream and afield for the mere love of killing something.
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