A fisher, says our father Izaak, is like a poet: he "must be born so."
The majority of dwellers on the Border are born to be fishers, thanks to
the endless number of rivers and burns in the region between the Tweed
and the Coquet--a realm where almost all trout-fishing is open, and
where, since population and love of the sport have increased, there is
now but little water that merits the trouble of putting up a rod.
Like the rest of us in that country, I was born an angler, though under
an evil star, for, indeed, my labours have not been blessed, and are
devoted to fishing rather than to the catching of fish. Remembrance can
scarcely recover, "nor time bring back to time," the days when I was not
busy at the waterside; yet the feat is not quite beyond the power of
Mnemosyne. My first recollection of the sport must date from about the
age of four. I recall, in a dim brightness, driving along a road that
ran between banks of bracken and mica-veined rocks, and the sunlight on a
shining bend of a highland stream, and my father, standing in the shallow
water, showing me a huge yellow fish, that gave its last fling or two on
the grassy bank. The fish seemed as terrible and dangerous to me as to
Tobit, in the Apocrypha, did that ferocious half-pounder which he carries
on a string in the early Italian pictures. How oddly Botticelli and his
brethren misconceived the man-devouring fish, which must have been a
crocodile strayed from the Nile into the waters of the Euphrates! A half-
pounder! To have been terrified by a trout seems a bad beginning; and,
thereafter, the mist gather's over the past, only to lift again when I
see myself, with a crowd of other little children, sent to fish, with
crooked pins, for minnows, or "baggies" as we called them, in the
Ettrick. If our parents hoped that we would bring home minnows for bait,
they were disappointed. The party was under the command of a nursery
governess, and probably she was no descendant of the mother of us all,
Dame Juliana Berners. We did not catch any minnows, and I remember
sitting to watch a bigger boy, who was angling in a shoal of them when a
parr came into the shoal, and we had bright visions of alluring that
monarch of the deep. But the parr disdained our baits, and for months I
dreamed of what it would have been to capture him, and often thought of
him in church. In a moment of profane confidence my younger brother once
asked me: "What do _you_ do in sermon time? I," said he in a
whisper--"mind you don't tell--_I_ tell stories to myself about catching
trout." To which I added similar confession, for even so I drove the
sermon by, and I have not "told"--till now.
By this time we must have been introduced to trout. Who forgets his
first trout? Mine, thanks to that unlucky star, was a double deception,
or rather there were two kinds of deception. A village carpenter very
kindly made rods for us. They were of unpainted wood, these first rods;
they were in two pieces, with a real brass joint, and there was a ring at
the end of the top joint, to which the line was knotted. We were still
in the age of Walton, who clearly knew nothing, except by hearsay, of a
reel; he abandons the attempt to describe that machine as used by the
salmon-fishers. He thinks it must be seen to be understood. With these
innocent weapons, and with the gardener to bait our hooks, we were taken
to the Yarrow, far up the stream, near Ladhope. How well one remembers
deserting the gardener, and already appreciating the joys of having no
gillie nor attendant, of being "alone with ourselves and the goddess of
fishing"! I cast away as well as I could, and presently jerked a trout,
a tiny one, high up in the air out of the water. But he fell off the
hook again, he dropped in with a little splash, and I rushed up to
consult my tutor on his unsportsmanlike behaviour, and the disappointing,
nay, heart-breaking, occurrence. Was the trout not morally caught, was
there no way of getting him to see this and behave accordingly? The
gardener feared there was none. Meanwhile he sat on the bank and angled
in a pool. "Try my rod," he said, and, as soon as I had taken hold of
it, "pull up," he cried, "pull up." I did "pull up," and hauled my first
troutling on shore. But in my inmost heart I feared that he was not my
trout at all, that the gardener had hooked him before he handed the rod
to me. Then we met my younger brother coming to us with quite a great
fish, half a pound perhaps, which he had caught in a burn. Then, for the
first time, my soul knew the fierce passion of jealousy, the envy of the
angler. Almost for the last time, too; for, I know not why it is, and it
proves me no true fisherman, I am not discontented by the successes of
others. If one cannot catch fish oneself, surely the next best thing is
to see other people catch them.
My own progress was now checked for long by a constitutional and
insuperable aversion to angling with worm. If the gardener, or a pretty
girl-cousin of the mature age of fourteen, would put the worm on, I did
not "much mind" fishing with it. Dost thou remember, fair lady of the
ringlets? Still, I never liked bait-fishing, and these mine allies were
not always at hand. We used, indeed, to have great days with perch at
Faldonside, on the land which Sir Walter Scott was always so anxious to
buy from Mr. Nichol Milne. Almost the last entry in his diary, at
Naples, breathes this unutterable hope. He had deluded himself into
believing that his debts were paid, and that he could soon "speak a word
to young Nichol Milne." The word, of course, was never spoken, and the
unsupplanted laird used to let us fish for his perch to our hearts'
desire. Never was there such slaughter. The corks which we used as
floats were perpetually tipping, bobbing, and disappearing, and then the
red-finned perch would fly out on to dry land. Here I once saw two corks
go down, two anglers haul up, and one perch, attached to both hooks,
descend on the grassy bank. My brother and I filled two baskets once,
and strung dozens of other perch on a stick.
But this was not legitimate business. Not till we came to fly-fishing
were we really entered at the sport, and this initiation took place, as
it chanced, beside the very stream where I was first shown a trout. It
is a charming piece of water, amber-coloured and clear, flowing from the
Morvern hills under the limes of an ancient avenue--trees that have long
survived the house to which, of old, the road must have led. Our gillie
put on for us big bright sea-trout flies--nobody fishes there for yellow
trout; but, in our inexperience, small "brownies" were all we caught.
Probably we were only taken to streams and shallows where we could not
interfere with mature sportsmen. At all events, it was demonstrated to
us that we could actually catch fish with fly, and since then I have
scarcely touched a worm, except as a boy, in burns. In these early days
we had no notion of playing a trout. If there was a bite, we put our
strength into an answering tug, and, if nothing gave way, the trout flew
over our heads, perhaps up into a tree, perhaps over into a branch of the
stream behind us. Quite a large trout will yield to this artless method,
if the rod be sturdy--none of your glued-up cane-affairs. I remember
hooking a trout which, not answering to the first haul, ran right across
the stream and made for a hole in the opposite bank. But the second lift
proved successful and he landed on my side of the water. He had a great
minnow in his throat, and must have been a particularly greedy animal. Of
course, on this system there were many breakages, and the method was
abandoned as we lived into our teens, and began to wade and to understand
something about fly-fishing.
It was worth while to be a boy then in the south of Scotland, and to fish
the waters haunted by old legends, musical with old songs, and renowned
in the sporting essays of Christopher North and Stoddart. Even then,
thirty long years ago, the old stagers used to tell us that "the waiter
was owr sair fished," and they grumbled about the system of draining the
land, which makes a river a roaring torrent in floods, and a bed of grey
stones with a few clear pools and shallows, during the rest of the year.
In times before the hills were drained, before the manufacturing towns
were so populous, before pollution, netting, dynamiting, poisoning,
sniggling, and the enormous increase of fair and unfair fishing, the
border must have been the angler's paradise. Still, it was not bad when
we were boys. We had Ettrick within a mile of us, and a finer natural
trout-stream there is not in Scotland, though now the water only holds a
sadly persecuted remnant. There was one long pool behind Lindean,
flowing beneath a high wooded bank, where the trout literally seemed
never to cease rising at the flies that dropped from the pendant boughs.
Unluckily the water flowed out of the pool in a thin broad stream,
directly at right angles to the pool itself. Thus the angler had, so to
speak, the whole of lower Ettrick at his back when he waded: it was a
long way up stream to the bank, and, as we never used landing-nets then,
we naturally lost a great many trout in trying to unhook them in mid
water. They only averaged as a rule from three to two to the pound, but
they were strong and lively. In this pool there was a large tawny, table-
shaped stone, over which the current broke. Out of the eddy behind this
stone, one of my brothers one day caught three trout weighing over seven
pounds, a feat which nowadays sounds quite incredible. As soon as the
desirable eddy was empty, another trout, a trifle smaller than the
former, seems to have occupied it. The next mile and a half, from
Lindean to the junction with Tweed, was remarkable for excellent sport.
In the last pool of Ettrick, the water flowed by a steep bank, and, if
you cast almost on to the further side, you were perfectly safe to get
fish, even when the river was very low. The flies used, three on a cast,
were small and dusky, hare's ear and woodcock wing, black palmers, or, as
Stoddart sings,
Wee dour looking huiks are the thing,
Mouse body and laverock wing.
Next to Ettrick came Tweed: the former river joins the latter at the bend
of a long stretch of water, half stream, half pool, in which angling was
always good. In late September there were sea-trout, which, for some
reason, rose to the fly much more freely than sea-trout do now in the
upper Tweed. I particularly remember hooking one just under the railway
bridge. He was a two-pounder, and practised the usual sea-trout tactics
of springing into the air like a rocket. There was a knot on my line, of
course, and I was obliged to hold him hard. When he had been dragged up
on the shingle, the line parted, broken in twain at the knot; but it had
lasted just long enough, during three exciting minutes. This accident of
a knot on the line has only once befallen me since, with the strongest
loch-trout I ever encountered. It was on Branxholme Loch, where the
trout run to a great size, but usually refuse the fly. I was alone in a
boat on a windy day; the trout soon ran out the line to the knot, and
then there was nothing for it but to lower the top almost to the water's
edge, and hold on in hope. Presently the boat drifted ashore, and I
landed him--better luck than I deserved. People who only know the trout
of the Test and other chalk streams, cannot imagine how much stronger are
the fish of the swift Scottish streams and dark Scottish lochs. They're
worse fed, but they are infinitely more powerful and active; it is all
the difference between an alderman and a clansman.
Tweed, at this time, was full of trout, but even then they were not easy
to catch. One difficulty lay in the nature of the wading. There is a
pool near Ashiesteil and Gleddis Weil which illustrated this. Here Scott
and Hogg were once upset from a boat while "burning the water"--spearing
salmon by torchlight. Herein, too, as Scott mentions in his Diary, he
once caught two trout at one cast. The pool is long, is paved with small
gravel, and allures you to wade on and on. But the water gradually
deepens as you go forward, and the pool ends in a deep pot under each
bank. Then to recover your ground becomes by no means easy, especially
if the water is heavy. You get half-drowned, or drowned altogether,
before you discover your danger. Many of the pools have this
peculiarity, and in many, one step made rashly lets you into a very
uncomfortable and perilous place. Therefore expeditions to Tweedside
were apt to end in a ducking. It was often hard to reach the water where
trout were rising, and the rise was always capricious. There might not
be a stir on the water for hours, and suddenly it would be all boiling
with heads and tails for twenty minutes, after which nothing was to be
done. To miss "the take" was to waste the day, at least in fly-fishing.
From a high wooded bank I have seen the trout feeding, and they have
almost ceased to feed before I reached the waterside. Still worse was it
to be allured into water over the tops of your waders, early in the day,
and then to find that the rise was over, and there was nothing for it but
a weary walk home, the basket laden only with damp boots. Still, the
trout were undeniably _there_, and that was a great encouragement. They
are there still, but infinitely more cunning than of old. Then, if they
were feeding, they took the artificial fly freely; now it must be exactly
of the right size and shade or they will have none of it. They come
provokingly short, too; just plucking at the hook, and running out a foot
of line or so, then taking their departure. For some reason the Tweed is
more difficult to fish with the dry fly than--the Test, for example. The
water is swifter and very dark, it drowns the fly soon, and on the
surface the fly is less easily distinguished than at Whitchurch, in the
pellucid streams. The Leader a tributary, may be fished with dry fly; on
the Tweed one can hardly manage it. There is a plan by which rising
trout may be taken--namely, by baiting with a small red worm and casting
as in fly-fishing. But that is so hard on the worm! Probably he who can
catch trout with fly on the Tweed between Melrose and Holy Lee can catch
them anywhere. On a good day in April great baskets are still made in
preserved parts of the Tweed, but, if they are made in open water, it
must be, I fancy, with worm, or with the "screw," the larva of the May-
fly. The screw is a hideous and venomous-looking animal, which is fixed
on a particular kind of tackle, and cast up stream with a short line. The
heaviest trout are fond of it, but it can only be used at a season when
either school or Oxford keeps one far from what old Franck, Walton's
contemporary, a Cromwellian trooper, calls "the glittering and resolute
streams of Tweed."
Difficult as it is, that river is so beautiful and alluring that it
scarcely needs the attractions of sport. The step banks, beautifully
wooded, and in spring one mass of primroses, are crowned here and there
with ruined Border towers--like Elibank, the houses of Muckle Mou'ed Meg;
or with fair baronial houses like Fernilea. Meg made a bad exchange when
she left Elibank with the salmon pool at its foot for bleak Harden,
frowning over the narrow "den" where Harden kept the plundered cattle.
There is no fishing in the tiny Harden burn, that joins the brawling
Borthwick Water.
The burns of the Lowlands are now almost barren of trout. The spawning
fish, flabby and useless, are killed in winter. All through the rest of
the year, in the remotest places, tourists are hard at them with worm. In
a small burn a skilled wormer may almost depopulate the pools, and, on
the Border, all is fish that comes to the hook; men keep the very
fingerlings, on the pretext that they are "so sweet" in the frying-pan.
The crowd of anglers in glens which seem not easily accessible is
provoking enough. Into the Meggat, a stream which feeds St. Mary's Loch,
there flows the Glengaber, or Glencaber burn: the burn of the pine-tree
stump. The water runs in deep pools and streams over a blue slatey rock,
which contains gold under the sand, in the worn holes and crevices. My
friend, Mr. McAllister, the schoolmaster at St. Mary's, tells me that one
day, when fish were not rising, he scooped out the gravel of one of these
holes with his knife, and found a tiny nugget, after which the
gold-hunting fever came on him for a while. But little is got nowadays,
though in some earlier period the burn has been diverted from its bed,
and the people used solemnly to wash the sand, as in California or
Australia. Well, whether in consequence of the gold, as the alchemical
philosophers would have held, or not, the trout of the Glengaber burn
were good. They were far shorter, thicker and stronger than those of the
many neighbouring brooks. I have fished up the burn with fly, when it
was very low, hiding carefully behind the boulders, and have been
surprised at the size and gameness of the fish. As soon as the fly had
touched the brown water, it was sucked down, and there was quite a fierce
little fight before the fish came to hand.
"This, all this, was in the olden time, long ago."
The Glengaber burn is about twenty miles from any railway station, but,
on the last occasion when I visited it, three louts were worming their
way up it, within twenty yards of each other, each lout, with his huge
rod, showing himself wholly to any trout that might be left in the water.
Thirty years ago the burns that feed St. Mary's Loch were almost
unfished, and rare sport we had in them, as boys, staying at Tibbie
Sheil's famous cottage, and sleeping in her box-beds, where so often the
Ettrick Shepherd and Christopher North have lain, after copious toddy.
"'Tis gone, 'tis gone:" not in our time will any man, like the Ettrick
Shepherd, need a cart to carry the trout he has slain in Meggat Water.
That stream, flowing through a valley furnished with a grass-grown track
for a road, flows, as I said, into St. Mary's Loch. There are two or
three large pools at the foot of the loch, in which, as a small boy
hardly promoted to fly, I have seen many monsters rising greedily. Men
got into the way of fishing these pools after a flood with minnow, and
thereby made huge baskets, the big fish running up to feed, out of the
loch. But, when last I rowed past Meggat foot, the delta of that
historic stream was simply crowded with anglers, stepping in in front of
each other. I asked if this mob was a political "demonstration," but
they stuck to business, as if they had been on the Regent's Canal. And
this, remember, was twenty miles from any town! Yet there is a burn on
the Border still undiscovered, still full of greedy trout. I shall give
the angler such a hint of its whereabouts as Tiresias, in Hades, gave to
Odysseus concerning the end of his second wanderings.
When, O stranger, thou hast reached a burn where the shepherd asks thee
for the newspaper wrapped round thy sandwiches, that he may read the
news, then erect an altar to Priapus, god of fishermen, and begin to
angle boldly.
Probably the troops who fish our Border-burns still manage to toss out
some dozens of tiny fishes, some six or eight to the pound. Are not
these triumphs chronicled in the "Scotsman?" But they cannot imagine
what angling was in the dead years, nor what great trout dwelt below the
linns of the Crosscleugh burn, beneath the red clusters of the rowan
trees, or in the waters of the "Little Yarrow" above the Loch of the
Lowes. As to the lochs themselves, now that anyone may put a boat on
them, now that there is perpetual trolling, as well as fly-fishing, so
that every fish knows the lures, the fun is mainly over. In April, no
doubt, something may still be done, and in the silver twilights of June,
when as you drift on the still surface you hear the constant sweet plash
of the rising trout, a few, and these good, may be taken. But the water
wants re-stocking, and the burns in winter need watching, in the
interests of spawning fish. It is nobody's interest, that I know of, to
take trouble and incur expense; and free fishing, by the constitution of
the universe, must end in bad fishing or in none at all. The best we can
say for it is that vast numbers of persons may, by the still waters of
these meres, enjoy the pleasures of hope. Even solitude is no longer to
be found in the scene which Scott, in "Marmion," chooses as of all places
the most solitary.
Here, have I thought, 'twere sweet to dwell,
And rear again the chaplain's cell.