Thou askest me, my brother, how first and where I met the Bloody Doctor?
The tale is weird, so weird that to a soul less proved than thine I
scarce dare speak of the adventure.
* * * * *
This, perhaps, would be the right way of beginning a story (not that it
is a story exactly), with the title forced on me by the name and nature
of the hero. But I do not think I could keep up the style without a lady-
collaborator; besides, I have used the term "weird" twice already, and
thus played away the trumps of modern picturesque diction. To return to
our Doctor: many a bad day have I had on Clearburn Loch, and never a good
one. But one thing draws me always to the loch when I have the luck to
be within twenty miles of it. There are trout in Clearburn! The Border
angler knows that the trout in his native waters is nearly as extinct as
the dodo. Many causes have combined to extirpate the shy and spirited
fish. First, there are too many anglers:
Twixt Holy Lee and Clovenfords,
A tentier bit ye canna hae,
sang that good old angler, now with God, Mr. Thomas Tod Stoddart. But
between Holy Lee and Clovenfords you may see half a dozen rods on every
pool and stream. There goes that leviathan, the angler from London, who
has been beguiled hither by the artless "Guide" of Mr. Watson Lyall.
There fishes the farmer's lad, and the schoolmaster, and the wandering
weaver out of work or disinclined to work. In his rags, with his thin
face and red "goatee" beard, with his hazel wand and his home-made reel,
there is withal something kindly about this poor fellow, this true
sportsman. He loves better to hear the lark sing than the mouse cheep;
he wanders from depopulated stream to depopulated burn, and all is fish
that comes to his fly. Fingerlings he keeps, and does not return to the
water "as pitying their youth." Let us not grudge him his sport as long
as he fishes fair, and he is always good company. But he, with all the
other countless fishermen, make fish so rare and so wary that, except
after a flood in Meggat or the Douglas burn, trout are scarce to be taken
by ordinary skill. As for
Thae reiving cheils
Frae Galashiels,
who use nets, and salmon roe, and poisons, and dynamite, they are
miscreants indeed; they spoil the sport, not of the rich, but of their
own class, and of every man who would be quiet, and go angling in the
sacred streams of Christopher North and the Shepherd. The mills, with
their dyes and dirt, are also responsible for the dearth of trout.
Untainted yet thy stream, fair Teviot, runs,
Leyden sang; but now the stream is very much tainted indeed below Hawick,
like Tweed in too many places. Thus, for a dozen reasons, trout are nigh
as rare as red deer. Clearburn alone remains full of unsophisticated
fishes, and I have the less hesitation in revealing this, because I do
not expect the wanderer who may read this page to be at all more
successful than myself. No doubt they are sometimes to be had, by the
basketful, but not often, nor by him who thinks twice before risking his
life by smothering in a peaty bottom.
To reach Clearburn Loch, if you start from the Teviot, you must pass
through much of Scott's country and most of Leyden's. I am credibly
informed that persons of culture have forgotten John Leyden. He was a
linguist and a poet, and the friend of Walter Scott, and knew
The mind whose fearless frankness naught could move,
The friendship, like an elder brother's love.
We remember what distant and what deadly shore has Leyden's cold remains,
and people who do not know may not care to be reminded.
Leaving Teviot, with Leyden for a guide, you walk, or drive,
Where Bortha hoarse, that loads the meads with sand,
Rolls her red tide.
Not that it was red when we passed, but _electro purior_.
Through slaty hills whose sides are shagged with thorn,
Where springs, in scattered tufts, the dark green corn,
Towers wood-girt Harden far above the vale.
And very dark green, almost blue, was the corn in September, 1888.
Upwards, always upwards, goes the road till you reach the crest, and
watch far below the wide champaign, like a sea, broken by the shapes of
hills, Windburg and Eildon, and Priesthaughswire, and "the rough skirts
of stormy Ruberslaw," and Penchrise, and the twin Maidens, shaped like
the breasts of Helen. It is an old land, of war, of Otterburn, and
Ancrum, and the Raid of the Fair Dodhead; but the plough has passed over
all but the upper pastoral solitudes. Turning again to the downward
slope you see the loch of Alemoor, small and sullen, with Alewater
feeding it. Nobody knows much about the trout in it. "It is reckoned
the residence of the water-cow," a monster like the Australian bunyip.
There was a water-cow in Scott's loch of Cauldshiels, above Abbotsford.
The water-cow has not lately emerged from Alemoor to attack the casual
angler. You climb again by gentle slopes till you reach a most desolate
tableland. Far beyond it is the round top of Whitecombe, which again
looks down on St. Mary's Loch, and up the Moffat, and across the Meggat
Water; but none of these are within the view. Round are _pastorum loca
vasta_, lands of Buccleugh and Bellenden, Deloraine, Sinton, Headshaw,
and Glack. Deloraine, by the way, is pronounced "Delorran," and perhaps
is named from Orran, the Celtic saint. On the right lies, not far from
the road, a grey sheet of water, and this is Clearburn, where first I met
the Doctor.
The loch, to be plain, is almost unfishable. It is nearly round, and
everywhere, except in a small segment on the eastern side, is begirt with
reeds of great height. These reeds, again, grow in a peculiarly
uncomfortable, quaggy bottom, which rises and falls, or rather which
jumps and sinks when you step on it, like the seat of a very luxurious
arm-chair. Moreover, the bottom is pierced with many springs, wherein if
you set foot you shall have thrown your last cast.
By watching the loch when it is frozen, a man might come to learn
something of the springs; but, even so, it is hard to keep clear of them
in summer. Now the wind almost always blows from the west, dead against
the little piece of gravelly shore at the eastern side, so that casting
against it is hard work and unprofitable. On this day, by a rare chance,
the wind blew from the east, though the sky at first was a brilliant
blue, and the sun hot and fierce. I walked round to the east side, waded
in, and caught two or three small fellows. It was slow work, when
suddenly there began the greatest rise of trout I ever saw in my life.
From the edge of the loch as far as one could clearly see across it there
was that endless plashing murmur, of all sounds in this world the
sweetest to the ear. Within the view of the eye, on each cast, there
were a dozen trout rising all about, never leaping, but seriously and
solemnly feeding. Now is my chance at last, I fancied; but it was not
so--far from it. I might throw over the very noses of the beasts, but
they seldom even glanced at the (artificial) fly. I tried them with
Greenwell's Glory, with a March brown, with "the woodcock wing and hare-
lug," but it was almost to no purpose. If one did raise a fish, he meant
not business--all but "a casual brute," which broke the already weakened
part of a small "glued-up" cane rod. I had to twist a piece of paper
round the broken end, wet it, and push it into the joint, where it hung
on somehow, but was not pleasant to cast with. From twelve to half-past
one the gorging went merrily forward, and I saw what the fish were rising
at. The whole surface of the loch, at least on the east side, was
absolutely peppered with large, hideous insects. They had big grey-white
wings, bodies black as night, and brilliant crimson legs, or feelers, or
whatever naturalists call them. The trout seemed as if they could not
have too much of these abominable wretches, and the flies were blown
across the loch, not singly, but in populous groups. I had never seen
anything like them in any hook-book, nor could I deceive the trout by the
primitive dodge of tying a red thread round the shank of a dark fly. So
I waded out, and fell to munching a frugal sandwich and watching Nature,
not without a cigarette.
Now Nature is all very well. I have nothing to say against her of a
Sunday, or when trout are not rising. But she was no comfort to me now.
Smiling she gazed on my discomfiture. The lovely lines of the hills,
curving about the loch, and with their deepest dip just opposite where I
sat, were all of a golden autumn brown, except in the violet distance.
The grass of Parnassus grew thick and white around me, with its moonlight
tint of green in the veins. On a hillside by a brook the countryfolk
were winning their hay, and their voices reached me softly from far off.
On the loch the marsh-fowl flashed and dipped, the wild ducks played and
dived and rose; first circling high and higher, then, marshalled in the
shape of a V, they made for Alemoor. A solitary heron came quite near
me, and tried his chance with the fish, but I think he had no luck. All
this is pleasant to remember, and I made rude sketches in the fly-leaves
of a copy of Hogg's poems, where I kept my flies. But what joy was there
in this while the "take" grew fainter and ceased at least near the shore?
Out in the middle, where few flies managed to float, the trout were at it
till dark. But near shore there was just one trout who never stopped
gorging all day. He lived exactly opposite the nick in the distant
hills, and exactly a yard farther out than I could throw a fly. He was a
big one, and I am inclined to think that he was the Devil. For, if I had
stepped in deeper, and the water had come over my wading boots, the odds
are that my frail days on earth would have been ended by a chill, and I
knew this, and yet that fish went on tempting me to my ruin. I suppose I
tried to reach him a dozen times, and cast a hundred, but it was to no
avail. At length, as the afternoon grew grey and chill, I pitched a rock
at him, by way of showing that I saw through his fiendish guile, and I
walked away.
There was no rise now, and the lake was leaden and gloomy. When I
reached the edge of the deep reeds I tried, once or twice, to wade
through them within casting distance of the water, but was always driven
off by the traitorous quagginess of the soil. At last, taking my courage
in both hands, I actually got so near that I could throw a fly over the
top of the tall reeds, and then came a heavy splash, and the wretched
little broken rod nearly doubled up. "Hooray, here I am among the big
ones!" I said, and held on. It was now that I learned the nature of
Nero's diversion when he was an angler in the Lake of Darkness. The loch
really did deserve the term "grim"; the water here was black, the sky was
ashen, the long green reeds closed cold about me, and beyond them there
was trout that I could not deal with. For when he tired of running,
which was soon, he was as far away as ever. Draw him through the forest
of reeds I could not. At last I did the fatal thing. I took hold of the
line, and then, "plop," as the poet said. He was off. A young sportsman
on the bank who had joined me expressed his artless disappointment. I
cast over the confounded reeds once more. "Splash!"--the old story! I
stuck to the fish, and got him into the watery wood, and then he went
where the lost trout go. No more came on, so I floundered a yard or two
farther, and climbed into a wild-fowl's nest, a kind of platform of
matted reeds, all yellow and faded. The nest immediately sank down deep
into the water, but it stopped somewhere, and I made a cast. The black
water boiled, and the trout went straight down and sulked. I merely held
on, till at last it seemed "time for us to go," and by cautious tugging I
got him through the reedy jungle, and "gruppit him," as the Shepherd
would have said. He was simply but decently wrapped round, from snout to
tail, in very fine water-weeds, as in a garment. Moreover, he was as
black as your hat, quite unlike the comely yellow trout who live on the
gravel in Clearburn. It hardly seemed sensible to get drowned in this
gruesome kind of angling, so, leaving the Lake of Darkness, we made for
Buccleugh, passing the cleugh where the buck was ta'en. Surely it is the
deepest, the steepest, and the greenest cleugh that is shone on by the
sun! Thereby we met an angler, an ancient man in hodden grey, strolling
home from the Rankle burn. And we told him of our bad day, and asked him
concerning that hideous fly, which had covered the loch and lured the
trout from our decent Greenwells and March browns. And the ancient man
listened to our description of the monster, and He said: "Hoot, ay; ye've
jest forgathered wi' the Bloody Doctor."
This, it appears, is the Border angler's name for the horrible insect, so
much appreciated by trout. So we drove home, when all the great
tableland was touched with yellow light from a rift in the west, and all
the broken hills looked blue against the silvery grey. God bless them!
for man cannot spoil them, nor any revolution shape them other than they
are. We see them as the folk from Flodden saw them, as Leyden knew them,
as they looked to William of Deloraine, as they showed in the eyes of Wat
of Harden and of Jamie Telfer of the Fair Dodhead. They have always
girdled a land of warriors and of people fond of song, from the oldest
ballad-maker to that Scotch Probationer who wrote,
Lay me here, where I may see
Teviot round his meadows flowing,
And about and over me
Winds and clouds for ever going.
It was dark before we splashed through the ford of Borthwick Water, and
dined, and wrote to Mr. Anderson of Princes Street, Edinburgh, for a
supply of Bloody Doctors. But we never had a chance to try them. I have
since fished Clearburn from a boat, but it was not a day of rising fish,
and no big ones came to the landing-net. There are plenty in the loch,
but you need not make the weary journey; they are not for you nor me.