The story of the following adventure--this deplorable confession, one may
say--will not have been written in vain if it impresses on young minds
the supreme necessity of carefulness about details. Let the "casual" and
regardless who read it--the gatless, as they say in Suffolk--ponder the
lesson which it teaches: a lesson which no amount of bitter experience
has ever impressed on the unprincipled narrator. Never do anything
carelessly whether in fishing or in golf, and carry this important maxim
even into the most serious affairs of life. Many a battle has been lost,
no doubt, by lack of ammunition, or by plenty of ammunition which did not
happen to suit the guns; and many a salmon has been lost, ay, and many a
trout, for want of carefulness, and through a culpable inattention to the
soundness of your gut, and tackle generally. What fiend is it that
prompts a man just to try a hopeless cast, in a low water, without
testing his tackle? As sure as you do that, up comes the fish, and with
his first dash breaks your casting line, and leaves you lamenting. This
doctrine I preach, being my own "awful example." "Bad and careless
little boy," my worthy master used to say at school; and he would have
provoked a smile in other circumstances. But Mr. Trotter, of the
Edinburgh Academy, had something about him (he usually carried it in the
tail-pocket of his coat) which inspired respect and discouraged ribaldry.
Would that I had listened to Mr. Trotter; would that I had corrected, in
early life, the happy-go-lucky disposition to scatter my Greek accents,
as it were, with a pepper-caster, to fish with worn tackle, and,
generally, to make free with the responsibilities of life and literature.
It is too late to amend, but others may learn wisdom from this spectacle
of deserved misfortune and absolute discomfiture.
I am not myself a salmon-fisher, though willing to try that art again,
and though this is a tale of salmon. To myself the difference between
angling for trout and angling for salmon is like the difference between a
drawing of Lionardo's, in silver point, and a loaded landscape by
MacGilp, R.A. Trout-fishing is all an idyll, all delicacy--that is,
trout-fishing on the Test or on the Itchen. You wander by clear water,
beneath gracious poplar-trees, unencumbered with anything but a slim rod
of Messrs. Hardy's make, and a light toy-box of delicate flies. You need
seldom wade, and the water is shallow, the bottom is of silver gravel.
You need not search all day at random, but you select a rising trout, and
endeavour to lay the floating fly delicately over him. If you part with
him, there is always another feeding merrily:
Invenies alium si te hic fastidit.
It is like an excursion into Corot's country, it is rich in memories of
Walton and Cotton: it is a dream of peace, and they bring you your tea by
the riverside. In salmon-fishing, on the Tweed at least, all is
different. The rod, at all events the rod which some one kindly lent me,
is like a weaver's beam. The high heavy wading trousers and boots are
even as the armour of the giant of Gath. You have to plunge waist deep,
or deeper, into roaring torrents, and if the water be at all "drumly" you
have not an idea where your next step may fall. It may be on a hidden
rock, or on a round slippery boulder, or it may be into a deep "pot" or
hole. The inexperienced angler staggers like a drunken man, is
occasionally drowned, and more frequently is ducked. You have to cast
painfully, with steep precipitous banks behind you, all overgrown with
trees, with bracken, with bramble. It is a boy's work to disentangle the
fly from the branches of ash and elm and pine. There is no delicacy, and
there is a great deal of exertion in all this. You do not cast subtilely
over a fish which you know is there, but you swish, swish, all across the
current, with a strong reluctance to lift the line after each venture and
try another. The small of the back aches, and it is literally in the
sweat of your brow that you take your diversion. After all, there are
many blank days, when the salmon will look at no fly, or when you
encounter the Salmo irritans, who rises with every appearance of earnest
good-will, but never touches the hook, or, if he does touch it, runs out
a couple of yards of line, and vanishes for ever. What says the poet?
There's an accommodating fish,
In pool or stream, by rock or pot,
Who rises frequent as you wish,
At "Popham," "Parson," or "Jock Scott,"
Or almost any fly you've got
In all the furred and feathered clans.
You strike, but ah, you strike him not
He is the _Salmo irritans_!
It may be different in Norway or on the lower casts of the Tweed, as at
Floors, or Makerstoun; but higher up the country, in Scott's own country,
at Yair or Ashiesteil, there is often a terrible amount of fruitless work
to be done. And I doubt if, except in throwing a very long line, and
knowing the waters by old experience, there is very much skill in salmon-
fishing. It is all an affair of muscle and patience. The choice of
flies is almost a pure accident. Every one believes in the fly with
which he has been successful. These strange combinations of blues, reds,
golds, of tinsel and worsted, of feathers and fur, are purely fantastic
articles. They are like nothing in nature, and are multiplied for the
fanciful amusement of anglers. Nobody knows why salmon rise at them;
nobody knows why they will bite on one day and not on another, or rather,
on many others. It is not even settled whether we should use a bright
fly on a bright day, and a dark fly on a dark day, as Dr. Hamilton
advises, or reverse the choice as others use. Muscles and patience,
these, I repeat, are the only ingredients of ultimate success.
However, one does do at Rome as the Romans do, and fishes for salmon in
Tweed when the nets are off in October, when the yellowing leaves begin
to fall, and when that beautiful reach of wooded valley from Elibank to
the meeting of Tweed and Ettrick is in the height of its autumnal charm.
Why has Yarrow been so much more besung than Tweed, in spite of the
greater stream's far greater and more varied loveliness? The fatal duel
in the Dowie Dens of Yarrow and the lamented drowning of Willie there
have given the stream its 'pastoral melancholy,' and engaged Wordsworth
in the renown of the water. For the poetry of Tweed we have chiefly,
after Scott, to thank Mr. Stoddart, its loyal minstrel. "Dearer than all
these to me," he says about our other valleys, "is sylvan Tweed."
Let ither anglers choose their ain,
And ither waters tak' the lead
O' Hieland streams we covet nane,
But gie to us the bonny Tweed;
And gie to us the cheerfu' burn,
That steals into its valley fair,
The streamlets that, at ilka turn,
Sae saftly meet and mingle there.
He kept his promise, given in the following verse:
And I, when to breathe is a labour, and joy
Forgets me, and life is no longer the boy,
On the labouring staff, and the tremorous knee,
Will wander, bright river, to thee!
Life is always "the boy" when one is beside the Tweed. Times change, and
we change, for the worse. But the river changes little. Still he
courses through the keen and narrow rocks beneath the bridge of Yair.
From Yair, which hills so closely bind,
Scarce can the Tweed his passage find,
Though much he fret, and chafe, and toil,
Till all his eddying currents boil.
Still the water loiters by the long boat-pool of Yair, as though loath to
leave the drooping boughs of the elms. Still it courses with a deep eddy
through the Elm Wheel, and ripples under Fernilea, where the author of
the "Flowers of the Forest" lived in that now mouldering and roofless
hall, with the peaked turrets. Still Neidpath is fair, Neidpath of the
unhappy maid, and still we mark the tiny burn at Ashiesteil, how in
November,
Murmuring hoarse, and frequent seen,
Through bush and briar, no longer green,
An angry brook, it sweeps the glade,
Brawls over rock and wild cascade,
And foaming brown, with doubled speed,
Hurries its waters to the Tweed.
Still the old tower of Elibank is black and strong in ruin; Elibank, the
home of that Muckle Mou'd Meg, who made Harden after all a better bride
than he would have found in the hanging ash-tree of her father. These
are unaltered, mainly, since Scott saw them last, and little altered is
the homely house of Ashiesteil, where he had been so happy. And we, too,
feel but little change among those scenes of long ago, those best-beloved
haunts of boyhood, where we have had so many good days and bad, days of
rising trout and success; days of failure, and even of half-drowning.
One cannot reproduce the charm of the strong river in pool and stream, of
the steep rich bank that it rushes or lingers by, of the green and
heathery hills beyond, or the bare slopes where the blue slate breaks
through among the dark old thorn-trees, remnants of the forest. It is
all homely and all haunted, and, if a Tweedside fisher might have his
desire, he would sleep the long sleep in the little churchyard that lies
lonely above the pool of Caddon-foot, and hard by Christopher North's
favourite quarters at Clovenfords.
However, while we are still on earth, Caddon-foot is more attractive for
her long sweep of salmon-pool--the home of sea-trout too--than precisely
for her kirk-yard. There will be time enough for that, and time it is to
recur to the sad story of the big fish and the careless angler. It was
about the first day of October, and we had enjoyed a "spate."
Salmon-fishing is a mere child of the weather; with rain almost anybody
may raise fish, without it all art is apt to be vain. We had been
blessed with a spate. On Wednesday the Tweed had been roaring red from
bank to bank. Salmon-fishing was wholly out of the question, and it is
to be feared that the innumerable trout-fishers, busy on every eddy, were
baiting with salmon roe, an illegal lure. On Thursday the red tinge had
died out of the water, but only a very strong wader would have ventured
in; others had a good chance, if they tried it, of being picked up at
Berwick. Friday was the luckless day of my own failure and broken heart.
The water was still very heavy and turbid, a frantic wind was lashing the
woods, heaps of dead leaves floated down, and several sheaves of corn
were drifted on the current. The long boat-pool at Yair, however, is
sheltered by wooded banks, and it was possible enough to cast, in spite
of the wind's fury. We had driven from a place about five miles distant,
and we had not driven three hundred yards before I remembered that we had
forgotten the landing-net. But, as I expected nothing, it did not seem
worth while to go back for this indispensable implement. We reached the
waterside, and found that the trout were feeding below the pendent
branches of the trees and in the quiet, deep eddies of the long
boat-pool. One cannot see rising trout without casting over them, in
preference to labouring after salmon, so I put up a small rod and
diverted myself from the bank. It was to little purpose. Tweed trout
are now grown very shy and capricious; even a dry fly failed to do any
execution worth mentioning. Conscience compelled me, as I had been sent
out by kind hosts to fish for salmon, not to neglect my orders. The
armour--the ponderous gear of the fisher--was put on with the enormous
boots, and the gigantic rod was equipped. Then came the beginning of
sorrows. We had left the books of salmon flies comfortably reposing at
home. We had also forgotten the whiskey flask. Everything, in fact,
except cigarettes, had been left behind. Unluckily, not quite
everything: I had a trout fly-book, and therein lay just one large salmon
fly, not a Tweed fly, but a lure that is used on the beautiful and
hopeless waters of the distant Ken, in Galloway. It had brown wings, a
dark body, and a piece of jungle-cock feather, and it was fastened to a
sea-trout casting-line. Now, if I had possessed no salmon flies at all,
I must either have sent back for some, or gone on innocently dallying
with trout. But this one wretched fly lured me to my ruin. I saw that
the casting-line had a link which seemed rather twisted. I tried it;
but, in the spirit of Don Quixote with his helmet, I did not try it hard.
I waded into the easiest-looking part of the pool, just above a huge tree
that dropped its boughs to the water, and began casting, merely from a
sense of duty. I had not cast a dozen times before there was a heavy,
slow plunge in the stream, and a glimpse of purple and azure.
"That's him," cried a man who was trouting on the opposite bank.
Doubtless it was "him," but he had not touched the hook. I believe the
correct thing would have been to wait for half an hour, and then try the
fish with a smaller fly. But I had no smaller fly, no other fly at all.
I stepped back a few paces, and fished down again. In Major Traherne's
work I have read that the heart leaps, or stands still, or otherwise
betrays an uncomfortable interest, when one casts for the second time
over a salmon which has risen. I cannot honestly say that I suffered
from this tumultuous emotion. "He will not come again," I said, when
there was a long heavy drag at the line, followed by a shrieking of the
reel, as in Mr. William Black's novels. Let it be confessed that the
first hooking of a salmon is an excitement unparalleled in trout-fishing.
There have been anglers who, when the salmon was once on, handed him over
to the gillie to play and land. One would like to act as gillie to those
lordly amateurs. My own fish rushed down stream, where the big tree
stands. I had no hope of landing him if he took that course, because one
could neither pass the rod under the boughs, nor wade out beyond them.
But he soon came back, while one took in line, and discussed his probable
size with the trout-fisher opposite. His size, indeed! Nobody knows
what it was, for when he had come up to the point whence he had started,
he began a policy of violent short tugs--not "jiggering," as it is
called, but plunging with all his weight on the line. I had clean
forgotten the slimness of the tackle, and, as he was clearly well hooked,
held him perhaps too hard. Only a very raw beginner likes to take hours
over landing a fish. Perhaps I held him too tight: at all events, after
a furious plunge, back came the line; the casting line had snapped at the
top link.
There was no more to be said or done, except to hunt for another fly in
the trout fly-book. Here there was no such thing, but a local spectator
offered me a huge fly, more like a gaff, and equipped with a large iron
eye for attaching the gut to. Withal I suspect this weapon was meant,
not for fair fishing, but for "sniggling." Now "sniggling" is a form of
cold-blooded poaching. In the open water, on the Ettrick, you may see
half a dozen snigglers busy. They all wear high wading trousers; they
are all armed with stiff salmon-rods and huge flies. They push the line
and the top joints of the rod deep into the water, drag it along, and
then bring the hook out with a jerk. Often it sticks in the side of a
salmon, and in this most unfair and unsportsmanlike way the free sport of
honest people is ruined, and fish are diminished in number. Now, the big
fly _may_ have been an honest character, but he was sadly like a rake-
hook in disguise. He did not look as if an fish could fancy him. I,
therefore, sent a messenger across the river to beg, buy, or borrow a fly
at "The Nest." But this pretty cottage is no longer the home of the
famous angling club, which has gone a mile or two up the water and
builded for itself a new dwelling. My messenger came back with one small
fatigued-looking fly, a Popham, I think, which had been lent by some one
at a farmhouse. The water was so heavy that the small fly seemed
useless; however, we fastened it on as a dropper, using the sniggler as
the trail fly; so exhausted were our resources, that I had to cut a piece
of gut off a minnow tackle and attach the small fly to that. The tiny
gut loop of the fly was dreadfully frayed, and with a heavy heart I began
fishing again. My friend on the opposite side called out that big fish
were rising in the bend of the stream, so thither I went, stumbling over
rocks, and casting with much difficulty, as the high overgrown banks
permit no backward sweep of the line. You are obliged to cast by a kind
of forward thrust of the arms, a knack not to be acquired in a moment. I
splashed away awkwardly, but at last managed to make a straight, clean
cast. There was a slight pull, such as a trout gives in mid-stream under
water. I raised the point, and again the reel sang aloud and gleefully
as the salmon rushed down the stream farther and faster than the first.
It is a very pleasant thing to hook a salmon when you are all alone, as I
was then--alone with yourself and the Goddess of Fishing. This salmon,
just like the other, now came back, and instantly began the old tactics
of heavy plunging tugs. But I knew the gut was sound this time, and as I
fancied he had risen to the sniggler, I had no anxiety about the tackle
holding. One more plunge, and back came the line as before. He was off.
One could have sat down and gnawed the reel. What had gone wrong? Why,
the brute had taken the old fly from the farmhouse and had snapped the
loop that attaches the gut. The little loop was still on the fragment of
minnow tackle which fastened it to the cast.
There was no more chance, for there were now no more flies, except a
small "cobbery," a sea-trout fly from the Sound of Mull. It was time for
us to go, with a heavy heart and a basket empty, except for two or three
miserable trout. The loss of those two salmon, whether big or little
fish, was not the whole misfortune. All the chances of the day were
gone, and seldom have salmon risen so freely. I had not been casting
long enough to smoke half a cigarette, when I hooked each of those fish.
They rose at flies which were the exact opposites of each other in size,
character, and colour. They were ready to rise at anything but the
sniggler. And I had nothing to offer them, absolutely nothing bigger
than a small red-spinner from the Test. On that day a fisher, not far
off, hooked nine salmon and landed four of them, in one pool, I never had
such a chance before; the heavy flood and high wind had made the salmon
as "silly" as perch. One might have caught half a dozen of the great
sturdy fellows, who make all trout, even sea-trout, seem despicable
minnows. Next day I fished again in the same water, with a friend. I
rose a fish, but did not hook it, and he landed a small one, five minutes
after we started, and we only had one other rise all the rest of the day.
Probably it was not dark and windy enough, but who can explain the
caprices of salmon? The only certain thing is, that carelessness always
brings misfortune; that if your tackle is weak fish will hook themselves
on days, and in parts of the water, where you expected nothing, and then
will go away with your fly and your casting-lines. Fortune never
forgives. He who is lazy, and takes no trouble because he expects no
fish, will always be meeting heart-breaking adventures. One should never
make a hopeless or careless cast; bad luck lies in wait for that kind of
performance. These are the experiences that embitter a man, as they
embittered Dean Swift, who, old and ill, neglected and in Irish exile,
still felt the pang of losing a great trout when he was a boy. What
pleasure is there in landscape and tradition when such accidents befall
you?
The sun upon the Weirdlaw hill,
In Ettrick's vale is sinking sweet.
There is a fire of autumn colour in the tufted woods that embosom
Fernilea. "Bother the setting sun," we say, and the Maid of Neidpath,
and the "Flowers of the Forest," and the memories of Scott at Ashiesteil,
and of Muckle Mou'd Meg, at Elibank. These are filmy, shadowy pleasures
of the fancy, these cannot minister to the mind of him who has been
"broken" twice, who cannot resume the contest for want of ammunition, and
who has not even brought the creature-comfort of a flask. Since that
woful day I have lain on the bank and watched excellent anglers skilfully
flogging the best of water, and that water full of fish, without hooking
one. Salmon-fishing, then, is a matter of chance, or of plodding
patience. They will rise on one day at almost any fly (but the
sniggler), however ill-presented to them. On a dozen other days no fly
and no skill will avail to tempt them. The salmon is a brainless brute
and the grapes are sour!
If only the gut had held, this sketch would have ended with sentiment,
and a sunset, and the music of Ettrick, the melody of Tweed. In the
gloaming we'd be roaming homeward, telling, perhaps, the story of the
ghost seen by Sir Walter Scott near Ashiesteil, or discussing the Roman
treasure still buried near Oakwood Tower, under an inscribed stone which
men saw fifty years ago. Or was it a treasure of Michael Scott's, who
lived at Oakwood, says tradition? Let Harden dig for Harden's gear, it
is not for me to give hints as to its whereabouts. After all that ill-
luck, to be brief, one is not in the vein for legendary lore, nor
memories of boyhood, nor poetry, nor sunsets. I do not believe that one
ever thinks of the landscape or of anything else, while there is a chance
for a fish, and no abundance of local romance can atone for an empty
creel. Poetical fishers try to make people believe these fallacies;
perhaps they impose on themselves; but if one would really enjoy
landscape, one should leave, not only the fly-book and the landing-net,
but the rod and reel at home. And so farewell to the dearest and fairest
of all rivers that go on earth, fairer than Eurotas or Sicilian Anapus
with its sea-trout; farewell--for who knows how long?--to the red-fringed
Gleddis-wheel, the rock of the Righ-wheel, the rushing foam of the
Gullets, the woodland banks of Caddon-foot.
The valleys of England are wide,
Her rivers rejoice every one,
In grace and in beauty they glide,
And water-flowers float at their side,
As they gleam in the rays of the sun.
But where are the speed and the spray--
The dark lakes that welter them forth,
Tree and heath nodding over their way--
The rock and the precipice grey,
That bind the wild streams of the North?
Well, both, are good, the streams of north and south, but he who has
given his heart to the Tweed, as did Tyro, in Homer, to the Enipeus will
never change his love.
P.S.--That Galloway fly--"The Butcher and Lang"--has been avenged. A
copy of him, on the line of a friend, has proved deadly on the Tweed,
killing, among other victims, a sea-trout of thirteen pounds.