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LORIOUS Kootenay!” That’s what the folders call it, and if any more
intense adjective could be found that too would be tacked on.
That Canadian Northwest strains the English language tremendously.
“Magnificent,” “splendid,” “grand,” “glorious,” are worn to frazzles by
constant use, and were it possible to roll them all into one big word,
it would still be utterly inadequate to express the native’s admiration
for his country. The chances are that the reader does not even know
where the Kootenay is, and, while we have a distinct aversion to playing
the part of a guide-book, we will go so far as to advise consultation of
a good map of British Columbia. Down in the southeastern corner you will
find Kootenay Lake and River, but the map does not reveal the rugged
mountains, the wine-like air, the sparkling water, the sunshine, the
peace, the restfulness, the TROUT that make the Kootenay one of God’s
best gifts to man.
The confession may as well be made first as last that we went to
the Kootenay country for the express purpose of fishing. This is no
disparagement to the people or to the scenery, for each stands at the
head of its class. But some philosopher has said (or if he has not he
ought to have done so): “Count that vacation wasted in which you do no
fishing.” Wasting a vacation is sinful; therefore we fish. Here in
the Kootenay are trout worthy of one’s skill; heroes of many battles;
cunning and adroit veterans who know all the tricks at the command of
the enemy.
Just below the point where the Kootenay River breaks out of the lake
is the little hamlet of Proctor. There is not much to the place but the
hotel and the name--yes, and the trout. The river is wide and deep, with
swift current and numberless counter-currents. Where the water rushes
around some rock or point of sand, where current struggles with current
and a great swirl grows out of the conflict, there the rainbow-trout
hold their town-meetings. We attended some of them and tried our
uttermost to break them up. It was in a visit to one of these gatherings
that the Junior made his bow to the inhabitants of the Kootenay waters.
Behold the young man (not quite four years old) seated in the stern of
the boat, rod firmly grasped, determination in his eye, while his aged
sire works the oars. To and fro over the waters for a little time, then
the rod bends sharply back, and far behind a quivering mass of colour
springs into the air and falls back with a mighty splash. “I’ve got
him!” cries the Junior, and “Hang on!” cries the Senior. And he does
hang on. Great boy, that! He’s as quiet and self-controlled as if only
purloining cookies out of the jar in the pantry. It must be confessed
that the fond father gave a little aid in landing the victim, but what
of that? A noble two-pounder is lying in the bottom of the boat, and
if there is a prouder mortal in the universe than that boy it is his
venerable father.
But it is the house-boat concerning which we set out to write. Be it
known that the Canadian Pacific Railway Company maintains a finely
furnished house-boat on the Kootenay waters for such visitors as may
desire to realize the utmost of human happiness. Can you see it in your
mind’s eye? Sixty feet long by about twenty in width, four staterooms
with two berths each, servants’ quarters, kitchen, pantry, storerooms,
toilets, cabin. On the upper deck are chairs, and here, under the shade
of the awning, we rest after the arduous labour of doing nothing. The
houseboat is towed to any point on river or lake which you may select,
and tied up to the shore. The steamer stops daily on its trips from
Nelson to Kootenay Landing to take your orders for provisions or to
bring supplies. A Chinaman does the “house work,” including alleged
cooking. Do you get the picture?
It was five o’clock on a Friday afternoon when the tug and the
house-boat picked us up at Proctor. By “us” is meant the Preacher and
his family, together with the Doctor and his daughter. The wind was
blowing fresh from the south, and our destination was twenty miles away.
Once out of the river where the wind could get a fair chance at us,
and that house-boat began to buck. Perhaps you think there are no
possibilities of a heavy sea on an inland lake. If so, you will do well
to think again. Kootenay Lake is more than one hundred miles long with
an average width of some five miles. Great mountains guard it on either
side, and up that long tunnel the wind came with a whoop. The boat was
lashed to the windward side of the tug, and so was in position to get
the full benefit of any slap that the waves thought best to give. We
rose and fell and heaved about. The hawsers were not absolutely taut,
and ever and again the boat would be knocked against the tug with a jar
that made everything rattle. It was time for supper, and the potatoes
were on to boil and the tea-kettle was just beginning to sing, when
a huge wave lifted us up and hurled us against the tug. Over went
potatoes, tea-kettle, kerosene can and everything else that was not
nailed down, while the dishes flew from their resting-places and smashed
to pieces on the floor. Who cares? Certain members of the party did not,
at any rate, for they had lost all interest in the food supply, and were
in retirement. Huge joke, to be sea-sick on a house-boat! The captain
yells from the tug that we must abandon the thought of making Midge
Creek that night, and heads for Pilot Bay, across the lake. Blessed
haven! In a landlocked harbour anchor is dropped and in a short time
order is brought out of chaos, and the discouraged members of the party
regain their appetites.
At four o’clock the next morning we are awakened by the chugging of the
tug. Day is just breaking, and the lake is as smooth as the floor of a
bowling alley. Three hours later we are tied up to a sandy beach on the
west shore of the lake, and vacation has really begun. Not a house is to
be seen except two or three in the distance on the opposite shore. Ten
rods away, to the north, a mountain stream comes rushing down the canyon
and goes billowing far out into the lake. At the south end of the beach
a giant mass of bare rock lifts itself into the air, while the mountains
are all about us. Here and there a snowy peak looms into the blue. The
lake dimples and smiles under a cloudless sky, and murmurs a gentle
welcome as it laps upon the gravelly beach. This is a beautiful world,
and nowhere more beautiful than on the shores of the Kootenay.
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What about the fishing? In view of the dictum recently rendered by
certain inordinately good people and recorded in one of our great
religious weeklies, that question is clearly out of order. It has been
decided by those who have no question as to their infallibility that it
is wicked to catch fish. (Poor Peter! How thoroughly ashamed of himself
he would be were he living in this day of ethical enlightenment.) Let
it be understood before proceeding further, that our action has historic
precedent in the well-known case of the boy and the woodchuck. We had to
fish. We were forty miles from the base of supplies. The Doctor and the
Junior and the girls and the head of the house and the Chinaman and
the Preacher must eat or perish. As each and all manifested a strong
prejudice against perishing, some one must fish. The Preacher offers
himself as a hesitating violator of that high-toned, transcendental
morality which places fishing among the mortal sins, and the Doctor aids
and abets him.
Just here listen to a word of advice: If you will fish, provide yourself
with a friend so unselfish that he will joyously perjure himself by
declaring that he does not care anything about the sport and prefers to
row the boat. It is important to have good tackle, carefully selected
flies, a rod that will stand strain and a line that runs freely; but the
_sine qua non_ is a companion whose generosity is so much greater than
your own that he will insist upon turning himself into a motor for your
benefit. Such a man is the Doctor. May all blessings rest upon him!
Those golden hours on the Kootenay were enriched by his companionship,
and his unselfishness materially increased the Preacher’s score.
Now we are off. The trunks have been unpacked, the “girls” are tidying
up the boat, the Junior is busy floating his ships from the shore, and
the row-boat, with the Doctor at the oars and the Preacher waving his
rod, is rounding the point of rocks to the south. Repeated casts of the
flies find nothing doing. At last there is a swirl and a tug. But what
sort of a trout is it at the end of the line? He pulls and plunges, but
there is never a jump nor any indication of a purpose to break water. It
is not much of a fight, anyhow, and the net lifts in a fish the like
of which neither Doctor nor Preacher has ever seen before. Large head,
enormous mouth, brownish back and sides with yellowish belly, he looks
something like a salt water ling. And that was the sum total of the
morning’s catch. Not much slaughter of the innocents about that! We
ventured to cook that unclassified victim, and he was not bad as food
for the starving. Later on the Doctor learned from the hermit--of course
we had a hermit--that the stranger is called a “squaw-fish,” although it
is said that the proper name is “squawk-fish,” so called from the noise
it makes when caught.
Is this all that the far-famed Kootenay can furnish? Must it be told
to future generations that two able-bodied men spent a half-day of
strenuous toil and only captured a plebeian squaw-fish? Well, tell it
if you must, but when you get started keep right on and tell the whole
story. That afternoon we deserted the calm water along the shore and
struck out for the tumbling billows made by Midge Creek as it rushes
into the lake. Then and there the sport began. The trout were at home
and receiving callers. The gaudy “Parmachene Belle” had no sooner struck
the water than snap--whizz--jump--splash--landing net--two-pounder, and
then it all began over again. We had struck our gait.
What fishing! Did you ever catch a rainbow trout? If not, you have yet
to live. He is a combination of gymnast and dynamo. When communications
have been established, he at once begins a series of acrobatic
performances which leave no doubt as to his agility. The writer counted
twelve jumps made by one fish before he was brought to net. These were
not little disturbances of the surface of the water, just enough to give
notice of his whereabouts--but clean leaps. How high? How would three
feet do? If that’s too much, take off an inch. Especially fascinating
was the sport after sundown, when the dusk was upon the face of the
waters. Then, with a “white miller” as lure, we circled the broken
water, knowing not where the fly lighted, but certain that it would be
seen and craved by some hungry trout.
But it was in the early morning that the most wonderful phenomena were
seen. The writer pledges his word that if he had not been there he would
not believe it (the reader is not expected to credit the statement),
but the Preacher, on divers and sundry occasions, left his berth before
sunrise and went out to fish. The grey is in the eastern sky, and the
lake motionless. Nothing breaks the silence but the roar of the creek
or the sharp challenge of a chipmunk. Rowing slowly along the shore, the
world seems as fresh as if newly born. A tip-up teeters along the
beach, a thrush sings his morning hymn of praise among the trees on the
mountain side, and now the sun peeps over a notch in the eastern hills.
Did you ever see more exquisite colouring than the brown of the moss
upon that rock, or the delicate shades of green in that clump of trees?
The fish are not early risers, or, if they are up, have not found their
appetites: but what matters it? Here are peace and beauty; God’s good
world at its best.
Just one little story about the big trout. It was close by a face of
rock that rose sheer from the water for fifty feet or more, that we
struck him. Up and again up, in mighty leaps clear from the water he
flung himself. With great surges he carried out the line, and then
allowed himself to be coaxed gently toward the boat. When the Preacher
fancied that the fight was well over and the great fish could be seen
plainly but a few feet from the boat, there was another rush, and this
straight down. There were one hundred and fifty feet of line on the
reel, and the old warrior took out every inch of it. Where did he go?
To China for aught the writer knows--but he came back. Slowly and
reluctantly he yielded to the steady strain, and at last lay in the
bottom of the boat, a dream of beauty. Three pounds and a quarter! The
biggest rainbow trout caught in the Kootenay this summer; so the Nelson
fishermen aver! Hooray!!!
By this time, the members of the gentler sex are saying, “It must have
been deadly dull for the ‘girls.’” Far from it. Ask the Preacheress, and
she will tell you that every moment of every day was full of happiness.
That you may have a glimpse at some of the experiences which helped to
make the hours pass pleasantly, listen to the tale of the chipmunks. The
whole family looked at us askance when we first tied up near their home.
Just a hurried scamper along the logs, and then away they fled with a
warning chatter. Two days had not passed before they were eating crumbs
thrown out for them. On the third day their suspicions were so far
allayed that they ate from the hand of one of the party. After that, not
a day passed, and hardly an hour of daylight, but some one could be seen
holding out a crust at which a chipmunk was gnawing away. They lost all
fear and would crawl over the knees and sometimes up on the shoulders in
search of rations. They would allow us to stroke their heads and feel
of the cheek-pouches in which they stored away food, without raising
the slightest objections. When we left they had come to seem like old
friends. They deserved better treatment at our hands than was accorded
them, and the writer’s heart is filled with self-reproach as he recalls
the dastardly act with which we closed our relations with these little
friends. We gave them Jimmie’s pie! (Jimmie was the Chinese cook.) Near
the close of our stay he manufactured the most wonderful and in every
way impossible pie ever achieved by human ingenuity. One after another,
every member of the party attacked that combination, only to suffer
defeat. It was still intact when the time came to leave. It would have
had abiding interest as a specimen, but there was danger that it might
be broken in transit, so we left it for those confiding chipmunks. One
thing is sure, if living, they must be woefully discouraged.
Jimmie was a character. What he did not know about the English language
was equalled only by his abysmal ignorance of cooking. Asked to bring
some breakfast-food for the Junior, he disappeared kitchenward, and
when, after a long absence, one of the party went in search of him,
he was discovered proudly bearing toward the table--a canteloupe. But
Jimmie did his best, and that was quite enough to satisfy the happy
members of our little family. He could boil potatoes well, and the water
that he brought from Midge Creek was always first-class. Then, too, we
had cooks of our own.
“Time to stop,” do I hear the weary reader say? Very likely, but the
half has not been told. You should hear about the “hermit,” with his
long, white hair and beard, his piercing eyes, his little shack and
garden and the romantic love-affair which is said to have driven him
into voluntary exile. You have not heard of the hard tramp up the
canyon, past almost innumerable cascades and rapids, back and upwards
until a pool is reached where a great throng of mountain trout is
assembled. That marvellous rainbow which followed the Sunday afternoon
storm must be ignored. The Junior’s sand-wells, his fall from the
gang-plank resulting in a broken collar-bone, the fracas with a colony
of yellow-jackets, the night of storm when we feared lest the cables
break and we go drifting at the mercy of wind and waves--but what’s the
use? You will never know what you have missed through your insistence
that you’ve had enough. The writer had intended to tell of the total
depravity of those trout, manifested on the Sundays of our stay with
them, as they gathered _en masse_ at the stern of the house-boat and
dared the Preacher to cast a fly. Perhaps it is just as well to stop
right here, for words cannot be found with which to describe the
ministerial struggle.
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_Angling is an art, and an art worth learning; the question is whether
you be capable of learning it. For Angling is something like Poetry, men
are to be born so. I mean with inclinations to it, though both may be
heightened by discourse and practice. But he that hopes to be a good
Angler, must not only bring an inquiring, searching, observing wit;
but he must bring a large measure of hope and patience, and a love and
propensity to the art itself; but by having once got and practised it,
then doubt not but Angling will prove to be so pleasant, that it will
prove to be like virtue, a reward to itself._--Izaak Walton, _The
Complete Angler._
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