There the new-breeched urchin stands on the low bridge of the little bit
burnie! and with crooked pin, baited with one unwrithing ring of a dead
worm, and attached to a yarn-thread, for he has not yet got into hair,
and is years off gut, his rod of the mere willow or hazel wand, there
will he stand during all his play-hours, as forgetful of his primer as
if the weary art of printing had never been invented, day after day,
week after week, month after month, in mute, deep, earnest, passionate,
heart-mind-and-soul engrossing hope of some time or other catching a
minow or a beardie!
[Illustration: 178]
A tug--a tug! with face ten times flushed and pale by turns ere you
could count ten, he at last has strength, in the agitation of his fear
and joy, to pull away at the monster--and there he lies in his beauty
among the gowans on the greensward, for he has whapped him right over
his head and far away, a fish a quarter of an ounce in weight, and, at
the very least, two inches long! Off he flies, on wings of wind, to
his father, mother, and sisters, and brothers, and cousins, and all the
neighbourhood, holding the fish aloft in both hands, still fearful of
its escape, and, like a genuine child of corruption, his eyes brighten
at the first blush of cold blood on his small fishy-fumy fingers. He
carries about with him, up stairs and down stairs, his prey upon a
plate; he will not wash his hands before dinner, for he exults in the
silver scales adhering to the thumbnail, that scooped the pin out of the
baggy’s maw--and at night, “cabin’d, cribb’d, confined,” he is overheard
murmuring in his sleep, a thief, a robber, and a murderer, in his yet
infant dreams!
From that hour Angling is no more a mere delightful day-dream, haunted
by the dim hopes of imaginary minnows, but a reality--an art--a
science--of which the flaxen headed school-boy feels himself to be
master--a mystery in which he has been initiated, and off he goes
now, all alone, in the power of successful passion, to the distant
brook--brook a mile off--with fields, and hedges, and single trees, and
little groves, and a huge forest of six acres, between him and the house
in which he is boarded or was born! There flows on the slender music
of the shadowy shallows--there pours the deeper din of the birch-tree’d
waterfall. The sacred water-pyet flits away from stone to stone, and
dipping, disappears among the airy bubbles, to him a new sight of joy
and wonder. And oh! how sweet the scent of the broom or furze, yellowing
along the braes, where leap the lambs, less happy than he, on the knolls
of sunshine! His grandfather has given him a half-crown rod, in two
pieces--yes, his line is of hair twisted--platted by his own soon
instructed little fingers. By heavens, he is fishing with the fly! and
the Fates, who, grim and grisly as they are painted to be by full-grown,
ungrateful, lying poets, smile like angels upon the padler in the brook,
winnowing the air with their wings into western breezes, while at the
very first throw, the yellow trout forsakes his fastness beneath the
bog-wood, and with a lazy wallop, and then a sudden plunge, and then a
race like lightning, changes at once the child into the boy, and
shoots through his thrilling and aching heart the ecstacy of a new
life expanding in that glorious pastime, even as a rainbow on a sudden
brightens up the sky. _Fortuna favet fortibus_--and with one long pull,
and strong pull, and pull altogether, Johnny lands a twelve incher on
the soft, smooth, silvery sand of the only bay in all the burn where
such an exploit was possible, and dashing upon him like an Osprey, soars
up with him in his talons to the bank, breaking his line as he hurries
off to a spot of safety, twenty yards from the pool, and then flinging
him down on a heath-surrounded plat of sheep-nibbled verdure, lets him
bounce about till he is tired, and lies gasping with unfrequent and
feeble motions, bright and beautiful, and glorious with all his yellow
light and crimson lustre, spotted, speckled, and starred in his scaly
splendour, beneath a sun that never shone before so dazzlingly; but now
the radiance of the captive creature is dimmer and obscured, for the
eye of day winks and seems almost shut behind that slow sailing mass of
clouds, composed in equal parts of air, rain, and sunshine.
Springs, summers, autumns, winters,--each within itself longer, by many
times longer than the whole year of grown up life, that slips at last
through one’s fingers like a knotless thread,--pass over the curled
darling’s brow, and look at him now, a straight and strengthy stripling,
in the savage spirit of sport, springing over rock-ledge after
rock-ledge, nor heeding aught as he splashes knee-deep, or waist-band
high, through river-feeding torrents, to the glorious music of his
running and ringing reel after a tongue-hooked salmon, insanely seeking
with the ebb of tide, but all in vain, the white breakers of the sea. No
hazel or willow wand, no half-crown rod of ash framed by village wright,
is now in his practised hands, of which the very left is dexterous: but
a twenty feet rod of Phin’s, all ring-rustling, and a-glitter with the
preserving varnish, limber as the attenuating line itself, and lithe
to its topmost tenuity as the elephant’s proboscis--the hiccory and the
horn without twist, knot, or flaw, from butt to fly, a faultless taper,
“fine by degrees, and beautifully less.” the beau ideal of a rod by the
skill of a cunning craftsman to the senses materialised! A fish-fat,
fair, and forty! “She is a salmon, therefore to be woo’d--she is a
salmon, therefore to be won”--but shy, timid, capricious, headstrong,
now wrathful, and now full of fear, like any other female whom the cruel
artist has hooked by lip or heart, and, in spite of all her struggling,
will bring to the gasp at last, and then with calm eyes behold her lying
in the shade dead, or worse than dead, fast-fading and to be reillumined
no more the lustre of her beauty, insensible to sun or shower, even the
most perishable of all perishable things in a world of perishing!--But
the salmon has grown sulky, and must be made to spring to the plunging
stone. There, suddenly, instinct with new passion, she shoots out of the
foam, like a bar of silver bullion; and, relapsing into the flood, is
in another moment at the very head of the water-fall! Give her the
butt--give her the butt--or she is gone for ever with the thunder into
ten fathom deep! Now comes the trial of your tackle--and when was
Phin ever known to fail at the edge of cliff or cataract? Her snout is
southwards--right up the middle of the main current of the hill-born
river, as if she would seek its very course where she was spawned! She
still swims swift, and strong, and deep--and the line goes, steady,
boys, steady--stiff and steady as a Tory in the roar of opposition.
There is yet an hour’s play in her dorsal fin--danger in the flap of her
tail--and yet may her silver shoulder shatter the gut against a rock.
Why, the river was yesterday in spate, and she is fresh run from the
sea. All the lesser waterfalls are now level with the flood, and
she meets with no impediment or obstruction--the course is clear--no
tree-roots here--no floating branches, for during the night they have
all been swept down to the salt loch--_in medio tutissimus ibis_--ay,
now you feel she begins to fail--the butt tells now every time you
deliver your right. What! another mad leap! yet another sullen
plunge! She seems absolutely to have discovered, or rather to be an
impersonation of the Perpetual Motion. Stand back out of the way, you
son of a sea-cook--you in the tattered blue breeches, with the tail
of your shirt hanging out. Who the devil sent you all here, ye
vagabonds?--Ha! Watty Richie, my man, is that you? God bless your honest
laughing phiz! What Watty, would you think of a Fish like that about
Peebles? Tam Grieve never gruppit sae heavy a ane since first he
belanged to the Council. Curse that colley! Ay! well done Watty! Stone
him to Stobbo. Confound these stirks--if that white one, with caving
horns, kicking heels, and straight up tail, come bellowing by between
me and the river, then, “Madam! all is lost, except honour!” If we lose
this Fish at six o’clock, then suicide at seven. Our will is made--ten
thousand to the Foundling--ditto to the Thames Tunnel-ha--ha--my beauty!
Methinks we could fain and fond kiss thy silver side languidly lying
afloat on the foam, as if all farther resistance now were vain,
and gracefully thou wert surrendering thyself to death No faith in
female--she trusts to the last trial of her tail--sweetly workest thou,
O Reel of Reels! and on thy smooth axle spinning sleep’st, even,
as Milton describes her, like our own worthy planet.
Scrope--Bainbridge--Maule--princes among Anglers--oh! that you were
here! Where the devil is Sir Humphrey? At his retort? By mysterious
sympathy--far off at his own Trows, the Kerss feels that we are killing
the noblest Fish, whose back ever rippled the surface of deep or shallow
in the Tweed. Tom Purdy stands like a seer, entranced in glorious
vision, beside turreted Abbotsford. Shade of Sandy Givan! Alas! alas!
Poor Sandy--why on thy pale face that melancholy smile!--Peter! The
Gaff! The Gaff! Into the eddy she saüs, sick and slow, and almost with
a swirl--whitening as she nears the sand--there she has it--struck
right into the shoulder, fairer than that of Juno, Diana, Minerva, or
Venus--fair as the shoulder of our own beloved, and lies at last in all
her glorious length and breadth of beaming beauty, fit prey for giant or
demi-god angling before the Flood!
“The child is father of the man,
And I would wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety!”
So much for the Angler. The Shooter again, he begins with his pop
or pipe gun, formed of the last year’s growth of a branch of the
plane-tree--the beautiful dark-green-leaved and fragrant-flowered
plane-tree, that stands straight in stem and round in head, visible
and audible too from afar the bee-resounding umbrage, alike on stormy
sea-coast and in sheltered inland vale, still loving the roof of the
fisherman’s or peasant’s cottage.
Then comes, perhaps, the city popgun, in shape like a very musket, such
as soldiers bear--a Christmas present from parent--once a Colonel of
volunteers--nor feeble to discharge the pea-bullet or barley-shot,
formidable to face and eyes; nor yet unfelt, at six paces, by hinder
end of play-mate, scornfully yet fearfully exposed. But the shooter soon
tires of such ineffectual trigger--and his soul, as well as his hair,
is set on fire by that extraordinary compound--Gunpowder. He begins with
burning off his eyebrows on the King’s birth-day--squibs and crackers
follow--and all the pleasures of the pluff. But he soon longs to let off
a gun--“and follows to the field some warlike lord”--in hopes of being
allowed to discharge one of the double-barrels, after Ponto has made his
last point, and the half-hidden chimneys of home are again seen smoking
among the trees. This is his first practice in fire-arms, and from that
hour he is--a Shooter.
Then there is in most rural parishes--and of rural parishes alone do we
condescend to speak--a pistol, a horse one, with a bit of silver on
the butt--perhaps one that originally served in the Scots Greys. It is
bought, or borrowed, by the young shooter, who begins firing, first at
barn doors, then at trees, and then at living things--a strange cur,
who, from his lolling tongue, may be supposed to have the hydrophobia--a
cat that has purred herself asleep on the sunny church-yard wall, or is
watching mice at their hole-mouths among the graves--a water-rat in the
mill-lead--or weasel that, running to his retreat in the wall, always
turns round to look at you--a goose wandered from his common in
disappointed love--or brown duck, easily mistaken by the unscrupulous
for a wild one, in pond, remote from human dwelling, or on meadow by the
river side, away from the clack of the muter mill. The corby crow, too,
shouted out of his nest on some tree lower than usual, is a good flying
mark to the more advanced class, or morning magpie, a-chatter at skreigh
of day close to the cottage door among the chickens, or a flock of
pigeons wheeling over head on the stubble-field, or sitting so thick
together that every stook is blue with tempting plumage.
But the pistol is discharged for a fowling piece--brown and rusty,
with a slight crack, probably in the muzzle, and a lock, out of
all proportion, to the barrel. Then the young shooter aspires at
half-pennies thrown up into the air--and generally hit, for there is
never wanting an apparent dent in copper metal; and thence he mounts to
the glancing and skimming swallow, a household bird, and therefore to be
held sacred, but shot at on the excuse of its being next to impossible
to hit him, an opinion strengthened into belief by several summers’
practice. But the small brown and white marten wheeling through below
the bridge, or along the many holed red sand bank, is admitted by all
boys to be fair game--and still more, the long-winged legless black
devilet, that, if it falls to the ground, cannot rise again and
therefore screams wheeling round the corners and battlements of towers
and castles, or far out even of cannon-shot, gambols in companies of
hundreds, and regiments of a thousand, aloft in the evening ether,
within the orbit of the eagle’s flight. It seems to boyish eyes, that
the creatures near the earth, when but little blue sky is seen between
the specks and the wall-flowers growing on the coign of vantage--the
signal is given to fire, but the devilets are too high in heaven to
smell the sulphur. The starling whips with a shrill cry into his
nest, and nothing falls to the ground but a tiny bit of mossy mortar,
inhabited by a spider!
But the Day of Days arrives at last, when the school-boy--or rather the
college boy returning to his rural vacation--for in Scotland, college
winters tread close--too close--on the heels of academies--has a
gun--a gun in a case--a double barrel too--of his own--and is provided
with a license--probably without any other qualification than that of
hit or miss. On some portentous morning he effulges with the sun, in
velveteen jacket and breeches of the same--many-buttoned gaiters, and an
unkerchiefed throat. Tis the fourteenth of September, and lo! a pointer
at his heels--Ponto of course--a game bag like a beggar’s wallet by
his side--destined to be at eve as full of charity--and all the
paraphernalia of an accomplished sportsman. Proud, were she to see
the sight, would be the mother that bore him the heart of that old
sportsman, his daddy, would leap for joy! The chained mastiff in the
yard yowls his admiration, the servant lassies uplift the pane of their
garret, and, with suddenly withdrawn blushes, titter their delight in
their rich paper curls and pure night-clothes. Rab Roger, who has been
cleaning out the barn, comes forth to partake of the caulker, and away
go the footsteps of the old poacher and his pupil through the autumnal
rime, off to the uplands, where--for it is one of the earliest of
harvests, there is scarcely a single acre of standing corn. The
turnip-fields are bright green with hope and expectation--and coveys
are couching on lazy beds beneath the potatoe shaw. Every high hedge,
ditch-guarded on either side, shelters its own brood--imagination hears
the whirr shaking the dew-drops from the broom on the brae--and first
one bird and then another, and then the remaining number, in itself no
contemptible covey, seems to fancy’s ear to spring single, or in clouds,
from the coppice brushwood, with here and there an intercepting standard
tree.
Poor Ponto is much to be pitied.--Either having a cold in his nose,
or having ante-breakfasted by stealth on a red herring, he can scent
nothing short of a badger; and, every other field, he starts in horror,
shame, and amazement, to hear himself, without having attended to his
points, inclosed in a whirring covey. He is still duly taken between
those inexorable knees; out comes the speck and span new dog-whip, heavy
enough for a horse; and the yowl of the patient is heard over the whole
parish. Mothers press their yet unchastised infants to their
breasts; and the schoolmaster, fastening a knowing eye on dunce and
ne’er-do-well, holds up, in silent warning, the terror of the tawse.
Frequent flogging will cow the spirit of the best man and dog in
Britain. Ponto travels now in fear and trembling, but a few yards
from his tyrant’s feet, till, rousing himself to the sudden scent of
something smelling strongly, he draws slowly and beautifully, and
“There fixed, a perfect semi-circle stands.”
Up runs the Tyro, ready-cocked, and in his eagerness, stumbling among
the stubble, when mark and lo! the gabble of grey goslings, and the
bill-protruded hiss of goose and gander! Bang goes the right-hand barrel
at Ponto, who now thinks it high time to be off, to the tune of “ower
the hills and far away,” while the young gentleman, half ashamed and
half incensed, half glad, and half sorry, discharges the left-hand
barrel, with a highly improper curse, at the father of the feathered
family before him, who receives the shot like a ball in his breast,
throws a somerset, quite surprising for a bird of his usual habits, and
after biting the dust with his bill, and thumping it with his bottom,
breathes an eternal farewell to this sublunary scene--and leaves
himself to be paid for, at the rate of eight-pence a pound to his justly
irritated owner, on whose farm he had led a long, and not only harmless,
but honourable and useful life.
It is nearly as impossible a thing as we know, to borrow a dog about
the time the Sun has reached his meridian, on the First day of the
Partridges. Ponto by this time has sneaked, unseen by human eye, into
his kennel, and coiled himself up into the arms of tired Nature’s
sweet restorer, balmy sleep. A farmer makes offer of a colley, who from
numbering among his paternal ancestors a Spanish pointer, is quite a Don
in his way among the chirpers, and has been known in a turnip-field
to stand in an attitude very similar to that of setting. Luath has no
objection to a frolic over the fields, and plays the part of Ponto to
perfection. At last he catches sight of a covey basking, and leaping in
upon them, open-mouthed, dispatches them right and left, even like the
famous dog Billy, killing rats in the pit at Westminster. The birds are
bagged, with a gentle remonstrance, and Luath’s exploit rewarded with
a whang of cheese. Elated by the pressure on his shoulder, the young
gentleman laughs at the idea of pointing, and fires away, like winking,
at every uprise of birds, near or remote; works a miracle by bringing
down three at a time, that chanced, unknown to him, to be crossing; and
wearied with such slaughter, lends his gun to the attendant farmer, who
can mark down to an inch, and walks up to the dropped pout, as if he
could kick her up with his foot; and thus the bag in a few hours is half
full of feathers, while to close with eclat the sport of the day, the
cunning elder takes him to a bramble bush, in a wall nook, at the edge
of a wood, and returning the gun into his hands, shows him poor pussie
sitting with open eyes fast asleep! The pellets are in her brain, and
turning herself over, she crunkles out to her full length, like a piece
of untwisting Indian rubber, and is dead. The posterior pouch of the
jacket, yet unstained by blood, yawns to receive her--and in she goes
plump, paws, ears, body, feet, fud and all--while Luath, all the way
home to the Mams, keeps snoking at the red drops oozing through--for
well he knows in summer’s heat and winter’s cold, the smell of pussie,
whether sitting beneath a tuft of withered grass on the brae, or
burrowed beneath a snow wreath. A hare, we certainly must say, in spite
of haughtier sportsman’s scorn is, when sitting, a most satisfactory
shot.
But let us trace no further, thus step by step, the Pilgrim’s Progress.
Look at him now,--a finished sportsman--on the moors--the bright black
boundless Dalwhinnie Moors, stretching away, by long Lock-Erricht-side,
into the dim and distant day that hangs, with all its clouds, over the
bosom of far Loch-Rannoch. Is that the pluffer at partridge pouts who
had nearly been the death of poor Ponto? Lord Kennedy himself might
take a lesson now from the straight and steady style in which, on the
mountain brow, and up to the middle in heather, he brings his Manton to
the deadly level! More unerring eye never glanced along brown barrel!
Finer forefinger never touched a trigger! Follow him a whole day, and
not one wounded bird. All most beautifully arrested on their flight
by instantaneous death! Down dropped, right and left, like lead on
the heather--old cock and hen singled out among the orphan’s brood,
as calmly as a cook would do it in the larder--from among a pile
of plumage. No random shot within--no needless shot out of
distance--covered every feather before stir of finger--and body, back,
and brain, pierced, broken, scattered! And what perfect pointers!
There they stand, still as death--yet instinct with life--the whole
half-dozen--Mungo, the black-tanned--Don, the red-spotted--Clara, the
snow-white--Primrose, the pale yellow--Basto, the bright brown, and
Nimrod, in his coat of many colours, often seen afar through the mists
like a meteor.
[BLACKWOOD’S MAGAZINE.]
[Illustration: 201]