kill a trout with anything but a fly. It requires some training on
the part of the trout to take to this method. The uncultivated,
unsophisticated trout in unfrequented waters prefers the bait and the
rural people, whose sole object in going a-fishing appears to be to
catch fish, indulge them in their primitive taste for the worm. No
sportsman, however, will use anything but a fly, except he happens to be
alone.”—_Charles Dudley Warner._
“The true fly-fisher, who practises his art _con amore_, does not
delight in big catches, nor revel in undue and cruel slaughter. He is
ever satisfied with a moderate creel, and is content with the scientific
and skilful capture of a few good fish. The beauties of nature, as
revealed in his surroundings—the sparkling water, the shadow and
sunshine, the rustling leaves, the song of birds and hum of insects, the
health-giving breeze—make up to him a measure of true enjoyment, and
peace, and thankfulness, that is totally unknown to the slaughterer of
the innocents, whose sole ambition is to fill his creel and record his
captures by the score.”—_James A. Henshall, M.D._
“In the fly book the sportsman collects his treasures—the fairy
imitations of the tiny nymphs of the water side—and it is the source of
much delight in inspecting, replenishing and arranging during the season
that the trout are safe from honorable pursuit.”—_R. B. Roosevelt_.
“There have been caught in Walden, pickerel, one weighing seven pounds,
to say nothing of another which carried off a reel with great velocity,
which the fisherman safely set down at eight pounds, because he did not
see him. I am thus particular, because the weight of a fish is commonly
its only title to fame.”—_Henry D. Thoreau_.
“Wet days in camp try ‘grit.’ ‘Clear grit’ brightens more crystalline
the more it is rained upon; sham grit dissolves into mud and
water.”—_Theodore Winthrop_.
WINTER ANGLING
By Frank S. Pinckney.
The best winter angling is to be had in that charming interval between
the hallowed old holidays and that sloppy period which, of late years,
heralds the slow approach of spring in these our latitudes.
The practice of angling at this season of the year for large trout,
immense black bass and preternatural mascalonge, has grown of late to
proportions which seem to warrant some special mention of so delightful,
if unseasonable, a sport, as well as some brief description of the
tackle and paraphernalia required for its fullest enjoyment.
To the winter angler a first-class outfit is of prime importance. The
poles should be of well-seasoned hickory or hard maple, from eight to
ten inches in diameter, in sections about three feet in length. These
need not to be divested of their rich covering of bark, curved, bronzed
and lichened, but should be fitted, fresh from the sheltered pile, with
careful skill into an old-fashioned open fire-place, about which,
in years agone, the angling forefathers of the angler of to-day told
marvellous tales of deeds of “derring do” with “dipscys,” bobs and
poles; and about which now _his_ children list with wonder, not
unmingled with some tinge of incredulity, to His yet more wondrous
recitals of brave contests and curious captures with dainty rods and
delicate reels.
The winter anglers wading shoes may be made of any soft material that
will protect his feet should they chance to slip from the old brass
fender down upon the sombre painted brick hearth below, during some
delicious drowse. Most anglers have lady friends—fair cousins and
others, who make them nicely with substantially embroidered lily-pads
and firm strong rosebuds and vigorous elastic daffadowndillys. These are
a good protection—but the soles?
Two dollars and a half, without hob nails, and no deduction for small
feet! Even winter angling has its drawbacks.
The winter angler’s fishing coat should be warmly quilted to protect him
from the cold, and may be of a color to suit his complexion if he has
one. It should be given him by his wife or “ladye faire” as a sample of
her skill in manipulating the needle and—the dressmaker.
As to the kind of lure required, much must depend upon the taste of the
individual angler, but it certainly ought to be hot and not have _too_
much water in it.
For protection against black flies, midgets and mosquitoes, he may, if
he likes, smear his face and hands with oils either of tar or of
pennyroyal, or he may build a “smudge” on the library table, but the
most successful winter anglers I know use for this purpose a hollow tube
of convenient length with a bowl at one end and a set of teeth, either
real or artificial, at the other. The bowl may be filled with any
harmless weed capable of burning slowly as, for example, tobacco. As
a rule, one of these will answer the purpose, but if the flies are
especially troublesome, or the angler should chance to be bald-headed,
he may be forced to ask a brother angler to come to his assistance with
a contrivance of a similar nature. Together they will probably be able
to defy all attacks of the black flies or even the blues.
As to creels (or baskets) the merest mention will suffice. At the
nearest newspaper office will be found one of suitable size and fair
proportions. It is called a “waste basket” and is specially constructed
to hold the abnormal catches made by winter anglers.
Possibly the highest charm of winter angling (or as some call it
“Fireside fishing”) is the grand wide ranging freedom of it. Three
vast realms are at one’s command. The realm of Memory, with its myriad
streams of recollection filled with the fish and fancies of the Past.
The realm of Anticipation bright with golden dreams of the coming open
season, and lastly the realm of Pure Lying, wherein from the deep,
dark pools of his own inner turpitude the angler at each cast hooks a
speckled-sided Hallucination (_Salmo Hullucionidus_), a large-mouthed
Prevarication (_Micropterus Prevaricatrix_), or a silver-gleaming
Falsehood (_Salmoides Falsus_), each more huge than the other, and all
“beating the record” quite out of the field. *
* Note—The writer respectfully submits this nomenclature to
revision by Dr. Henshall, an unquestioned authority.
What wonderful vistas, what remotely narrowing perspectives, stretch
away into the vague distances of the first two of these grand realms!
How far reachingly the life-lines of anglers uncoil in both directions
from the reel of time—“playing” the hoarded treasures of memory at one
end, and making tournament casts into the future with the other! Are not
the time-worn rod-case and the well-thumbed fly-book and note-book on
his table, side by side with the last daintily tapered product of
his plane, rasp and scraper—his rod, just finished for the coming
summer—which, perchance for him may never come?
Is he not at once revelling in the past and dreaming of the future?
There is no sport, when known in all its branches, that is so fully an
all-the-year-round delight as is angling.
Many an idle hour of the long winter evenings may be pleasantly passed
by the angler in “going over” his tackle, oiling his reels, airing his
lines, and re-arranging his flies, freeing them from the moth and rust
that do corrupt. He is but a slovenly worshipper at the shrine of the
good Saint Izaak, who casts aside his panoply after the last bout of
autumn and gives no thought to it again till spring makes her annual
jail-delivery of imprisoned life. Constant care of the belongings of his
art, be he fly or bait fisher, is characteristic of the faithful angler,
and only simple justice to the tackle maker. There is nothing sadder or
more dejected-looking than a crippled rod and a neglected “kit” full of
snarled lines, rusty hooks, and moth-eaten flies.
In the matter of winter angling, the fly-fisherman has a decided
advantage over him who uses bait alone. The art for him has more side
issues. He may, if he can, learn to tie flies or contrive and construct
newfangled fly-books. The effort to learn will probably ruin his temper
and break up his domestic relations if he has any, but it is not for
me to say that “_le jeu ne vaut pas la chandelle_.” If no domestic ties
trend him toward caution as yet, and he dreads none in the future, he
may even venture the attempt to make his own rods.
Let me say a word here of amateur tackle-making from the standpoint of
personal experience. It is agreeable—it is even fascinating, but it
does not _pay_; very few have the mechanical deftness, the patience,
taste, and judgment combined to really excel in any of its branches. No
young man with a career to make for himself by dint of constant toil or
close application to a business or profession has any right to devote to
these arts the time and attention they demand if even a fair degree of
skill is to be attained. For the angler of “elegant leisure” this has no
weight perhaps, but he too will, as a rule, find better tackle than he
can make, readily at his command at a cost so inconsiderable as to quite
justify me in saying that his amateur work will not _pay_—for, if he be
young, out-of-door sports will far better serve to lay up in his still
developing frame the treasures of health and vitality for future use.
There are those, indeed, for whom it is a proper employment of time and
who are endowed with the peculiar faculties required. To such it is a
charming occupation, a delightful distraction, and a choice factor in
the enjoyment of the winter angler by the fireside.
Every angler ought to keep a record or diary of his angling bouts. Most
anglers do so, I think. Therein should be recorded not only the weight
and size of daily catch, the number saved, and the number _thrown back_,
(I look back with especial pride upon my record in this direction),
but also some jottings of scenes, impressions, and incidents. Reading
therefrom years after at the fireside he will detect a faint perfume
of old forests in the winter air, and hear again in fancy the swirl of
swift waters sweeping among mossy rocks.
I take up my own, quoting from it almost at random note, if you please,
how, in untamed words, have expressed themselves the exhilaration of the
stream—the tingling of healthy blood through ample veins—the joy in
nature’s aspects, and the delightful sense of unrestraint that comes
only of fresh air, of wholesome exercise, of angling.
“May 20th.— * * * The streams hereabout lack two important elements
which are the charm of my favorite —— kill, to wit, picturesqueness
and the possibility of large trout—large, I mean, for our mountain
brooks where still found _au naturel_. I went over the other day to
Bright’s Run. I don’t know exactly where it is, and I consider it (next
to Bright’s disease of the kidneys) the very worst thing Bright has
developed. It is a stream such as might properly empty into the Dismal
Swamp, and find itself quite at home there. It is totally devoid, of
romantic beauty—and nearly so of trout. I never worked so hard in my
life for twenty-two little ones, that put me to the blush as I put them
in the basket. I was perpetually in a row with the overhanging thickets
and the underlying logs, and my thoughts were a monologue of exclamation
points. I would not angle in Bright’s turgid waters again for all the
trout the most minute analysis might discover in them.
“Yesterday I had a much more agreeable day without a seven-mile ride on
a pesky buck-board. I went quite alone, up the Buckhill as far as the
Fall. This is a pleasant stream full of nature—and sawdust—with here
and there a speckled trout and here and there a black snake. (By special
permission of mr. Tennyson.) There really are now and then cool little
nooks which make one envy the trout; and an occasional spring dripping
with a fresh _rat-tat-tat_ over rocks and moss and into one’s whiskey in
spite of all one can do. This sort of thing is what makes a trout-stream
after all. You may catch a whale in a goose-pond but it isn’t angling.
To me much depends upon surroundings. I like to form a picturesque part
of a picturesque whole. Even when there is no audience in the gallery.
“Given, a dark glen fringed with pines that sigh and pine high up
aloft—a pool whose sweep is deep, around which rocks in tiers, mossy
as tombstones centuries old, bow their heads in mourning—heads crowned
with weeds, and grave-mounds of mother earth, and pallid flowers, pale
plants and sapless vines that struggle through shadows of a day in coma,
laid in the hearse of night, without a proper permit, and I am happy. I
don’t know just why, but if I meet an undertaker I mean to ask him. All
these deep, dark hiding spots of nature seem but so many foils to the
keen sense of life and thrills of vitality that fill me. My nervous
system sparkles against such sombre backgrounds.
“Then, too, the Fall was lovely. Next to Niagara, the Kauterskill and
Adams’, this Buckhill Fall is one of the most successful, in a small
way, that I know of. It might be bigger and higher and have twenty-five
cents worth more water coming over it out of a dam; but for a mere
casual Fall gotten up inadvertently by nature, it is very good, in an
amateurish sort of away, you know!
“There is, I believe (hang it, there _always_ is!) a romantic legend
connected with—but stay!—you already guess it. Big Buck Indian—years
ago—in love with mother-in-law—commits suicide—jumps over the
ledge—ever since on moonlight nights, water the color of blood
(probably tannery just above the Fall), Buck Kill, now corrupted into
Buckhill. In the march of civilization the last _impedimenta_ to be left
by the wayside are the beautiful superstitions of ignorance.
“I am now quite alone here. A young music composer, hitherto my
companion, left yesterday, so I am handcuffed to nature in solitary
confinement.
“By the way, my composer was a voluntary exile from the domestic arena.
He had but recently married—to formulate it by proportions—say about
a ton of mother-in-law to about an ounce of wife, and when the contest
waxed fiercer than became the endurance of a sensitive nature, he
packed his bag and came a-fishing. He was a capital angler—a phenomenal
musician and had an appetite and digestion like one or more of the
valiant trencher men of England’s merrie days, so he solaced his
grief with Sonatas and buckwheat cakes in the mornings and tears and
ginger-bread in the evenings. He was a born genius and as beautiful as a
dream, so I advised him to go home, choke his m-in-l, kiss his wife and
live happily all the days of his life. I think he has gone to try the
plan.
“Speaking of buckwheat cakes, you can go out here most any time and
catch a nice mess running about a half a pound and _game_ all the way
through. No! No!
“I’m thinking of the trout! I mean they are light as a feather, and taste
to me just as did those I never had half enough of when I was a lad with
my good old Presbyterian grandmother, who would not ‘set’ the batter on
Saturday night lest it should ‘work’ on the Sabbath.
“Just here I wish to record an event which has happened to me while yet
each detail is fresh in my memory.
“The day had been showery, yet the fishing had been very poor, so I went
at sunset to try my luck in the stream near the house, where are some
fair pools and a semi-occasional trout.
“The darkness had begun to gather, indeed it was so dark that I knew
only by the instinct of habit where my flies fell upon the water, for I
could not fairly see them. I had just made a cast across a little rock
which protruded somewhat above the surface into a small pool behind,
and was slowly drawing my line toward me, when I perceived a frog seated
upon the rock, watching the proceedings with some apparent anxiety.
Hardly had I made out his frogship in the gloaming, when pop! he went
into the water. ‘Kerchung!’ At this instant I felt a _strike_ and
returned the compliment sharply, so as to set my hook well in and make
sure of my trout. He was very _game_, and I was obliged to play him with
a five and a half ounce rod for some time, but finally landed him in
good form, only to discover that instead of a trout I had taken froggy
on a black hackle fly, setting the hook firmly into the thin membrane
which connects the two hind legs and just where the tail _ought_ to
be. This left him the fullest freedom of action and gave him so good
a chance to fight me that I never suspected him of being anything less
than a half-pounder. He must have jumped from the rock directly on to
the fly trailing behind it and been thus hooked by my ‘strike.’ Mem.
—This story is true as gospel, but better not tell it where you enjoy
an exceptional reputation for veracity.
“_July 19th._ * * * Nothing has happened! Nothing ever does happen here.
Delightful existence, free from events! I remember hearing Homer Martin
once say that it was the height of his artistic ambition to paint a
picture without objects. The confounded objects, he said, always would
get wrong and destroy his best effects. How far this was intended to be
a humorous paradox and how far the suggestion of an artistic ideal, I
know not, but I surely somewhere have seen a painting—from whose brush
I cannot say—which quite nearly fulfilled this strange condition. It
represented an horizon, where met a cloudless, moonless, starless summer
sky and a waveless, almost motionless sea—these and an atmosphere. The
effect was that one could hardly perceive where the sea ceased and the
sky began. I wonder if it would not be thus with a life quite devoid of
events—would one be able to distinguish such from Heaven?
“The charm of it is that it leaves both the physical and intellectual in
one to develop freely. When a cow, grazing in a woodland pasture, comes
at noonday to the brook to drink and then calmly and not without a
certain ungainly majesty of movement, crosses the deep pool and climbs
the steep hank on the other side, by no apparent motive urged save of
her own sweet will, she always looks refreshed and filled in some
sort with the stolid bovine expression of great contentment. Mark how
different it all is when the same cow crosses the same brook driven by
the barefooted urchin with a gad and shrill cries and a possible small
dog in the background. How wearily and breathlessly she wades, and with
what distressful pan tings she climbs, and how unhappy and enduring
and long-suffering she appears, as you watch her shuffle away down the
cow-path homeward! It’s the Must that hurts. It’s the barefooted urchin
Necessity with his infernal gad Ambition and his ugly little cur dog
Want, always chasing and shouting after one, that makes it so tiresome
to cross the stream.
“Then, too, as to the mind. Shall not one gain better intellectual
growth when beyond the reach of the imperial ukase of daily custom which
fixes the mind upon and chains the tongue to some leading event of the
passing hour?
“In swift and endless succession come foul murders, robberies,
revolutions, sickening disasters, nameless crimes, and all the long list
of events, and are as so many manacles upon the mind.
“I hate Events. They bore me. _All except taking a pound trout_.
“Alas! what a rent these last words make in the balloon I have been
inflating! Logic (another troublesome nuisance, evolved, probably, at
Hunter’s Point) forces me from the clouds to earth and insists that I
shall accept a trite aphorism: ‘Little events fill little minds; great
events for big ones.’
“Then if I take refuge in the cowardly device of saying I don’t want a
big mind, what becomes of my theory of intellectual development as the
outgrowth of an eventless life!
“I decline to follow out more in detail this or any other line
of argument. One can’t argue in the face of such an event as the
thermometer in the nineties away up here in the mountains.
“This chance allusion to logic reminds me that I have recently heard
from a dear old angling friend. He writes incidentally that since his
return to his active professional duties he has made money enough to pay
many times over the expenses of his recent two weeks’ fishing bout with
me. I have written him that he might find it well to start at once upon
another trip. I have no doubt there exists a certain correlation
of forces whereby a week’s fishing, with its resultant increase of
oxygenation, and rebuilding of gray tissue, accurately represents a
certain amount of possible mental labor and thus, indirectly, a fixed
sum of money.
“It is then alarming to think how abnormally rich a man might become if
he fished all the time.”
If I have thus quoted somewhat at length vaporings of other days from
my note book it has been only to suggest to others, whose angling
experiences are and have been wider and more varied than my own, how
readily they can organize a “preserve” for winter angling. Believe me,
no event, no feeling, no passing observation of your surroundings can
be too trivial to record, and each written line will, in years to come,
suggest a page of pleasant memories when as “Nessmuk” says—
“The Winter streams are frozen
And the Nor’west winds are out.”
“Mr. Webster’s sport of angling has given him many opportunities for
composition, his famous address on Bunker Hill having been mostly
planned out on Marshpee Brook; and it is said that the following
exclamation was first heard by a couple of huge trout immediately on
their being transferred to his fishing-basket, as it subsequently
was heard at Bunker Hill by many thousands of his fellow-citizens:
‘Venerable men! you have come down to us from a former generation.
Heaven has bounteously lengthened out your lives that you might behold
this joyous day.’”—_Lan-man’s Life of Webster._
“How, I love fishing dearly. There is no sport like it for me, but there
is a vast deal in fishing besides catching fish.”—_H. H. Thompson._
[Illustration: 0296]
13. The Triumph.
14. Alexandra.
15. Seth Green.
16. Jungle Cock.
17. Fitz-Maurice.
18. Caddis.
19. Davis.
“When fish are basking during the mid-day hours in the hot summer
months, they are not always to be drawn to the surface. But the
combination more suitable for this method is the dressing known as the
‘Alexandra Fly.’”—_David Foster._
“The exertion of crossing the Atlantic for fly-fishing will be amply
repaid the sportsman by the quantity and weight of the fish he will
capture; for there the fish are not troubled with the fastidiousness of
appetite which in Great Britain causes it always to be a source of doubt
whether the water is in proper order, the wind in the east, or thunder
overhead, either of which, or all combined, too frequently cause the
most industrious to return, after a long and laborious day, with an
empty basket.”—_Parser Gilmore._
“Of all places, commend me, in the still of the evening, to the long
placid pool, shallow on one side, with deeper water and an abrupt
overhanging bank opposite. Where the sun has shone all day, and legions
of ephemera sported in its declining rays; the bloom of the rye or
clover scenting the air from the adjoining field! Now light a fresh
pipe, and put on a pale Ginger Hackle for your tail-fly, and a little
white-winged Coachman for your dropper. Then wade in cautiously—move
like a shadow—don’t make a ripple. Cast, slowly, long, light; let your
stretcher sink a little. There, he has taken the Ginger—lead him around
gently to the shallow side as you reel him in, but don’t move from your
position—let him tug awhile, put your net under him, break his neck,
and slip him into your creel. Draw your line through the rings—cast
again; another and another—keep on until you can see only the ripple
made by your fly; or know when it falls, by the slight tremor it imparts
through the whole line down to your hand—until the whip-poor-will
begins his evening song, and the little water-frog tweets in the grass
close by not till then is it time to go home.”—_Thaddeus Norris_.
“You may always know a large trout when feeding in the evening. He rises
continuously, or at small intervals—in a still water almost always in
the same place, and makes little noise—barely elevating his mouth to
suck in the fly, and sometimes showing his back-fin and tail. A large
circle spreads around him, but there are seldom any bubbles when he
breaks the water, which usually indicates the coarser fish.”—_Sir
Humphry Davy_.