THE WINCHESTER WATER MEADS.
NOTE.--The following sketch has, locally speaking, no place in the
present collection. But since it is somewhat similar in its nature
to the others, since it describes a day's fishing with the
well-known angler to whom the book is dedicated, and since,
moreover, it serves to mark the interval which elapsed between the
time when the foregoing and succeeding sketches were written, I
nevertheless introduce it.
There is a wind which belongs only to spring mornings and they are chary
of it. Soft, and yet fresh, if winds were subject to the condition of
age, this one might be supposed to be in its first sunny childhood. It
has no care nor business. If it blew with all its strength it could
never stir a mill-sail, or set a ship in motion. A butterfly rides out
its silken gales, and its boldest blast, like the whispered secret of a
child, beguiles you of an involuntary smile. Imagine such a breeze
fitfully exploring the Winchester Water Meads. Now it hesitates, now
lingers, now pauses altogether; anon with a dainty tinkling of herbage
resumes its progress. And a fair march it has.
Once more the sumptuary laws of winter have been repealed, the fashions
of a new _regime_ adopted. The time has come when "the fields catch
flower." Tall buttercups, and dandelions, and knots of the great marsh
marigold strew the thick grass with ingots of gold. Myriads of daisies
and "milkmaids" powder it with snowy flakes. "Welshman's buttons" and
anemones fill every sheltered nook, and stud the borders of each
turf-cut drain. Here and there an early plume of sorrel shows like a
vein of rust in this floral mosaic work, and each blade or flower, still
wet with dew, flashes brilliantly in the sunlight as it trembles in
sweet air.
On all sides the air is thrilling with the full melody of larks. A
couple of plovers, that are nesting in the neighbourhood, wheel and turn
with plaintive cries aloft; and a solitary cabbage butterfly, the
melancholy forerunner of its clan, wanders away across the water towards
Winnal moors in quest of fellows.
But marigolds and "milkmaids," larks and solitary butterflies aside! The
Itchen and its trout are at hand, the rod is ready, and the momentous
question is: "The fly?"
The swifts and swallows are ranging high, or at any rate totally
ignoring the stream, sufficient proof that there is but little of
entomological interest for them on the water.
"There's a rise!" ejaculates my companion, however, "and there's
another. But they are only feeding on larvae."
Fish are rising occasionally without absolutely breaking the water, and
it is evident that their attention is devoted not to the casual insects
floating on the surface, but to the larvae ascending from the river bed,
which they seize before they reach the upper world. We catch a specimen
of the full-fledged fly (a Light-Olive), and, having matched it closely
in the fly-book, commence operations.
It is ticklish work, this Hampshire trout fishing. Long education has
developed in the natives of these waters a degree of sagacity that is
almost supernatural. Their appreciation of the faintest _nuance_ of
exaggeration in colour of wing or body, in the artificial flies offered
them, is unerring.
Time was, when to take six or seven brace of fish was a common
occurrence. But in the memory of chalk-stream _habitues_ there has been
a gradual and steady diminution in angling averages; and now, unless the
trout have a silly interval, a brace and a half or two brace is a good
day's sport, and to catch these demands far greater knowledge, and the
exercise of far more skill and patience than was formerly dreamt of.
Then men walked boldly along the river bank, and fished with ordinary
tackle and a wet fly. Now, albeit the flies used are miracles of
diminutive workmanship, the gut a filament of fineness, that, with any
consideration for its strength, can scarcely be reduced, to stalk and
capture a two-pound trout necessitates the use of a dry fly, and a
degree of caution and address scarcely less than is required for
successful moose hunting.
As the best fly-fisherman in Hampshire said to me: "You want to put the
exact fly just over your fish the first time, if he doesn't take it he
doesn't mean to. By changing flies, and sticking to him half the day,
you _may_ worry him into an indiscretion, but it is a hundred to one
that you are only educating him."
What fishing will eventually become in these streams it is difficult to
imagine, for the decrease in sport arises from no reduction in the stock
of fish, which are more numerous now than they ever were.
To-day I am not wielding the rod, but act merely as gillie for a master
of the art, on whom the mantle of old Isaac Walton has descended.
Gradually we work up stream, trying to convert these Winnal incarnations
of perversity from their unholy appetite for larvae, with exquisite
imitations of various Olives and of the Red Quill. But they remain
obdurate. They come, but come short. They roll up and leisurely inspect
the fly, and with not less contemptuous deliberation turn tail upon it.
At length a far cast under the opposite bank is followed by a slight
break in the water, a quick tension of the line, and a good fish is in
difficulty. But almost immediately the point of the rod flies up, and,
owing to the knot attaching the gut to the eyed hook having drawn, the
fish escapes.
"None do here
Use to swear,
Oaths to fray
Fish away."
And yet, methinks, with the "poetry of earth," something is mingled now
that sounds not like the music of waters, the song of birds, or the
fluttering of a butterfly's wings--no, nor was it a hymn in praise of
tackle-makers' carelessness. Let us hope that the "recording angel" for
the day was once a keen sportsman, and appreciated, therefore, the
extenuating circumstances of the case. Eventually the fly is replaced,
and the campaign continued.
By lunch-time we reach one of the wooden shanties, with which it is
becoming the custom on these streams to provide for temporary shelter.
There is not a fish moving, and for the present it is useless to flog
the water. Sandwiches and a pipe fill the interlude; and by-and-by the
keeper, a shrewd, wooden-visaged, terrier-looking countryman, suddenly
drops upon us (after the fashion of keepers), as it were, from the
clouds. Locke, in his way, is a type, and his utterances occasionally
have a refreshing dryness.
"Marning sir, marning sir," he says cheerily, laying a six-pound jack on
the grass to leeward of the hut (for wind spoils the look of fish), and
depositing his "rod," a bamboo pole furnished with wire noose, beside
it. "Have you caught anything?"
"No, nothing; it's too bright."
"It is so; 'sides, the rise was over afore you come. I eyed you coming
with my glass. There was a few fish feeding 'tween nine and ten this
marning. I wish you'd been here."
"We came in for the tail of the rise. How did you get the jack?"
"I noosed un, sir, I allus nooses 'em. You can't get 'em out with the
net, they's too artful. They lies right close on the ground, and lets
the net rub over 'em."
Incited to continue, Locke plunges into a dissertation on the art of
snaring jack, against which he is very naturally the sworn foe. He
proudly recounts how he one day removed eighteen of these cannibals from
his water, and, on another occasion, snared a leviathan of nineteen
pounds eight ounces. Every now and then producing from an inner pocket a
small telescope, the lens of which he polishes on his velveteen cuff, he
pauses to reconnoitre suspiciously some distant figures in Nun's Walk,
near which he has a small backwater full of "store" trout, that cause
him a good deal of anxiety.
"In fact," he continues, a little abstractedly, after one of these
surveys, "they's reg'lar reptiles, they jack, and you can't never quite
get rid of 'em. You has to keep 'em down. I'm allus looking for 'em.
Now, maybe, you won't believe me, sir, when I tell you that, that there
little bit of backwater alongside Nun's Waark gives me moore trouble
than all this here put together. I'll just take a cast round there, and
see what they chaps there is about. Don't you leave none of your things
lying about wheere they Herefords can get at 'em," he warns us, as he
prepares to move off, indicating some white-faced cattle grazing in the
neighbourhood. "They's moore destructive than our beasts about here.
They'll chew up a mackintosh, or a basket--anything. Now, maybe, you
won't believe what I'm going to say, sir, but they eat up my coat
once--moleskin it war--and my dinner was in the pockets. Walking pikes I
calls they Herefords."
Beyond St. Catherine's Hill heavy rain clouds, fringed with long
"drifting locks," are passing slowly across the scene, and a few drops
of the shower reach us. But in a little while the magnificent skyscape
of mountainous cumuli, mellowing in the afternoon light, regains its
brilliancy, and my energetic companion marches off by himself, convinced
that he had put up "the fly" at last. As for me I remain smoking on a
rail, lazy and unambitious no doubt, but supremely contented. Perhaps my
appreciation of the moment's ease is not a little enhanced by watching
another laboriously drying his fly, and crouching low as he creeps along
the bank. And so I sit, and let my glance go wandering across the meads
to the big elms, over against Nun's Walk and Abbots Barton Farm, where
crowded cities of rooks may be seen, the movements of whose black
inhabitants are clearly distinguishable in the half-naked boughs; and on
and on to scalloped ranks of trees in the farther distance, that, in the
scanty foliage of the season, stand out against the horizon like
fret-work fans; till, finally, by many a hedge, and field, and ditch, I
come back to the river-side again.
The silvery whisper of this spring's young rushes mingles with the
harsher rustling of last year's dead blades, and the softened sleepy
wash of water at a hatch-hole hard by. Locke says he took a five-pound
trout out of that little hatch-hole some years ago, and though of course
I believe him, I cannot help casually wondering whether--as an old
hunter in Alaska once cautiously added to a choice yarn that he had
been telling me about a three-headed fish--"he was the only man who saw
it"? With its swelling spaces of glassy smoothness, mantling with
opalescent gleams of colour, with its glittering arabesque and tracery
of swirl and ripple, its tiny, short-lived surface whirlpools, the
full-bosomed river glides by, bearing its now rapidly accumulating cargo
of fly. And in serried hosts the swifts and swallows have congregated
above its course, and are busy skirmishing to and fro there. Now
mingling and now scattering, crossing and recrossing one another, they
clamber up against little currents of wind, and poise themselves, then
dive, and skim the surface of the water, daintily picking therefrom fly
after fly, and rarely making that slight fault which breaks the deep
tones in the distance of the river's reach, with a small fan-shaped
flash of silver spray! The fly is up! By twos and threes they came at
first, but hundreds inadequately number the unbroken swarms that now
cover the water, and Olives of every shade dance past from ripple to
ripple in alluring pageantry.
In the whole range of Nature there is probably nothing more exquisitely,
coquettishly graceful, than are these water insects. With the stamp of
refinement that marks the typically aristocratic maiden, they somehow
combine the traditional piquancy of the French actress in opera bouffe.
Nothing can possibly appear more appetising. But these epicurean fish
are spoiled. The splendid condition they show at this early season of
the year proves that they are overfed; and even under the temptation of
such a banquet as the present, they indulge with more or less
deliberation.
We are fishing a plain canal-looking piece of water--a kind of
upper-school, only frequented by fish of good size, and under a
dishevelled tuft of brown rushes on the opposite bank a trout is
feeding, taking with the regularity of clock-work about three flies a
minute. The little gleam of transparent wings can be seen approaching
the fatal spot, undulating with the motion of the tide. There is a
slight disturbance on the surface, a subdued rich "gulp" is heard, and a
few expanding rings are drifting from the scene of the disaster, whilst
the course of the hapless fly is pursued by a short-lived bubble. Again
and again the tragedy is repeated, and, at length, opportunely
substituted for the genuine delicacy, a Light-Olive of silk, feathers,
and steel floats over the swirl that marks the masked lair. There is a
sudden commotion, a tremendous splashing, and a second later a good
fish is making a determined rush for a neighbouring sanctuary of heavy
weed. It is a question of pull devil, pull baker. If he reach the weed,
he will inevitably escape with the fly and half the collar, and in the
absolute necessity of stopping him the butt is forcibly applied and a
breakage risked at once. Fortunately the fine tackle stands the strain,
and, foiled in his purpose, the trout turns suddenly and shoots down
stream at a pace that makes the reel sing merrily. For a little while
now he sulks in deep water, but, brought to the surface, catches sight
of us and darts across the river, following this effort up by a
succession of short and savage dashes. Some nice steering and
manipulation coax him safely through a dangerous archipelago of weed,
and then, though with lowered head, he still endeavours to plough on
down stream, the constant strain of tackle begins to tire him. From time
to time he yields temporarily to the power that turns him open-jawed
against the current, and at length, almost a hundred yards below where
he first was hooked, a two-pound-and-a-half fish, in the perfection of
beauty and condition, glides into the net. He had fought so gallantly
that he deserved to escape.
Before the rise ceases another fish, of within an ounce of two pounds,
completes our brace. Then a long period of tranquillity ensues, and it
becomes evident that if the trout move again to-day it will be in the
evening, and for the evening fishing we do not intend to wait. Pausing
to make an occasional cast over a likely spot, therefore, we work back
towards Winchester.
In a mood of exquisite serenity the last phase of afternoon is closing.
There is no wind. The sky is filled with soft gold and silver clouds,
dimmed by transparent veils of pearliest gray. Black rooks plodding
lazily homewards are relieved against its pure tones, and an occasional
couple of duck cross its broad fields with strenuous haste that jars
oddly with the ineffable calm up there. Upreared in virtual isolation,
Winchester Cathedral stretches its great length on the town like a
stranded whale--possessed, though, of a majestic dignity and repose that
I am afraid the simile does not convey. A curious contrast exists
between its massive tower and the sharp, pretentious little spires of
the modern churches near it, which seem to be tiptoeing enviously to
attract unmerited attention. By his works shall a man be known. Does the
difference in the style of these buildings indicate any parallel change
in the character of the race that raised them?