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Page 2
"----no!" growled Theodore in disgust. "Just derrick him right into the
canoe!" A heroic method, surely; though it once cost me the best
square-tail I ever hooked, for Theodore had forgotten the landing-net,
and the gut broke in his fingers as he tried to swing the fish aboard.
But with these lively quarter-pounders of the Taylor Brook, derricking
is a safer procedure. Indeed, I have sat dejectedly on the far end of a
log, after fishing the hole under it in vain, and seen the mighty R.
wade downstream close behind me, adjust that comical extra butt, and
jerk a couple of half-pound trout from under the very log on which I
was sitting. His device on this occasion, as I well remember, was to
pass his hook but once through the middle of a big worm, let the worm
sink to the bottom, and crawl along it at his leisure. The trout could
not resist.
Once, and once only, have I come near equaling R.'s record, and the way
he beat me then is the justification for a whole philosophy of
worm-fishing. We were on this very Taylor Brook, and at five in the
afternoon both baskets were two thirds full. By count I had just one
more fish than he. It was raining hard. "You fish down through the
alders," said R. magnanimously. "I 'll cut across and wait for you at
the sawmill. I don't want to get any wetter, on account of my
rheumatism."
This was rather barefaced kindness,--for whose rheumatism was ever the
worse for another hour's fishing? But I weakly accepted it. I coveted
three or four good trout to top off with,--that was all. So I tied on a
couple of flies, and began to fish the alders, wading waist deep in the
rapidly rising water, down the long green tunnel under the curving
boughs. The brook fairly smoked with the rain, by this time, but when
did one fail to get at least three or four trout out of this best half
mile of the lower brook? Yet I had no luck I tried one fly after
another, and then, as a forlorn hope,--though it sometimes has a magic
of its own,--I combined a brown hackle for the tail fly with a twisting
worm on the dropper. Not a rise! I thought of E. sitting patiently in
the saw mill, and I fished more conscientiously than ever.
"Venture as warily, use the same skill,
Do your best, whether winning or losing it,
If you choose to play!--is my principle."
Even those lines, which by some subtle telepathy of the trout brook
murmur themselves over and over to me in the waning hours of an unlucky
day, brought now no consolation. There was simply not one fish to be
had, to any fly in the book, out of that long, drenching, darkening
tunnel. At last I climbed out of the brook, by the bridge. R. was
sitting on the fence, his neck and ears carefully turtled under his
coat collar, the smoke rising and the rain dripping from the inverted
bowl of his pipe. He did not seem to be worrying about his rheumatism.
"What luck?" he asked.
"None at all," I answered morosely. "Sorry to keep you waiting."
"That's all right," remarked R. "What do you think I 've been doing? I
've been fishing out of the saw-mill window just to kill time. There
was a patch of floating sawdust there,--kind of unlikely place for
trout, anyway,--but I thought I'd put on a worm and let him crawl
around a little." He opened his creel as he spoke. "But I did n't look
for a pair of 'em," he added. And there, on top of his smaller fish,
were as pretty a pair of three-quarter-pound brook trout as were ever
basketed.
"I 'm afraid you got pretty wet," said R. kindly.
"I don't mind that," I replied. And I didn't. What I minded was the
thought of an hour's vain wading in that roaring stream, whipping
it with fly after fly, while R., the foreordained fisherman, was
sitting comfortably in a sawmill, and derricking that pair of
three-quarter-pounders in through the window! I had ventured more
warily than he, and used, if not the same skill, at least the best
skill at my command. My conscience was clear, but so was his; and he
had had the drier skin and the greater magnanimity and the biggest
fish besides. There is much to be said, in a world like ours, for
taking the world as you find it and for fishing with a worm.
One's memories of such fishing, however agreeable they may be, are not
to be identified with a defense of the practice. Yet, after all, the
most effective defense of worm-fishing is the concrete recollection of
some brook that could be fished best or only in that way, or the image
of a particular trout that yielded to the temptation of an angleworm
after you had flicked fly after fly over him in vain. Indeed, half the
zest of brook fishing is in your campaign for "individuals,"--as the
Salvation Army workers say,--not merely for a basketful of fish qua
fish, but for a series of individual trout which your instinct tells
you ought to lurk under that log or be hovering in that ripple. How to
get him, by some sportsmanlike process, is the question. If he will
rise to some fly in your book, few fishermen will deny that the fly is
the more pleasurable weapon. Dainty, luring, beautiful toy, light as
thistle-down, falling where you will it to fall, holding when the
leader tightens and sings like the string of a violin, the artificial
fly represents the poetry of angling. Given the gleam of early morning
on some wide water, a heavy trout breaking the surface as he curves and
plunges, with the fly holding well, with the right sort of rod in your
fingers, and the right man in the other end of the canoe, and you
perceive how easy is that Emersonian trick of making the pomp of
emperors ridiculous.
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