Angling Sketches

A >> Andrew Lang >> Angling Sketches

ANGLING SKETCHES


Contents:

Preface
Note to New Edition
The Confessions of a Duffer
A Border Boyhood
Loch Awe
Loch-Fishing
Loch Leven
The Bloody Doctor
The Lady or the Salmon?
A Tweedside Sketch
The Double Alibi
The Complete Bungler




DEDICATION


TO MRS HERBERT HILLS

'NO FISHER
BUT A WELL-WISHER
TO THE GAME.'

IN MEMORY OF PLESANT DAYS AT CORBY




PREFACE


Several of the sketches in this volume have appeared in periodicals. "The
Bloody Doctor" was in _Macmillan's Magazine_, "The Confessions of a
Duffer," "Loch Awe," and "The Lady or the Salmon?" were in the _Fishing
Gazette_, but have been to some extent re-written. "The Double Alibi"
was in _Longman's Magazine_. The author has to thank the Editors and
Publishers for permission to reprint these papers.

The gem engraved on the cover is enlarged from a small intaglio in the
collection of Mr. M. H. N. STORY-MASKELYNE, M.P. Such gems were
recommended by Clemens of Alexandria to the early Christians. "The
figure of a man fishing will put them in mind of the Apostle." Perhaps
the Greek is using the red hackle described by AElian in the only known
Greek reference to fly-fishing.




NOTE TO NEW EDITION


The historical version of the Black Officer's career, very unlike the
legend in "Loch Awe," may be read in Mr. Macpherson's _Social Life in the
Highlands_.




THE CONFESSIONS OF A DUFFER


These papers do not boast of great sport. They are truthful, not like
the tales some fishers tell. They should appeal to many sympathies.
There is no false modesty in the confidence with which I esteem myself a
duffer, at fishing. Some men are born duffers; others, unlike persons of
genius, become so by an infinite capacity for not taking pains. Others,
again, among whom I would rank myself, combine both these elements of
incompetence. Nature, that made me enthusiastically fond of fishing,
gave me thumbs for fingers, short-sighted eyes, indolence, carelessness,
and a temper which (usually sweet and angelic) is goaded to madness by
the laws of matter and of gravitation. For example: when another man is
caught up in a branch he disengages his fly; I jerk at it till something
breaks. As for carelessness, in boyhood I fished, by preference, with
doubtful gut and knots ill-tied; it made the risk greater, and increased
the excitement if one did hook a trout. I can't keep a fly-book. I
stuff the flies into my pockets at random, or stick them into the leaves
of a novel, or bestow them in the lining of my hat or the case of my
rods. Never, till 1890, in all my days did I possess a landing-net. If
I can drag a fish up a bank, or over the gravel, well; if not, he goes on
his way rejoicing. On the Test I thought it seemly to carry a landing-
net. It had a hinge, and doubled up. I put the handle through a button-
hole of my coat: I saw a big fish rising, I put a dry fly over him; the
idiot took it. Up stream he ran, then down stream, then he yielded to
the rod and came near me. I tried to unship my landing-net from my
button-hole. Vain labour! I twisted and turned the handle, it would not
budge. Finally, I stooped, and attempted to ladle the trout out with the
short net; but he broke the gut, and went off. A landing-net is a
tedious thing to carry, so is a creel, and a creel is, to me, a
superfluity. There is never anything to put in it. If I do catch a
trout, I lay him under a big stone, cover him with leaves, and never find
him again. I often break my top joint; so, as I never carry string, I
splice it with a bit of the line, which I bite off, for I really cannot
be troubled with scissors and I always lose my knife. When a phantom
minnow sticks in my clothes, I snap the gut off, and put on another, so
that when I reach home I look as if a shoal of fierce minnows had
attacked me and hung on like leeches. When a boy, I was--once or twice--a
bait-fisher, but I never carried worms in box or bag. I found them under
big stones, or in the fields, wherever I had the luck. I never tie nor
otherwise fasten the joints of my rod; they often slip out of the sockets
and splash into the water. Mr. Hardy, however, has invented a
joint-fastening which never slips. On the other hand, by letting the
joint rust, you may find it difficult to take down your rod. When I see
a trout rising, I always cast so as to get hung up, and I frighten him as
I disengage my hook. I invariably fall in and get half-drowned when I
wade, there being an insufficiency of nails in the soles of my brogues.
My waders let in water, too, and when I go out to fish I usually leave
either my reel, or my flies, or my rod, at home. Perhaps no other man's
average of lost flies in proportion to taken trout was ever so great as
mine. I lose plenty, by striking furiously, after a series of short
rises, and breaking the gut, with which the fish swims away. As to
dressing a fly, one would sooner think of dressing a dinner. The result
of the fly-dressing would resemble a small blacking-brush, perhaps, but
nothing entomological.

Then why, a persevering reader may ask, do I fish? Well, it is stronger
than myself, the love of fishing; perhaps it is an inherited instinct,
without the inherited power. I may have had a fishing ancestor who
bequeathed to me the passion without the art. My vocation is fixed, and
I have fished to little purpose all my days. Not for salmon, an almost
fabulous and yet a stupid fish, which must be moved with a rod like a
weaver's beam. The trout is more delicate and dainty--not the sea-trout,
which any man, woman, or child can capture, but the yellow trout in clear
water.

A few rises are almost all I ask for: to catch more than half a dozen
fish does not fall to my lot twice a year. Of course, in a Sutherland
loch one man is as good as another, the expert no better than the duffer.
The fish will take, or they won't. If they won't, nobody can catch them;
if they will, nobody can miss them. It is as simple as trolling a minnow
from a boat in Loch Leven, probably the lowest possible form of angling.
My ambition is as great as my skill is feeble; to capture big trout with
the dry fly in the Test, that would content me, and nothing under that.
But I can't see the natural fly on the water; I cannot see my own fly,

Let it sink or let it swim.

I often don't see the trout rise to me, if he is such a fool as to rise;
and I can't strike in time when I do see him. Besides, I am unteachable
to tie any of the orthodox knots in the gut; it takes me half an hour to
get the gut through one of these newfangled iron eyes, and, when it is
through, I knot it any way. The "jam" knot is a name to me, and no more.
That, perhaps, is why the hooks crack off so merrily. Then, if I do spot
a rising trout, and if he does not spot me as I crawl like the serpent
towards him, my fly always fixes in a nettle, a haycock, a rose-bush, or
whatnot, behind me. I undo it, or break it, and put up another, make a
cast, and, "plop," all the line falls in with a splash that would
frighten a crocodile. The fish's big black fin goes cutting the stream
above, and there is a _sauve qui peut_ of trout in all directions.

I once did manage to make a cast correctly: the fly went over the fish's
nose; he rose; I hooked him, and he was a great silly brute of a
grayling. The grayling is the deadest-hearted and the foolishest-headed
fish that swims. I would as lief catch a perch or an eel as a grayling.
This is the worst of it--this ambition of the duffer's, this desire for
perfection, as if the golfing imbecile should match himself against Mr.
Horace Hutchinson, or as the sow of the Greek proverb challenged Athene
to sing. I know it all, I deplore it, I regret the evils of ambition;
but _c'est plus fort que moi_. If there is a trout rising well under the
pendant boughs that trail in the water, if there is a brake of briars
behind me, a strong wind down stream, for that trout, in that impregnable
situation, I am impelled to fish. If I raise him I strike, miss him,
catch up in his tree, swish the cast off into the briars, break my top,
break my heart, but--that is the humour of it. The passion, or instinct,
being in all senses blind, must no doubt be hereditary. It is full of
sorrow and bitterness and hope deferred, and entails the mockery of
friends, especially of the fair. But I would as soon lay down a love of
books as a love of fishing.

Success with pen or rod may be beyond one, but there is the pleasure of
the pursuit, the rapture of endeavour, the delight of an impossible
chase, the joys of nature--sky, trees, brooks, and birds. Happiness in
these things is the legacy to us of the barbarian. Man in the future
will enjoy bricks, asphalte, fog, machinery, "society," even picture
galleries, as many men and most women do already. We are fortunate who
inherit the older, not "the new spirit"--we who, skilled or unskilled,
follow in the steps of our father, Izaak, by streams less clear, indeed,
and in meadows less fragrant, than his. Still, they are meadows and
streams, not wholly dispeopled yet of birds and trout; nor can any defect
of art, nor certainty of laborious disappointment, keep us from the
waterside when April comes.

Next to being an expert, it is well to be a contented duffer: a man who
would fish if he could, and who will pleasure himself by flicking off his
flies, and dreaming of impossible trout, and smoking among the sedges
Hope's enchanted cigarettes. Next time we shall be more skilled, more
fortunate. Next time! "To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow." Grey
hairs come, and stiff limbs, and shortened sight; but the spring is green
and hope is fresh for all the changes in the world and in ourselves. We
can tell a hawk from a hand-saw, a March Brown from a Blue Dun; and if
our success be as poor as ever, our fancy can dream as well as ever of
better things and more fortunate chances. For fishing is like life; and
in the art of living, too, there are duffers, though they seldom give us
their confessions. Yet even they are kept alive, like the incompetent
angler, by this undying hope: they will be more careful, more skilful,
more lucky next time. The gleaming untravelled future, the bright
untried waters, allure us from day to day, from pool to pool, till, like
the veteran on Coquet side, we "try a farewell throw," or, like Stoddart,
look our last on Tweed.




A BORDER BOYHOOD


A fisher, says our father Izaak, is like a poet: he "must be born so."
The majority of dwellers on the Border are born to be fishers, thanks to
the endless number of rivers and burns in the region between the Tweed
and the Coquet--a realm where almost all trout-fishing is open, and
where, since population and love of the sport have increased, there is
now but little water that merits the trouble of putting up a rod.

Like the rest of us in that country, I was born an angler, though under
an evil star, for, indeed, my labours have not been blessed, and are
devoted to fishing rather than to the catching of fish. Remembrance can
scarcely recover, "nor time bring back to time," the days when I was not
busy at the waterside; yet the feat is not quite beyond the power of
Mnemosyne. My first recollection of the sport must date from about the
age of four. I recall, in a dim brightness, driving along a road that
ran between banks of bracken and mica-veined rocks, and the sunlight on a
shining bend of a highland stream, and my father, standing in the shallow
water, showing me a huge yellow fish, that gave its last fling or two on
the grassy bank. The fish seemed as terrible and dangerous to me as to
Tobit, in the Apocrypha, did that ferocious half-pounder which he carries
on a string in the early Italian pictures. How oddly Botticelli and his
brethren misconceived the man-devouring fish, which must have been a
crocodile strayed from the Nile into the waters of the Euphrates! A half-
pounder! To have been terrified by a trout seems a bad beginning; and,
thereafter, the mist gather's over the past, only to lift again when I
see myself, with a crowd of other little children, sent to fish, with
crooked pins, for minnows, or "baggies" as we called them, in the
Ettrick. If our parents hoped that we would bring home minnows for bait,
they were disappointed. The party was under the command of a nursery
governess, and probably she was no descendant of the mother of us all,
Dame Juliana Berners. We did not catch any minnows, and I remember
sitting to watch a bigger boy, who was angling in a shoal of them when a
parr came into the shoal, and we had bright visions of alluring that
monarch of the deep. But the parr disdained our baits, and for months I
dreamed of what it would have been to capture him, and often thought of
him in church. In a moment of profane confidence my younger brother once
asked me: "What do _you_ do in sermon time? I," said he in a
whisper--"mind you don't tell--_I_ tell stories to myself about catching
trout." To which I added similar confession, for even so I drove the
sermon by, and I have not "told"--till now.

By this time we must have been introduced to trout. Who forgets his
first trout? Mine, thanks to that unlucky star, was a double deception,
or rather there were two kinds of deception. A village carpenter very
kindly made rods for us. They were of unpainted wood, these first rods;
they were in two pieces, with a real brass joint, and there was a ring at
the end of the top joint, to which the line was knotted. We were still
in the age of Walton, who clearly knew nothing, except by hearsay, of a
reel; he abandons the attempt to describe that machine as used by the
salmon-fishers. He thinks it must be seen to be understood. With these
innocent weapons, and with the gardener to bait our hooks, we were taken
to the Yarrow, far up the stream, near Ladhope. How well one remembers
deserting the gardener, and already appreciating the joys of having no
gillie nor attendant, of being "alone with ourselves and the goddess of
fishing"! I cast away as well as I could, and presently jerked a trout,
a tiny one, high up in the air out of the water. But he fell off the
hook again, he dropped in with a little splash, and I rushed up to
consult my tutor on his unsportsmanlike behaviour, and the disappointing,
nay, heart-breaking, occurrence. Was the trout not morally caught, was
there no way of getting him to see this and behave accordingly? The
gardener feared there was none. Meanwhile he sat on the bank and angled
in a pool. "Try my rod," he said, and, as soon as I had taken hold of
it, "pull up," he cried, "pull up." I did "pull up," and hauled my first
troutling on shore. But in my inmost heart I feared that he was not my
trout at all, that the gardener had hooked him before he handed the rod
to me. Then we met my younger brother coming to us with quite a great
fish, half a pound perhaps, which he had caught in a burn. Then, for the
first time, my soul knew the fierce passion of jealousy, the envy of the
angler. Almost for the last time, too; for, I know not why it is, and it
proves me no true fisherman, I am not discontented by the successes of
others. If one cannot catch fish oneself, surely the next best thing is
to see other people catch them.

My own progress was now checked for long by a constitutional and
insuperable aversion to angling with worm. If the gardener, or a pretty
girl-cousin of the mature age of fourteen, would put the worm on, I did
not "much mind" fishing with it. Dost thou remember, fair lady of the
ringlets? Still, I never liked bait-fishing, and these mine allies were
not always at hand. We used, indeed, to have great days with perch at
Faldonside, on the land which Sir Walter Scott was always so anxious to
buy from Mr. Nichol Milne. Almost the last entry in his diary, at
Naples, breathes this unutterable hope. He had deluded himself into
believing that his debts were paid, and that he could soon "speak a word
to young Nichol Milne." The word, of course, was never spoken, and the
unsupplanted laird used to let us fish for his perch to our hearts'
desire. Never was there such slaughter. The corks which we used as
floats were perpetually tipping, bobbing, and disappearing, and then the
red-finned perch would fly out on to dry land. Here I once saw two corks
go down, two anglers haul up, and one perch, attached to both hooks,
descend on the grassy bank. My brother and I filled two baskets once,
and strung dozens of other perch on a stick.

But this was not legitimate business. Not till we came to fly-fishing
were we really entered at the sport, and this initiation took place, as
it chanced, beside the very stream where I was first shown a trout. It
is a charming piece of water, amber-coloured and clear, flowing from the
Morvern hills under the limes of an ancient avenue--trees that have long
survived the house to which, of old, the road must have led. Our gillie
put on for us big bright sea-trout flies--nobody fishes there for yellow
trout; but, in our inexperience, small "brownies" were all we caught.
Probably we were only taken to streams and shallows where we could not
interfere with mature sportsmen. At all events, it was demonstrated to
us that we could actually catch fish with fly, and since then I have
scarcely touched a worm, except as a boy, in burns. In these early days
we had no notion of playing a trout. If there was a bite, we put our
strength into an answering tug, and, if nothing gave way, the trout flew
over our heads, perhaps up into a tree, perhaps over into a branch of the
stream behind us. Quite a large trout will yield to this artless method,
if the rod be sturdy--none of your glued-up cane-affairs. I remember
hooking a trout which, not answering to the first haul, ran right across
the stream and made for a hole in the opposite bank. But the second lift
proved successful and he landed on my side of the water. He had a great
minnow in his throat, and must have been a particularly greedy animal. Of
course, on this system there were many breakages, and the method was
abandoned as we lived into our teens, and began to wade and to understand
something about fly-fishing.

It was worth while to be a boy then in the south of Scotland, and to fish
the waters haunted by old legends, musical with old songs, and renowned
in the sporting essays of Christopher North and Stoddart. Even then,
thirty long years ago, the old stagers used to tell us that "the waiter
was owr sair fished," and they grumbled about the system of draining the
land, which makes a river a roaring torrent in floods, and a bed of grey
stones with a few clear pools and shallows, during the rest of the year.
In times before the hills were drained, before the manufacturing towns
were so populous, before pollution, netting, dynamiting, poisoning,
sniggling, and the enormous increase of fair and unfair fishing, the
border must have been the angler's paradise. Still, it was not bad when
we were boys. We had Ettrick within a mile of us, and a finer natural
trout-stream there is not in Scotland, though now the water only holds a
sadly persecuted remnant. There was one long pool behind Lindean,
flowing beneath a high wooded bank, where the trout literally seemed
never to cease rising at the flies that dropped from the pendant boughs.
Unluckily the water flowed out of the pool in a thin broad stream,
directly it right angles to the pool itself. Thus the angler had, so to
speak, the whole of lower Ettrick at his back when he waded: it was a
long way up stream to the bank, and, as we never used landing-nets then,
we naturally lost a great many trout in trying to unhook them in mid
water. They only averaged as a rule from three to two to the pound, but
they were strong and lively. In this pool there was a large tawny, table-
shaped stone, over which the current broke. Out of the eddy behind this
stone, one of my brothers one day caught three trout weighing over seven
pounds, a feat which nowadays sounds quite incredible. As soon as the
desirable eddy was empty, another trout, a trifle smaller than the
former, seems to have occupied it. The next mile and a half, from
Lindean to the junction with Tweed, was remarkable for excellent sport.
In the last pool of Ettrick, the water flowed by a steep bank, and, if
you cast almost on to the further side, you were perfectly safe to get
fish, even when the river was very low. The flies used, three on a cast,
were small and dusky, hare's ear and woodcock wing, black palmers, or, as
Stoddart sings,

Wee dour looking huiks are the thing,
Mouse body and laverock wing.

Next to Ettrick came Tweed: the former river joins the latter at the bend
of a long stretch of water, half stream, half pool, in which angling was
always good. In late September there were sea-trout, which, for some
reason, rose to the fly much more freely than sea-trout do now in the
upper Tweed. I particularly remember hooking one just under the railway
bridge. He was a two-pounder, and practised the usual sea-trout tactics
of springing into the air like a rocket. There was a knot on my line, of
course, and I was obliged to hold him hard. When he had been dragged up
on the shingle, the line parted, broken in twain at the knot; but it had
lasted just long enough, during three exciting minutes. This accident of
a knot on the line has only once befallen me since, with the strongest
loch-trout I ever encountered. It was on Branxholme Loch, where the
trout run to a great size, but usually refuse the fly. I was alone in a
boat on a windy day; the trout soon ran out the line to the knot, and
then there was nothing for it but to lower the top almost to the water's
edge, and hold on in hope. Presently the boat drifted ashore, and I
landed him--better luck than I deserved. People who only know the trout
of the Test and other chalk streams, cannot imagine how much stronger are
the fish of the swift Scottish streams and dark Scottish lochs. They're
worse fed, but they are infinitely more powerful and active; it is all
the difference between an alderman and a clansman.

Tweed, at this time, was full of trout, but even then they were not easy
to catch. One difficulty lay in the nature of the wading. There is a
pool near Ashiesteil and Gleddis Weil which illustrated this. Here Scott
and Hogg were once upset from a boat while "burning the water"--spearing
salmon by torchlight. Herein, too, as Scott mentions in his Diary, he
once caught two trout at one cast. The pool is long, is paved with small
gravel, and allures you to wade on and on. But the water gradually
deepens as you go forward, and the pool ends in a deep pot under each
bank. Then to recover your ground becomes by no means easy, especially
if the water is heavy. You get half-drowned, or drowned altogether,
before you discover your danger. Many of the pools have this
peculiarity, and in many, one step made rashly lets you into a very
uncomfortable and perilous place. Therefore expeditions to Tweedside
were apt to end in a ducking. It was often hard to reach the water where
trout were rising, and the rise was always capricious. There might not
be a stir on the water for hours, and suddenly it would be all boiling
with heads and tails for twenty minutes, after which nothing was to be
done. To miss "the take" was to waste the day, at least in fly-fishing.
From a high wooded bank I have seen the trout feeding, and they have
almost ceased to feed before I reached the waterside. Still worse was it
to be allured into water over the tops of your waders, early in the day,
and then to find that the rise was over, and there was nothing for it but
a weary walk home, the basket laden only with damp boots. Still, the
trout were undeniably _there_, and that was a great encouragement. They
are there still, but infinitely more cunning than of old. Then, if they
were feeding, they took the artificial fly freely; now it must be exactly
of the right size and shade or they will have none of it. They come
provokingly short, too; just plucking at the hook, and running out a foot
of line or so, then taking their departure. For some reason the Tweed is
more difficult to fish with the dry fly than--the Test, for example. The
water is swifter and very dark, it drowns the fly soon, and on the
surface the fly is less easily distinguished than at Whitchurch, in the
pellucid streams. The Leader a tributary, may be fished with dry fly; on
the Tweed one can hardly manage it. There is a plan by which rising
trout may be taken--namely, by baiting with a small red worm and casting
as in fly-fishing. But that is so hard on the worm! Probably he who can
catch trout with fly on the Tweed between Melrose and Holy Lee can catch
them anywhere. On a good day in April great baskets are still made in
preserved parts of the Tweed, but, if they are made in open water, it
must be, I fancy, with worm, or with the "screw," the lava of the May-
fly. The screw is a hideous and venomous-looking animal, which is fixed
on a particular kind of tackle, and cast up stream with a short line. The
heaviest trout are fond of it, but it can only be used at a season when
either school or Oxford keeps one far from what old Franck, Walton's
contemporary, a Cromwellian trooper, calls "the glittering and resolute
streams of Tweed."