Whatever one may say of March, April is the true opening month of the trout season. I have caught plenty of out-of-condition trout in April, brown trout not yet built back to shape by the release of underwater life in the warmer temperatures, cutthroats hardly finished with their spawning, rainbows full ripe and ready to begin theirs. April days can be as cold and wet and miserable with wind as December days. April rivers can be swollen and thick with flood. But April is still as beautiful as its name, the true spring month that breaks our world out of winter into something nearly summer. It could not be right to keep anglers away from their rivers at such a time, and I think they seldom are kept away, unless by the ice of a high altitude or a late year.
There is a tale that the willow and the alder are two anglers who offended the powers by fishing on Sunday and were transformed, to stand beside the river evermore. It would have been in April, I think, that this happened. The alder woods are a bright, fresh mist of pale green then; the willow whips are tall and supple, with the sap swelling under green and yellow bark and red and white buds thrusting forth. April, perhaps because it is the spring month, is a month of little pictures vividly remembered. I remember the high, wild, crying wedges of geese swinging splendidly northward, sometimes with the sunlight bright on their wings; and once, at dusk, three geese circling the house and looking for a place to light. I remember the bright mating plumage of the mallards and the drake mergansers all up and down the river and once, along the road, the first goldfinch of the year all black and sunlit yellow just ahead of me. I remember the approach to the Sandy Pool—under the white-barked alders a floor of freshet-swept sand pierced by bleeding heart and a thousand trilliums and the pink Easter lilies just breaking out of bud. Once, going up to the Canyon Pool along the far bank of the river, I crossed a little swamp where skunk cabbage flowers sprang strongly from black ooze in spaced and loveliest yellow. There is pink almond blossom in April and heavy white cherry blossom against blue and white skies. There are killdeer and yellowlegs on the tide flats, meadow larks on the fence posts, red-winged black-birds in the swamps. Not to go out and meet all this would be a denial of the year’s hope.
The humpback fry are out in the Campbell in April—other fry too, for that matter—but one notices the humpbacks because of their bright silver scales quite without parr marks. It seems to me I always see them first swimming about in the current within inches of my waders, half a dozen quick little fish, heads upstream, holding maybe, but going down very shortly. Then I look harder and see others, whole schools clustered in the eddies. The big cutthroats find them out and feed greedily—it pays to drop a fly in places where no fish lies through the rest of the year. Obviously a silver-bodied fly is the thing, fished fast; but that is a shade too obvious. It will take fish, yes, and sometimes take them better than anything else. But the cutthroats are seldom as single-minded as they seem. Many times I have opened up a catch of ten or twelve fish, taken in April when the river was full of salmon fry, and found that only one or two of my fish had been really feeding on fry, and sometimes not even one or two. Of the others, several perhaps would have fry in them, but well mixed with other feed, and at least half the catch would have been concerned with anything and everything except fry—May flies, caddis grubs, beetles, caterpillars, bees, even bullheads, but not fry. I suspect that free-swimming fry are overquick and difficult to catch. Not every fish can be bothered with them when the current brings other and better things straight to the open jaws.
So I seldom fish my silver fly very fast; I let it drift weakly, crossing the current but making no headway against it, tumbling down rather and, I like to think, rolling clear over some times. And I do not stay always with the silver fly or even with the wet fly. The trout are feeding, on the lookout, and I have risen April fish after April fish to the dry fly in pools where every little backwater was packed with fry.
Iremember April fishing days, like other April happenings, in quick sunlit flashes. I remember an English garden, built narrowly along a trout stream, a thorn hedge, a narrow border, an edge of lawn, a red-graveled path, another strip of lawn, and then the river, and on the far bank, tall and graceful willows in wild growth. The river was shallow and straight through the garden, broken into three little falls by logs staked across it. Close under the far side of the center fall, in a deeper place where the bubbles showed white in green water, I could see the long dark shape of a big trout. He was a thin fish with a great wedge-shaped head, and he showed up very clearly against the pale sand of the river bottom. Grandfather, walking up the garden a few days earlier, had seen him and decided that he was a ne’er-do-well, a cannibal, who must be taken out by any method; and I was ordered to attend to the matter.
I had a medium olive quill tied on a No. 16 hook— double-o, we called it—and 4X gut. The chance of moving the fish to that, clear up from the bottom, didn’t seem very great, but at least he deserved his chance. I dropped down on one knee and began to let out line in false casts. Then I saw the other fish, a pale, thick, hog-backed fish lying two or three feet over from the dark fish, well up in the water, his nose almost touching the little log that made the fall. As I watched, his body tilted slightly and his nose just broke water to suck in a fly.
I thought quickly over all the implications and complications; there were plenty of both. The pale fish was really big and really beautiful—I wanted him badly. He was a stranger, perhaps not yet settled into a permanent summer holt, and if I left him or disturbed him this time I might not find him again. He was difficult; the fall of water over the log made a close back eddy, perhaps five or six inches wide and running the full length of the little fall. He was taking flies held in this back eddy, and to catch him, I must drop my first cast so that the fly pitched almost exactly on his nose, with a slack line behind it to delay the pull of the stream which would eventually whip the fly out of the eddy in an unnatural drag that would scare the wits out of him. I considered a longer cast above the fall that would let the fly drift down on him, but decided against that because the fly might be drowned or, worse still, the longer drift might use up the precious slack line and bring the drag on the fly just as it came into his vision.
Then there was Grandfather to be considered. Grandfather wanted his cannibal caught and would have a good deal to say about it if he was not caught— Grandfather hadn’t a very high opinion of fishing as a sport, though he felt that one possibly had some excuse for indulging in it if one did a good job. Catching the pale fish would almost certainly disturb the cannibal and make him impossible to move. But I still wanted the pale fish and I promised myself that the affair of the cannibal would work itself out somehow.
I lengthened my line and dropped the fly on the water once, well behind both fish. The pale fish came up in one of his tiny, tidy, fastidious rises as I did so; his back looked six inches wide, which it was not and could not have been, but the impression made me want him still more. I let out more line, then took my long chance and aimed the fly for the narrow eddy. It came perfectly to the water, perhaps three inches to one side of his nose. He turned to it slowly, so slowly that I knew from the poise and set of his body rather than from actual movement that he was interested. The little olive danced there on the curling water in the April sunlight; I moved my rod point cautiously to delay the drag of the line until the last possible moment. Then he came, confidently and calmly, and the fly was gone. For a tiny fraction of time his back was broad again and quite still in the bright water. Then I touched the hook home. He did the right thing, by Grandfather and by me. Instead of turning across or down he went straight up, over the log like an explosion and on almost to the tail of a fine weed bed, where the rod turned him. I brought him back, and he ran again as he felt his tail come out over the log. Three times he did that; then I tumbled him down, and we fought it out in water well below the cannibal’s lie. On the bank he was as perfect as I had hoped he would be, his red spots splendid against his pale coat, his body far too thick for my hand’s grip.
And the black fish was still where he had been. I dried the fly and dropped it over him, but he made no move. I tried it again, half a dozen times, then a freak of the current smoothed the surface and I saw his head most clearly. Around the eye there was a circle of dead whiteness; I knew he was blind. I drowned the fly and dropped it to him again, several times. Once he moved, the slight restless movement that brown trout make when they are deciding it’s about time to move out for some favorite hiding place. I crept back from the bank and made myself wait for ten or fifteen minutes, then changed the little dry fly to a much larger wet fly, for the small hook would not sink down to him. The big fly went down well, and I tried drifting it a foot or two away from him at first, hoping he would sense it and come across. I brought it closer and closer to him with each cast, and still he would not move. Then I dropped it squarely above him. It sank and slid down; it brushed his nose so that he turned away; it crept along his body, passed his tail—then he turned like a pike, his great white mouth opened and he had it. Grandfather looked over both fish as they lay in state on the hall table and was impressed.
Two other April days come sharply into my mind, and both are sunny days of fish seen clearly in bright April water. On the Nimpkish River we kept the gas boats tied to a rough landing two or three hundred yards below the house. One morning we went down to work on them, and as we worked, a good fish rose again and again with solemn, solid plops close under the bushes just above us. Buster said at last, “Go and catch him.”
I started on him, using a small iron blue; and as he came to it, another fish rose twenty or thirty yards farther up. I netted the first fish, a green-backed, solid cutthroat of two and a half pounds. Little dark-blue May flies poured down the river in a narrow stream close under the bushes, and the second fish still rose. I went up to him, and as I cast for him, a third fish rose twenty yards beyond him. An hour later I came out of the water opposite the house, and I had with me ten white-bellied, green-backed cutthroats with not an inch in length nor a quarter of a pound in weight between them. I laid them out in the sunlight on the short grass of the bank. Buster was coming up to the house for lunch and saw me there. “You’re a hell of a guy,” he said. “I ought to have known better than let you go off the job.” Then he came closer and saw the fish. “Oh, boy!” he said softly. “Oh, boy!”
Since Ann and I have filled the house with children, we go up the river together too seldom. But there was an April day a year or two ago when we arranged things and went. “We shan’t find much,” I said. “The fish seem to have moved up out of the Island Pools this year. I think the river’s low for them. But it’s a swell day and it will be fun up there.”
So I went out into the main pool and hooked almost at once a thick golden cutthroat that looked to me like a four-pounder and fought me till I was trembling with the fear that I should never get him to the scales to find out. I have caught only one sea-run cutthroat of over four pounds in the Campbell, and he doesn’t count because I was fishing for steelhead when he took hold. The fish came to the net at last, and I carried him proudly ashore. “He’s a four-pounder,” I told Ann.
She shook her head. “I don’t think so. I’ve seen you catch them as big as that before.”
The scales made him three and three-quarter pounds.
I fished lazily, bouncing a deer-hair dry fly down over the fast water of the pool, and caught other fish. We lay in the sun and ate lunch and talked. I went far out on the bar at last, because it seems wrong to go all the way up to the Islands and not try it out properly, however lazy the day. Just above the main run a great, bright steelhead took my fly. He seemed to love the fast, clear water and ran and played in it with little care for all I could do with my trout rod. Ann saw me in trouble and came out along the bar toward me. The fish came back, more or less of his own free will, and carelessly let himself into slack water behind a rock. I held hard, reached down and slipped a finger in his gills. I held him up, looking back toward Ann against the sun, then freed the hook and slipped him back. I heard Ann laugh and knew that the Island Pool was a good place to be on a spring day.
H. M. GREENHILL
As I look back on them now it seems to me that my male elders in Dorset fell into two astonishingly well-defined groups. There were the Victorians, men in their seventies and eighties: Grandfather and his two brothers; Thomas Hardy; Squire Sheridan, Grandfather’s neighbor; Mr. Shepherd, the village carpenter; Knight, the river keeper on the club water. These make a cross section of examples. They were small, spare, wiry men, usually with short gray beards—though Hardy and my two great-uncles had only gray mustaches—very quick and keen, both physically and mentally. Dorset is kind to old men, or was before the world wars began. Squire Sheridan was well over eighty when I last saw him, but he was standing waist deep in the river, cutting weeds with great sweeping strokes of his scythe. Grandfather had to break his ankle twice in the hills to be convinced that eighty is too old for hard shooting days. Knight was walking his twelve or fourteen miles a day through the water meadows, summer and winter, when he was well into the eighties. Hardy, though the scope of his labors bore little relation to that of these mere mortals, was in no greater haste to lay down his burden than they were; his greatness did not fail him in his life time and his stature grows steadily now that he is dead.
Among these men there was something of the closeness that there is among the elder citizens of an American small town. Grandfather and my great-uncles had been at Dorchester Grammar School with Hardy, and though the way of the three brothers branched widely from Hardy’s way after their school days, there was much that held them together. Grandfather loved Dorset county as Hardy loved Dorset people and he respected Hardy with a sincerity that was wholly admirable in such a practical and autocratic old gentleman. I think he rarely missed a quarterly teatime visit to Max Gate, and I know that when he took me with him, we entered the house and met the great and gentle little man with a humility that seemed to re duce Grandfather to my own schoolboy age. Between Grandfather and Squire Brinsley Sheridan there was a different respect, grudging and born out of a lifetime of disagreements, but real. Mr. Shepherd and Grandfather met squarely as equals, craftsman to trader, though one was employer and the other employed, and I think the fraternity of old age was stronger between these two than between any of the others. Knight was Knight, the friend of every keen fisherman, wise in the life of his water meadows and a truer countryman than any of the others. Knight could not read or write properly, and he regretted it. Once he told me, “I ain’t never learned ‘ee. My zister, her can do ‘un, but her beant so oold as I be. You zee, when they passed this ‘ere law ‘bout ‘avin’ to ‘ave schoolin’ it du zeem I were just too old for ‘un.” I often wondered how great was the loss through that, not Knight’s loss, for he was great in his work as were the other Victorians I have listed, but the country’s. Sixty years of walking the meadows is a long time, sixty years of knowing birds and beasts and fish and seeing them with sharp gray eyes that never needed spectacles is time to have yielded much knowledge. An educated Knight might have been another such as William Lunn, the inspired keeper and manager of the Houghton Club water. He might even have been a Gilbert White or a Jefferies.
The other group of my elders was Edwardian, as clearly as Grandfather’s group was Victorian. They were big, heavy, broad-shouldered men, often soldiers, black-mustached and deep-voiced, lovers of all forms of sport. Nearly all of them were magnificent with the shotgun, most of them were cricketers, and some were good fishermen. I can think easily over a long list of names—Colonel Saunders, Major Radclyffe, the Ham-bro brothers of banking fame, my uncle Alec who died of wounds in 1919 and John Kelly, the wonderful Irish gardener who was as truly a Dorset man as William Barnes himself. Of them all, none was truer to type than Major Greenhill, and from Greenhill I learned most of those things about fishing and wing shooting that a boy generally learns from his father.
The First World War took hold of my father when I was six years old and held him until he was killed at Bapaume in March, 1918. Nearly all my Mother’s eleven brothers were kept busy during the war and for some years after. As a result, I grew up beside a fine trout stream and in the midst of good shooting country with only the crudest ideas of how to go about either business. I caught a few fish by most reprehensible methods and stalked rabbits and pigeons, even partridges and mallards, with a variety of weapons at once less effective and less artistic then the shotgun. In the summer of 1922, when I was fourteen, one of my uncles—the best and keenest fisherman of them all—was at home long enough to teach me the elements of dry-fly fishing. And during the Christmas holidays of the same year Greenhill came, it seemed to me from nowhere, and took over.
At that time Greenhill was already a heroic figure to me. He had always been held up to me as one of the best wing shots in England, and I knew he was a fine salmon fisherman. He was a huge man, an inch or two over six feet and weighing about 220 pounds, which he seemed to carry mainly on his chest and shoulders. I had seen him play a brave part on the cricket field, lifting the ball in full-shouldered drives to bounce its way among the mounds of the cemetery. Seated in glory at the edge of the ring, I had watched him referee the army boxing tournaments. And now his talented bulk rested itself deep in one of the dining-room chairs, and his strong, heavy voice told Mother that he would look after my sporting education. Some one, he said, had to make up for the war.
He taught as good teachers do, by example, by opportune and unhurried explanation, by occasional strong direction. The strongest lesson he taught, though he never named it, was complete concentration on, and devotion to, the matter in hand. I learned quickly that if there was a chance of going shooting on a certain day, I must not tie myself to anything else; that while we were out I must see everything and know everything—the identity of birds by their fight, the line that rabbits would take in bolting from a certain place, any shift of wind, the change of a field from stubble to plow, any lowering or raising of the river by a farmer’s manipulation of irrigation hatches. I must never tire, because I was younger and stronger in proportion to my weight than he was—a point that it was not difficult for me to recognize. No walk must be too long, no hour of creeping in wet meadows too painful, if there was a chance of a shot at the end of it. Above all, I must be ready when game flushed; I could miss and be forgiven, provided I offered no excuse for missing. But if I failed to get my gun off at a fair chance, I must walk with it unloaded through the rest of the day. Safety was provided for by an even stiffer penalty; if I fired a dangerous shot, if I failed to break my gun before climbing a fence or crossing a hedge, I must go home at once in disgrace. But this penalty was never invoked, because I had been already well trained in safety.
Such an account of penalties and forfeits makes our shooting days sound gloomy, but they were not. I made him angry perhaps half a dozen times in all the years we fished and shot together—two or three times because I was lazy or fainthearted, two or three times because I missed, through sheer carelessness, golden chances we had worked hard for, once because I lied to him. It was a simple thing, this last, yet it taught me clearly, as nothing else has, the urgency of being honest with yourself if you want to learn. I had planned to take the ferrets and terriers out one day to kill off the rats that infested a corn rick. The day turned out badly, with a southwesterly gale and driving rain, but I wanted to go anyway and I asked Greenhill to go with me. “No use,” he said. “Rats won’t bolt a day like this. You’ll get your ferrets all bitten up and you’ll just be wasting your time.” I went anyway, with a couple of friends; and my favorite ferret got badly bitten, the rats wouldn’t bolt and we finished the day with six or eight dead rats instead of a hundred or more. A few days later he asked me how it had been.
“All right,” I said. “We didn’t do badly.”
Greenhill snorted. “Bet you didn’t get half a dozen rats.”
“Yes, we did,” I said. “More than that.”
“How many? Twenty? Thirty?”
I nodded. “About that,” I said, and he said nothing more until the next day. Then he said, “You lied to me about those rats, young fellow. You only got six or seven the whole day.”
I tried to get out of it, but there was no way. He was really angry then and so was I, angry and afraid. But what he meant was clear enough: rats and rabbits won’t bolt well to ferrets on a bad day—that is a piece of knowledge by which one must be guided again and again in planning a day. Any exception to it is important, for it may disclose some other factor that has entered into the business. A lie such as I had told is aimed at the roots of useful knowledge.
One other incident taught me early just what sort of training I was under. Greenhill had a Labrador bitch named Dinah, and Dinah was a model retriever. By some standards she was too sedate and dignified and slow, but her calm eyes and mind missed nothing. Greenhill could stand and drop a dozen birds, with Dinah moving only her head behind him to watch the fight and fall of each one. Then, when the drive was finished, he would move her out, and she would pick up every one of them on her own, without help unless there happened to be an exceptionally bad runner. She was the same in the meadows, phlegmatic about the rise of a bird, unmoved by the shot, un concerned about the retrieve until he ordered her out. Early one January we had a quick spell of hard weather, a light fall of snow and more frosts. Working the meadows for snipe, we found a flock of mallards on the river, stalked them and killed four. Two fell in the water on the far side of the river and were caught up by low-hanging willow branches. We picked tip the other two, and I waited for him to send Dinah across. He didn’t. Instead he said, “All right, young fellow, get on with it.”
“Get on with what?”
“Go across and pick ‘em up. It’s too cold for Dinah; she’s getting old.”
The nearest bridge was a mile upstream, and the water was high and dirty in spite of the frosts.
“You mean swim?” I asked. “It’s too cold.”
“If you want to come out with me you do what I say and don’t argue.”
“I haven’t got anything to dry myself with.”
“You’ve got a handkerchief, haven’t you?”
I took my clothes off and fetched the ducks, and the hand kerchief did its job well enough. That wasn’t the last time I worked for Dinah.
“She works hard enough for you,” Greenhill said. “You can do something for her once in a while.”
Because he infinitely preferred shooting and salmon fishing and because I knew my way about the river well enough, Greenhill did not come trout fishing with me very often at first. As a matter of fact I began, in my dry-fly man’s arrogance, to discount him as a trout fisherman. My uncles and my father had, so far as I knew, used nothing but the dry fly on Grandfather’s lengths of the Frome and the Wrackle and on the Club water as well. The uncle who taught me to fish had taught me only dry-fly fishing, and I was, at fourteen, a hidebound purist. To make matters worse, I got pretty good at the business and kept on improving steadily, which was natural enough because I had every opportunity to know the water well and had a fanatical keenness as well as a complete disregard for weather conditions or discomfort of any kind. Such things simply didn’t register.
I am not sure just when or how I discovered that Greenhill was not a very experienced dry-fly fisherman. Certainly he never told me or admitted it by remotest inference, nor did he ever attempt to suggest that the wet fly was a better method. But I knew somehow; and after the original shock of surprise, the knowledge gave me a very pleasant sense of superiority- there was at least one thing in which I could match him. Greenhill took whatever offensiveness I had to offer—I can’t remember any of it exactly, but I am sure it was plenty— and began to fish with me more often. He used the dry fly for the most part, out of respect for the unwritten rule of the water, but occasionally turned to the wet fly. Very offhandedly he began to explain to me and show me some of the difficulties and complications of wet-fly fishing. We treated it as something of a joke, a method to play with occasionally, just for a change. I was glad to keep it that way because I was in no hurry to lose my sense of superiority. Wet-fly fishing was chuck-and-chance-it, a fair-enough method for the little trout of the Scottish burns or the Devonshire streams, but mild sacrilege on a chalk stream, even on a minor edition of a chalk stream such as the Frome was. But unfortunately for my sense of superiority, I liked fishing and I liked to know about fish; watching Greenhill and trying the method occasionally myself I began to see that there were satisfactions and difficulties in it as great as those of dry-fly fishing; more important, trout responded differently to a fly moved across or against the current than they did to one floating on the surface. Fishing the wet fly, one found trout in unexpected places; they came to it sometimes over the top of weed beds in great smooth arrows of disturbed water that checked sharply into a boiling rise. The sudden direct pull of a fish on the line and back into the hand was fully as exciting as the gentle dimple in which a dry fly disappeared.
The Frome fish were every bit as shy as chalk-stream fish are likely to be—any clumsy approach would put a feeding fish down for the rest of that day and perhaps for longer. Fishing a dry fly, one learned to kneel and crawl upstream, spot ting rises carefully, studying the approach, working carefully into position for the cast. Upstream nymph fishing was fascinating and profitable, as I already knew, and the upstream wet fly offered most of the same advantages, except that the fish usually turned to follow it downstream before taking and so would sometimes see the rod or simply turn in disgust from the too swift swimming of the fly. But Greenhill wanted me to fish the downstream wet fly, and that was really difficult with shy fish. It meant an altogether more intense form of crawling and creeping, a closer study of lies and approaches and current, longer and in some ways more accurate casting. Greenhill was good, and I wanted to be as good myself; so I began to work at it.
As soon as I had thoroughly committed myself to learning the method, Greenhill began to rule and guide my learning as he ruled what I did when we were shooting. I started out with one bad fault, an almost unbreakable habit of recovering line in my hand, developed by years of upstream fishing. This brought the fly across too fast and too shallow, and Greenhill, after a period of patient explanation, began to take the rod away from me whenever I fell in to it. In a little while we were fishing with only one rod between us, changing over whenever one or other of us hooked a fish and whenever I made a clumsy or careless cast or fished the fly badly. I became a respectable wet-fly fisherman rather quickly, and from then on Greenhill was little concerned about whether I fished wet or dry or with the nymph.
All this, I realize now, was his way of preparing me for salmon fishing. Greenhill was not by any means a rich man; he lived frugally in the barracks at Dorchester and spent what little money he had where it would give him the most of the sports he loved. He had a pair of beautiful guns and loaded his own cartridges. His salmon rods were greenheart that he had made up himself; he made all his own traces and fights and minnows and prawn tackles, though not, I think, his flies. The one extravagance he allowed himself was the renting of a stretch of salmon water on the lower reaches of the Frome, between Wool and Wareham. During the season he fished there almost every day, alone or with his friend Charlie Baunton, with whom he shared the water.
At that time the Frome, like several other fine salmon rivers in the south of England, was slowly and painfully re covering after bad days. Early in the nineteenth century it had been a great river with a magnificent run of fish. Uncontrolled netting and some pollution had made it almost worthless, but evidently the run of fish was not quite killed out. I don’t know the exact history of its recovery, whether the riparian owners bought off some of the nets, as they did on the Wye, or whether the scarcity of salmon simply discouraged the net fisherman, but the recovery was a fine thing. In the early 1920’s there was a good run of fish in the spring months, and they were really large fish— over twenty pounds as often as not and thirty-pounders were common. One April, during the Easter holidays, Greenhill suddenly told me that I was to come salmon fishing with him, not just once or twice, but every day I wanted to. This was like a sudden opening of heaven’s gate. For years I had listened to my uncle’s talk of salmon fishing and read books about salmon fishing and dreamed dreams of it. Now I was to start fishing with the almost certain chance of really big fish, and I knew I should be learning the business properly.
The Frome is a slow, deep river in its lower reaches, and the meadows through which it runs are wilder and rougher than those farther up. Strong weeds and sedges grow up in the pasture land, and the irrigation ditches are deep and wide; the river was not tidal where we fished it, but as I remember it now the country had some measure of the bigness and wildness of the tide flats at the mouths of British Columbia rivers that I have known since. There were ravens there and big hawks and ducks and wading birds of many kinds. Small birds were there also, sedge warblers and reed buntings and black-headed buntings, pippits and pert wagtails; they sang and mated and nested in the reeds and the rough grass, the wagtails fussing and fluttering and strutting at the edge of the river. And always things were happening in the wide meadows and the willow beds: a nesting plover would be chasing a raven, or two ravens chasing a hawk; a polecat would be glimpsed hunting a hedge; or a sudden rush of wings would reveal a sparrow hawk’s stoop at a bunting.
But the river itself was the greatest fascination. Its slow current hid things that I could only vaguely imagine: the lies of great pike and salmon, deep silent places from which tKey might fiercely turn at any moment to seize the fly or minnow or prawn that I dared to hang there. I was almost genuinely afraid at times, afraid of dragging the fly away from some crashing rise or of jamming the reel as a great fish jumped or of doing any of the hundred other things I could do to throw away a golden chance that might better have been in Greenhill’s capable hands.
Wisely, Greenhill started me with the fly. The Frome is not a really good river for the fly; for the most part it is too slow and too deep for attractive fishing, though many fine fish have come to the torrish or Jock Scott or green highlander. But I was given the fly rod because it was easy—minnow and prawn were for those experienced and fortunate individuals who knew the bottom of the river as well as its surface and could handle them properly.
We started fishing at an off time. Fish were being caught in the pool below Bindon Mill. We heard about them and even saw them caught as we passed the mill each day. But in the rest of the river there was little moving; in a full week’s Fishing I had moved two fish to the fly, and Greenhill had felt perhaps five or six touch his prawn, only one of them hard enough to take out line. We had not even killed a good-sized pike, something I had hoped for, though Greenhill had warned me carefully that we were not fishing for pike and should not catch them unless we fished too fast for salmon. Before the end of the week I had tried prawn and minnow several times, gladly and hopefully, but they had done little more for me than the fly—one good hard pull to the minnow in the Railway Pool.
On the morning of the ninth day we got to the river late and found that Charlie Baunton had killed two beautiful fish on the fly before we got there. We caught nothing. On the tenth day we took out only the Spinning rod and fished alternately. The Railway Pool was blank and so was the next pool below it. That brought us to the Ivy Pool, a deep pool where the fish sometimes lie well in under the bank in a sort of cave that the river has cut away. Greenhill worked his prawn into this place and hooked a fish. For once all went well, and I gaffed it for him ten minutes later—a fourteen-pounder.
I worked down the rest of the pool, fishing my most careful best, dropping the prawn within six inches of the other bank, swinging it across deep and slow, holding it as long as I could wherever the fish should be lying. Greenhill watched closely and once or twice nodded his head in approval. I wanted that because I knew that a bad cast plopping down in midstream or a few turns of the reel too fast in bringing the prawn through a good lie would be his signal to take the rod away for half an hour. But fish how I would, the rest of the pool was blank.
The next pool was the Hut Pool, a pool on a curve and shallow at the head, so shallow that I could see the prawn as I brought the first cast around. I moved two steps and cast again. Again I saw the prawn coming up to me under my own bank; then there was a fish behind it, a silver-gray fish, big and beautiful. He came in a wave and turned in a boil, and then Greenhill was shouting anxious directions to me.
He was only a ten-pounder, and Greenhill lifted him on the gaff five or six minutes after I had hooked him. He half-apologized, half-scolded me, “I wanted you to get the first one, young fellow. Next time you can play him out and bring him to the gaff properly.”
I don’t think I cared whether I fished at all in the rest of that day. My salmon was on the bank, clean silver and beautiful, with the violet sheen of the sea faint on his scales. Greenhill fished on, and we came to the long pool called the Salmon Water. He was fishing as only he could, swinging the prawn out easily, letting it almost brush the reeds of the far bank in its fall, working it deep down to the floor of the river before he began the slow recovery. His big shoulders hunched over the rod, his hands on rod and reel were ready and sensitive, his whole being seemed projected out into the swim of his prawn, concentrated on what it was doing down there on the bottom of the river. Beside him Dinah sat in trembling concentration as tense as his own. Suddenly, almost in the exact moment that he began the recovery of a cast, he lifted the rod in a heavy strike. Dinah stood up, ears pricked forward. Right under the far bank a big fish crashed to the surface in a heavy, shattering jump. The fish ran as the others had not, deep down and strongly, taking out a lot of line. For fully twenty minutes he bored and struggled and twisted, while we followed him as closely as we could along the bank. Then Greenhill brought him to the gaff, and I saw he was big, so big I didn’t want the gaffing of him for fear I would muff it. I reached over, slowly and carefully, then struck and felt the gaff slide solidly home; I lifted and the fish was on the bank.
“Well done,” Greenhill said.
“Gosh,” I said. “What does he weigh? Forty pounds?”
Greenhill shook his head and smiled. “Not quite thirty. We’ll see when we get back to the mill.” He began to mount a new prawn. “You get on and fish before it’s too late. You won’t get many days like this one.”
So I fished out the rest of the Salmon Water, and near the tail of it an eighteen-pounder took me, and I killed him, properly and alone as a salmon fisherman should, even gaffing him myself. As we walked back up toward the mill along the railroad, I felt my face hot and my knees weak from sheer joy; the thirty-pound weight of salmon slung clumsily on my back was something I remembered only because it was salmon—salmon Greenhill and I had caught.
I fished many more days with Greenhill. Once I gaffed a forty-pounder for him, and within an hour of that he gaffed a twenty-eight-pounder for me. But right up until the last day I fished with him, I fished on probation. Sometimes, despairing of salmon, I would fish the minnow a little faster in the hope of attracting a big pike. “When you come out with me for salmon, don’t waste time fishing for pike,” he would say. “Give me that rod.” Or, when I made a clumsy cast, “What are you trying to do? Knock their brains out? They don’t want it on top of their heads.” I think I learned the lessons. I know I still think of him almost every time I fish a pool and try to cover it as carefully and cunningly as he would have.
The very last day I fished with him we fished for pike in the river Stour near Wimborne. We often went out in high hopes of big pike during the winter months, and I was not surprised when he suggested the Stour because I knew a forty-pounder had been killed there years earlier. We crossed the river on a bridge some way above where we were to fish and saw it was high but in good shape. “You ought to get a twenty-pounder today, young fellow,” he said. At the farm where we left the car, they told us the river might be flooded over its banks in places, but it should be fishable. This was accurate enough, and I killed a ten-pounder in the first few minutes by wading over the tops of my boots. I offered Greenhill the rod, but he shook his head. “I want to see you catch fish today,” he said.
I caught them. An eight-pounder, a fourteen-pounder, two or three small ones, then a sixteen-pounder. Each time I offered him the rod, and each time he refused it. He stood behind me all the time, leaning on the long handle of his gaff, watching closely and yet not wholeheartedly interested in the fate of every cast as he usually was. It was still early in the day when the sixteen-pounder was on the bank. Greenhill said, “You know, I was born a few miles from here.”
I was surprised; I hadn’t known that. I think I realized then how little I did know about him. He said, “You’ve got all the fish you want. I’d like to drive round and look at two or three places.”
So we took the rod down and went back to the car. He directed as I drove along narrow lanes until we came to the gates of a big stone house in a fine park. I stopped the car, and he looked at it for a long time. I knew it was the house where he was born and I asked, “Who lives there now?” But he didn’t answer. Later we drove on farther, to a cemetery, and he showed me the graves where his mother and father were buried. After that we drove home. I felt I had been taken close to him, but I couldn’t understand why and I held back into myself a little, afraid. After a while, he said, “Sorry I took you away from your fishing, young fellow. But it’s not like salmon fishing; it was only pike.” I hadn’t minded about the fishing, but I knew it was strange that he had wanted to leave it and strange that he hadn’t taken the rod all day. At seventeen I was perfectly willing to call a thing strange without wondering much just why it was strange.
Three weeks later Greenhill went up to shoot pigeons in a wood on a windy hill. He died there, and Dinah howled beside him through the night and part of the next morning.
LITTLE LAKES
The little lakes of Vancouver Island and the British Columbia coast are uncountable. If they were to be counted, someone would have to lay down a law that distinguished between a lake and a pothole and a pond and a swamp. Then all the ground would have to be resurveyed and all the maps drawn again to make quite sure that no little lake, anywhere, was left out. And that would be an awful job because they nestle in a thousand unexpected places—on the breasts of mountains, in wide river flats, up draws and gullies, on forgotten plateaus and on the round tops of big hills.
To be little, I think a lake should be not more than a mile or two long. To be a lake at all, it should have a respectable flow of water into it and out of it, some lakes, I know, are fed by springs and drained by underground streams; but a little lake that has nothing more than an overflow channel leading from it is in grave danger of being reckoned a pond. Swamps, very often, are lakes filled in by the slow deposit of each year’s algal bloom and weed growth until reeds and hardhack can spread their roots out into it and still keep their heads above water. It is not always too easy to decide when a lake has ceased to be a lake and become a swamp. Potholes, for my purpose, are flood pools in the swamps and wide places in the creeks where there is just room for a few ducks to light and feed. Beaver ponds usually are something all their own, good places to fish, but still more nearly potholes than lakes.
Most of the little lakes on the British Columbia coast have trout in them, and the time to go to them first is in April. May can be a good month too, but in July and August, even in June, the water is likely to be too warm for good fish or good fishing. In late September and early October, when cool nights have lowered the water temperature, they are good again. Generally the trout in the lakes are cutthroats, generally they will come well enough to the fly and generally there will be plenty of them; but that’s about all the generalizing it is safe to do because little lakes can vary in fascinating ways, even when they are on the same watershed.
I like them best when they are back in the standing timber. They are secret and silent then, closed in, and few people go to them. It is a great moment when you come down through the woods to such a lake. You stand there and look at it, judging its shore line, measuring its islands, noticing a deep bay here, a sloping beach there, a rock bluff across on the other side; it is untried water then and it looks full of promise. Every wind fall, thrusting out into the water, may be the haunt of a big fish; the shallow water behind the island, where the lily pads show, will surely be a good place for the fly; the mouth of the stream at the head will be worth trying; the deep, still water may hide anything, even a short, thick ten-pounder, perhaps a whole round dozen of them. True, that miracle never hap pens, but a man would be a queer sort of fisherman if he did not let his mind play with the idea of it at every first sight of new water.
There is a whole chain of little lakes above the fourteen- mile length of Nimpkish Lake—Anutz, Hustan, Atluck, Wolf, Crescent, Loon, to name only the larger ones. Each lake, and its fishing, is sharply different from the others, and each has its surprises. I fished Anutz for a whole year before I caught anything much bigger than a pound. Then one day I ran a canoe clear to the head and pulled it up on a gravel bar where the stream came in. I had meant to take the trail and go on through to Hustan Lake, but as I watched there was a quiet little rise at the edge of the fast run of water that poured into the lake. I got ready lazily to fish over it, but because the day was bright I put up a 4X leader and a No. 17 greenwell nymph. The fish rose again while I was tying on the fly, but I still didn’t suppose he was particularly big. I cast upstream of the rise, saw a faint movement underwater and struck into something solid. The fish rolled out as he felt the hook, then turned and ran down into the lake until he had half the backing off the reel. He weighed over four pounds when I netted him, and I caught two others of about the same size without moving from the gravel bar. The next week I caught three more in the same place and with the same fly, one of them only a few ounces under five pounds. I can’t recall that I saw any others or lost any, and each rise meant a fish fairly and solidly hooked. The little greenwell does its work well.
Hustan lies farther in toward the high mountains and is more beautiful than Anutz. It is almost two lakes, divided by a thirty-foot neck of moderate current. The best fishing is in this neck, good, free-rising little cutthroats running from three quarters of a pound up to a pound and a quarter at most. The lower half of the lake is a great jam of floating logs and smaller drift, sucked in against an underground outlet. There are two layers of splendidly arched limestone caves, the upper layer bone dry and with funnels that lead down to the river on the lower level. There were fish here in the semi-darkness, little, thin half-pounders that took the fly greedily and fought gamely for their size. They were not blind, even far down the caves where only a shadow of light penetrated, and it was strange to hook them and play them and net them entirely by feel.
Little lakes have a way of hiding themselves in the woods, and it is easy to pass within a few hundred feet of one and not see it, particularly if it has an underground outlet, as is very often the case in limestone country. Unknown Lake is within a hundred yards of the main trail to Buttle Lake, or what was the main trail until logging destroyed it a year or two ago. Even though a stranger passing may see light on the water through the trees, he will not suspect there is a lake there because he has just passed a great wide backwater of the Buttle River and it is easy to imagine that the trail has curved to pass the head of this. I heard reports of Unknown Lake long before I found it, and wonderful reports they were too: the trout took with fierce carelessness; they were hog flat from feeding on nothing but leeches; they averaged three pounds or more in weight. The truth, when I found it, differed somewhat from the reports, but was almost as spectacular. The truth was not revealed the first time I found the lake—only suggested. It was a hot day in July, and Edward and I ran down from the trail on our way out from Buttle Lake. The lake lay in the sun without a ripple, and all over its surface there played great mottled-wing dragonflies, mating and hunting and feeding. They swooped and dove and pounced and hovered, and the warm, still air seemed to nestle under their wings and click with their sharp maneuvering. There were other, smaller dragonflies among them and gray and blue damsel flies also, but not a trout moved anywhere that we could see. We found an old dugout at the lower end of the lake; but it was leaky and waterlogged, and we had only an hour or so to fish, so we worked along the shore, wading in where the bottom was right. We caught and killed three fish that weighed about a pound each and returned two others that were smaller. All of them came up from deep water, in fine slashing rises, but after that fought poorly. Fortunately I had a thermometer with me, and when I read the water temperature at sixty-eight degrees Fahrenheit, I knew we had not given the lake a fair chance. When I examined the stomachs of the fish we had caught and found them packed with beetles and caddis larvae and chironomid nymphs, in hundreds, and fresh-water clams and dragonfly larvae, I knew the lake had possibilities.
So we tried it again the next year, in April, before the water had time to get warm. One or two fish showed far out, near the islands, while we were putting our rods up. I tied on a fly and flipped it out along the log I was standing on. It was taken fiercely and at once by a fish about fifteen inches long. All around the lake it was the same: the second a fly touched the water, a fish had it. They came to wet fly or dry, to fly worked or simply sinking down through the water, to fly cast well out or flicked in close to shore. Often three or four fish came at once, and the disappointed waited their chance until the barb- less and pointless hook—for we cut away barbs and points almost at once—dropped away from the first fish. We caught no three-pounders—a pound and a half was the largest; but we caught no really small fish, nothing much smaller than ten inches long. Later I went into the lake again and built a raft so that we could fish the deep water in the center and the shoals near the islands. We tried in May and in September, but still we could find no three-pounders even though we tried a little halfhearted trolling for them.
Burnt Lake is another lake with no outlet and only a small stream running into it in times of heavy rain. It is a tiny lake, not more than twenty acres, and I first heard of it from hunters ten or twelve years ago. A wonderful place for big bucks, they said, if you can find it. It’s somewhere in the flat above the Quinsam, not more than a mile or so from the road and nearer the bluffs than the river, probably draining into Coal Creek.
Then the timber was cut away, and the hunters seemed even more vague than they had been about it. So I took time out one day when I was hunting willow grouse and found it myself. It wasn’t really so very hard to find, because there were a few tall, slim trees standing around it amidst all the devastation of high-lead logging; and when one marked their line from Coal Creek, it was fairly obvious that the lake was near them. It was a calm day, and the surface of the lake was not stirred by the least ripple. I watched it for nearly an hour and saw no sign of fish.
A week or two later I took the rubber boat in there and learned a little more about it. I fished with everything—flies and spinners and even worms—and could not move a fish of any kind. I took soundings and found over seventy feet of water in the center, with depths sloping almost evenly down to that from every side. The lake was quite cool enough for fish—fifty-two degrees Fahrenheit at six feet, forty-two degrees Fahrenheit at twenty-four feet—and I found many kinds of good trout feed in it. It seemed a perfect chance for an experiment in stocking. I made a few calculations and decided that an annual planting of about 500 fry should keep the lake producing a steady harvest of two-and three-pound fish. Kamloops trout would be the best prospect, because they will seldom spawn without running water, and I felt confident that the intermittent flow of the creek at the head would not be sufficient encouragement for them. So long as there was no natural spawning to confuse things, it should not be difficult to keep the lake exactly controlled.
I reckoned without the freehandedness of the powers that be. I wrote and asked them for the first stocking, 500 fry. When the cans came up, they had in them a thousand little fish instead of five hundred, three-inch fingerlings instead of one-inch fry, and all were solemnly dumped into poor little Burnt Lake. This meant a survival far in excess of anything I had counted on, and I saw that my hope of two- and three-pounders was gone. The next year, which was 1928, the powers sent along 500 more fingerlings in the spring, and then, during the summer, a great forest fire swept down Vancouver Island. For two or three days Burnt Lake was in the hottest heart of the fire. The last few standing trees burned away, the salal brush burned and the hardhack around the edges of the lake, and the soil burned away from the gravel of the ridges. Even great Douglas fir stumps were burned to nothing, leaving three or four deep holes in the ground where their largest roots had gone down.
I saw Burnt Lake soon after the fire passed through. Its whole surface was covered with a gray scum of ashes, and I tried to imagine it as it had been in the fire, with the red glare all around it and reflected from it and smoldering pieces of bark and debris, wind-borne, falling into it and hissing their heat away into the water. I wondered if any fish still lived. Such a little lake in the midst of such a huge fire seemed no more than a kettle on a hot stove, but I remembered that heat goes up, not down, even in water, and that the lake was seventy feet deep. There would have been plenty of cool water down there. Then I wondered about the ash, whether it would choke the oxygen out of the water or perhaps sink down and clog the gills of the fish. I felt less certain about this; it might not kill them all but surely would affect a fair number, and that would be no bad thing for my hope of three-pounders.
I fished the lake the following April. It was full of fish, lively little nine- and ten-inch Kamloops that came hungrily to any fly. I waited a year and tried again; there were eleven- and twelve-inch fish now, rather thin and dark, but red-fleshed, pretty and lively. Many of them were fully ripened to spawn and some of the females had begun to reabsorb their eggs, I thought.
I still go occasionally to Burnt Lake. It isn’t so pretty since the fire, but there is something attractive about its small, almost perfect roundness and the way the ridges circle it close and hide it. The salal and Oregon grape are starting to grow again, with yellow violets among them; willows are creeping down again from the swamp that feeds the creek; and not all the hardhack along the edge of the lake was killed. The fish are still there, and I keep very quiet about them and the lake. I don’t think anyone has remembered to stock it since the war started, and in time the surplus stock of fish should die out. Then, if there has been even a little successful natural spawning, there may be a chance of two- and three-pounders. I like to think of that and I like to think, too, that the ridges all around the lake will be green again with salal, perhaps even with the start of fir and hemlock and cedar. Some day, hunters may talk again of the little lake lost in the woods on the wide flat above the Quinsam. “A fine place for a big buck,” they’ll say. “And there’s big fish in the lake too; you can see ‘em jump sometimes, if you watch.”
Ax and fire and logging machinery come to nearly all the little lakes of Vancouver Island sooner or later. Some are still lost in the deep woods, a few are protected in parks, rugged mountain country guards others; but the near ones, those one lives with, are passing through the change or must pass through it soon. And the change is not all loss. I wonder often about logged-off land, whether or not love of it is an acquired taste. The first days and months of the change are shocking—scarred earth, splintered stumps, dead, brown treetops, broken sap lings, everything torn and shattered and fattened into a chaos of waste. The summer sun bleaches the raw red scars, dries the glistening sap where the bark is torn away, shrivels the needles from the broken tops; in the fall there is fire, and the waste becomes black logs and stumps against red gravel. Sooner or later after that the healing starts. Little shoots of salal and Oregon grape show the earliest green, and then the brambles and bracken and fireweed make light ground cover out of the exhausted soil; after these, willows and poplars in the creek bottoms and along the lines of swamps, spreading out even to dry ground where the country is fairly fat. Dogwoods spring from old stumps on the slopes, and in a few favored places the broad-leaved maples seed thickly and grow to tree height in a few short years. Wherever there are seed trees left alive after the burning, Douglas fir and hemlock and cedar show again; often the white pine comes, far more thickly than before the logging. But no fire kills blister rust. Its spores settle from the high air, and one by one the little pine trees wither and bleed and die. Slowly the old botanical wars fight themselves out again, and the forest builds back to itself through a changing loveliness surely as satisfying as the heavy magnificence of virgin timber.
The first little lake I ever saw on Vancouver Island was Theimar Lake, and my first duty was to stake out the line of the logging railroad that harvested its timber. Our line ran eight hundred or a thousand feet from the lake, but I went down there the first day. Mac, a little Irishman who was working on the same crew, came down with me, and I asked him about the fish. “Lots of them,” he said. “The boys go out from camp every Sunday. We can come back and try it after supper if you like.”
We did that, and the fishing was pretty good. It was an ex citing lake too, deep and fairly wide at the upper end, suddenly narrow where an island came up out of the deep water and little more than river width from there down through a mile or more of swamp. I wanted to explore, and Mac was willing enough, so we poled the clumsy old raft all over it until the sun was down and the moon was up. Then we hit back for camp, and the moon went in and we lost ourselves somehow between the lake and our survey line. We walked around a little until I fell over a twenty-foot bluff and told Mac I meant to stay put until there was some light. Soon after that the moon came out again, and we found the line and saw lanterns along it—our boss had come out with the skidder rigger to look for us. Mac didn’t like being kidded and he was pretty gloomy on the way home. “We’ll never hear the last of this,” he said. “The only way is to pull right out of camp tomorrow.” But we survived it somehow and both of us were still working on the same crew a full year later.
I fished Theimar Lake a good many times during the next several years and learned the full length of the little stream that runs from it down to the salt water. There were beaver dams in the stream where big sea-run cutthroats sometimes lay, and in October a fine run of coho salmon came through to the lake to spawn. In the winter months I shot ducks and geese in the marshy lower end of the lake, and once, at dusk, half a dozen swans circled the island where I was hidden. I remember the work of the graders and steel gangs as they put in the rail road along the line we had laid out; I remember the fallers coming behind them and how I worked myself to load the logs on the cars as the yarding donkey brought them up to the track from the edge of the lake. I felt then that the lake was almost dead and finished. There was scrub timber still around the heronry and the swampy lower end of the lake, scrub timber around the swamps at the head; but the main part of the lake was stripped bare, and dead tops lay dismally out in the water in all the little bays we had fished. I fished it no more, though I passed it often on the way to other fishing places, and in fall and winter I hunted in it and near it for ducks and geese and grouse and deer.
Then I was away from that country for two or three years. The April after I got back I thought of lake fishing. Theimar Lake was only four or five miles away across the logging slash, so I took blankets and a light pack and went there. On the way to the lake I passed through two heavy hailstorms, cold lashing storms from black clouds, but the clouds blew over and the sun came out again in a blue and white sky. I began to notice how the logging slash had healed: alders were thick along the grades, willows and young conifers grew in the old settings, the raw red earth of the skid roads was weathered and over grown by brambles, and salal brush was thick and glossy green among the burned stumps.
Even so, I did not expect that the lake would please me; the trees had been cut away from it, and the slope of Mount Holdsworth was bare for two thousand feet above it. I could see how the benches and gullies had logged out to the railroads we had laid along them and across them. I came upon the lake almost suddenly. It was blue and white, broken by the wind, very clean and clear in the sunlight. On the islands and at the far end the scrub timber was still standing; the swamp grass was thick, still brown from winter frosts, and Hudson’s Bay tea grew in the drier places. At the head was the long, level swamp, and at the upper end of that stood the tall white pines that had not been reached by the high-lead machine. The lake seemed as fine as it had ever seemed, and now it was lonely and lost in the logging slash as little lakes are lonely and lost in the Scottish moors. The loggers who had taken the timber had moved far away; the steel and the ties were stripped from the railroads, and there was no threat of ax or donkey whistle or saw. No one wanted the country or the lake or anything in it, so it was mine as it never had been before. I was suddenly conscious of the other little lakes that lay near by, Soo Lake and Roselle Lake, and of the length of Theimar Creek toward the salt water and the sweep of land over toward the mountains along Nimpkish Lake. It was a big empty country, left to its own devices, to its own fascinating growth back into something that some day men would want again.
It was late afternoon when I came to the lake, and I had decided to build a raft because I knew the old ones would be waterlogged and falling apart. I made camp quickly near the larger of the two creeks that came in at the head of the lake, then walked two or three hundred yards up to the old logging trestle. The lean-to shelter where Sam Ford’s bridge crew had cooked their lunches was still there, and I found a handful of spikes, as I was pretty sure I would. Then I picked out two of the sawed bridge ties left on the deck and dragged them down to the lake. There was enough shiplap lumber lying around the trestle to floor my raft, so I packed that down too. Then I put up my rod and caught two or three fish for supper.
The wind died down at dusk and a full moon was in the sky almost at once; it was a still night, crystal bright in the stars and the moon and the water. All day long the big blue grouse had been hooting in the logging slash and the ruffed grouse drumming in the swamps; now the hooters were silent, but the ruffed grouse drummed and courted all around me in the moonlight. I lay and listened to them and thought of Sam’s good bridge crew—Roy Davis, Curly Brown, George Boxall, Ozzie, the engineer, Sam himself. I knew where some of them were and could guess at what they were doing. I wondered if they ever thought of this one of the many, many logging trestles they had built together, this one near the head of little, lost Theimar Lake.
I made my raft the next morning, dapping the bridge ties across three slender, sharply pointed cedar poles, nailing the shiplap deck to the ties. By the time I had finished the wind was strong again, blowing up from the foot of the lake. I poled my raft up to the island, drifted back and caught a few fish, poled up again, drifted once more and caught a few more fish. But it was hard work and uncomfortable, so I decided to wait for the calm of the next morning and spent the rest of that afternoon in walking to Soo Lake and Roselle Lake to see how they looked with the timber away from them.
In the calm of the next morning the fish were really feeding, coming freely to the surface in deep water all down the center of the lake. I used a small, dry iron blue on 3X gut and kept everything larger than fourteen inches. It was fine fishing, exactly what I had come for, and by the time the first ripple of wind came up the lake I had twelve or fourteen good, clean fish on the raft. None of them was larger than a pound and a half, but I was not looking for large fish because I had learned long before that Theimar Lake’s big ones were dark and thin in April. I was near the island, almost a mile from my camp, when the wind began to freshen. I hooked another fish, and by the time he was in the net there were whitecaps all over the lake. I thought I saw a quiet rise on the slope of one and cast to it. A fish took the little fly at once and ran with a solid determination that told me he was big. Had he broken me or shaken loose in that first run, I should hardly have cared, because I was certain I knew his type—twenty-four inches long, a bare two pounds in weight, dark, with a big head and red on his gill covers. But he came back from the run and ran again, near the surface this time, so that I saw his broad, clean side under the crest of a whitecap. Then everything was difficult. The fish went down, and the raft wanted to drift over the line. I paddled awkwardly with one hand, holding the rod in the other. The waves swept over the shiplap floor of my raft, and the raft itself creaked and groaned. I couldn’t raise the fish in the water; then I could raise him and he came back to me, but I couldn’t net him. And the raft drifted over him again and I straightened that out, but he ran again, strongly, upwind, and I dared not hold him on the light rod and the light gut. Then the raft jarred suddenly, hard on the shore at the head of the lake. I jumped out into the shallow water and knew that the fish was tiring. Two or three minutes later he was on his side, with the swells lifting him as I slipped the net under. I looked at him a long time when I had him, because he was the only really fine fish I ever caught in Theimar Lake—nearly four pounds and fat as a fish from the Test in June. I forced the hook from his jaw and loosed the gut from my line. It was no time to make another cast.