ANGLING SKETCHES(安格林素描)

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ANGLING SKETCHES

By Andrew Lang

ANGLING SKETCHES

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.

ANGLING SKETCHES

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 buttonhole 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

ANGLING SKETCHES

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

ANGLING SKETCHES

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

ANGLING SKETCHES

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.

ANGLING SKETCHES

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

ANGLING SKETCHES

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

ANGLING SKETCHES

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

ANGLING SKETCHES

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

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ANGLINGSKETCHES1ANGLINGSKETCHESByAndrewLangANGLINGSKETCHES2PREFACESeveralofthesketchesinthisvolumehaveappearedinperiodicals."TheBloodyDoctor"wasinMacmillan'sMagazine,"TheConfessionsofaDuffer,""LochAwe,"and"TheLadyortheSalmon?"wereintheFishingGazette,buthavebeentosomeextentre-written."TheDoubleAlibi"...

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