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 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.
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