THE CONFESSIONS OF A DUFFER
These papers do not boast of great sport. They are truthful, not like
the tales some fishers tell. They should appeal to many sympathies.
There is no false modesty in the confidence with which I esteem myself a
duffer, at fishing. Some men are born duffers; others, unlike persons of
genius, become so by an infinite capacity for not taking
pains. Others,
again, among whom I would rank myself, combine both these elements of
incompetence. Nature, that made me enthusiastically fond of fishing,
gave me thumbs for fingers, short-sighted eyes, indolence, carelessness,
and a temper which (usually sweet and angelic) is goaded to madness by
the laws of matter and of gravitation. For example: when another man is
caught up in a branch he disengages his fly; I jerk at it till something
breaks. As for carelessness, in boyhood I fished, by preference, with
doubtful gut and knots ill-tied; it made the risk greater, and increased
the excitement if one did hook a trout. I can't keep a fly-book. I
stuff the flies into my pockets at random, or stick them into the leaves
of a novel, or bestow them in the lining of my hat or the case of my
rods. Never, till 1890, in all my days did I possess a landing-net. If
I can drag a fish up a bank, or over the gravel, well; if not, he goes on
his way rejoicing. On the Test I thought it seemly to carry a landing-
net. It had a hinge, and doubled up. I put the handle through a button-
hole of my coat: I saw a big
fish rising, I put a dry fly over him; the
idiot took it. Up stream he ran, then down stream, then he yielded to
the rod and came near me. I tried to unship my landing-net from my
button-hole. Vain labour! I twisted and turned the handle, it would not
budge. Finally, I stooped, and attempted to ladle the trout out with the
short net; but he broke the gut, and went off. A landing-net is a
tedious thing to carry, so is a creel, and a creel is, to me, a
superfluity. There is never anything to put in it. If I do catch a
trout, I lay him under a big stone, cover him with leaves, and never find
him again. I often break my top joint; so, as I never carry string, I
splice it with a bit of the line, which I bite off, for I really cannot
be troubled with scissors and I always lose my knife. When a phantom
minnow sticks in my clothes, I snap the gut off, and put on another, so
that when I reach home I look as if a shoal of fierce minnows had
attacked me and hung on like leeches. When a boy, I was--once or twice--a
bait-fisher, but I never carried worms in box or bag. I found them under
big stones, or in the
fields, wherever I had the luck. I never tie nor
otherwise fasten the joints of my rod; they often slip out of the sockets
and splash into the water. Mr. Hardy, however, has invented a
joint-fastening which never slips. On the other hand, by letting the
joint rust, you may find it difficult to take down your rod. When I see
a trout rising, I always cast so as to get hung up, and I frighten him as
I disengage my hook. I invariably fall in and get half-drowned when I
wade, there being an insufficiency of nails in the soles of my brogues.
My waders let in water, too, and when I go out to fish I usually leave
either my reel, or my flies, or my rod, at home. Perhaps no other man's
average of lost flies in proportion to taken trout was ever so great as
mine. I lose plenty, by striking furiously, after a series of short
rises, and breaking the gut, with which the fish swims away. As to
dressing a fly, one would sooner think of dressing a dinner. The result
of the fly-dressing would resemble a small blacking-brush, perhaps, but
nothing entomological.
Then why, a persevering reader may ask, do I
fish? Well, it is stronger
than myself, the love of fishing; perhaps it is an inherited instinct,
without the inherited power. I may have had a fishing ancestor who
bequeathed to me the passion without the art. My vocation is fixed, and
I have fished to little purpose all my days. Not for salmon, an almost
fabulous and yet a stupid fish, which must be moved with a rod like a
weaver's beam. The trout is more delicate and dainty--not the sea-trout,
which any man, woman, or child can capture, but the yellow trout in clear
water.
A few rises are almost all I ask for: to catch more than half a dozen
fish does not fall to my lot twice a year. Of course, in a Sutherland
loch one man is as good as another, the expert no better than the duffer.
The fish will take, or they won't. If they won't, nobody can catch them;
if they will, nobody can miss them. It is as simple as trolling a minnow
from a boat in Loch Leven, probably the lowest possible form of angling.
My ambition is as great as my skill is feeble; to capture big trout with
the dry fly in the Test, that would content me, and nothing under that.
But
I can't see the natural fly on the water; I cannot see my own fly,
Let it sink or let it swim.
I often don't see the trout rise to me, if he is such a fool as to rise;
and I can't strike in time when I do see him. Besides, I am unteachable
to tie any of the orthodox knots in the gut; it takes me half an hour to
get the gut through one of these newfangled iron eyes, and, when it is
through, I knot it any way. The "jam" knot is a name to me, and no more.
That, perhaps, is why the hooks crack off so merrily. Then, if I do spot
a rising trout, and if he does not spot me as I crawl like the serpent
towards him, my fly always fixes in a nettle, a haycock, a rose-bush, or
whatnot, behind me. I undo it, or break it, and put up another, make a
cast, and, "plop," all the line falls in with a splash that would
frighten a crocodile. The fish's big black fin goes cutting the stream
above, and there is a sauve qui peut of trout in all directions.
I once did manage to make a cast correctly: the fly went over the fish's
nose; he rose; I hooked
him, and he was a great silly brute of a
grayling. The grayling is the deadest-hearted and the foolishest-headed
fish that swims. I would as lief catch a perch or an eel as a grayling.
This is the worst of it--this ambition of the duffer's, this desire for
perfection, as if the golfing imbecile should match himself against Mr.
Horace Hutchinson, or as the sow of the Greek proverb challenged Athene
to sing. I know it all, I deplore it, I regret the evils of ambition;
but
c'est plus fort que moi. If there is a trout rising well under the
pendant boughs that trail in the water, if there is a brake of briars
behind me, a strong wind down stream, for that trout, in that impregnable
situation, I am impelled to fish. If I raise him I strike, miss him,
catch up in his tree, swish the cast off into the briars, break my top,
break my heart, but--that is the humour of it. The passion, or instinct,
being in all senses blind, must no doubt be hereditary. It is full of
sorrow and bitterness and hope deferred, and entails the mockery of
friends, especially of the fair. But I would as soon lay down a love of
books as a love of fishing.
Success with pen or rod may be beyond one, but there is the pleasure of
the pursuit, the rapture of endeavour, the delight of an impossible
chase, the joys of nature--sky, trees, brooks, and birds. Happiness in
these things is the legacy to us of the barbarian. Man in the future
will enjoy bricks, asphalte, fog, machinery, "society," even picture
galleries, as many men and most women do already. We are fortunate who
inherit the older, not "the new spirit"--we who, skilled or unskilled,
follow in the steps of our father, Izaak, by streams less clear, indeed,
and in meadows less fragrant, than his. Still, they are meadows and
streams, not wholly dispeopled yet of birds and trout; nor can any defect
of art, nor certainty of laborious disappointment, keep us from the
waterside when April comes.
Next to being an expert, it is well to be a contented duffer: a man who
would fish if he could, and who will pleasure himself by flicking off his
flies, and dreaming of impossible trout, and smoking among the sedges
Hope's enchanted cigarettes. Next time we shall be more skilled, more
fortunate.
Next time! "To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow." Grey
hairs come, and stiff limbs, and shortened sight; but the spring is green
and hope is fresh for all the changes in the world and in ourselves. We
can tell a hawk from a hand-saw, a March Brown from a Blue Dun; and if
our success be as poor as ever, our fancy can dream as well as ever of
better things and more fortunate chances. For fishing is like life; and
in the art of living, too, there are duffers, though they seldom give us
their confessions. Yet even they are kept alive, like the incompetent
angler, by this undying hope: they will be more careful, more skilful,
more lucky next time. The gleaming untravelled future, the bright
untried waters, allure us from day to day, from pool to pool, till, like
the veteran on Coquet side, we "try a farewell throw," or, like Stoddart,
look our last on Tweed.
