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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. Andrew Lang.
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