BIG FISHING
In October every year there are apt to be more fish upon the land in the Nepigon country than one would suppose could find life in the waters. Most families have laid in their full winter supply, the main exceptions being those semi-savage families which leave their fish out—in preference to laying them in—upon racks whereon they are to be seen in rows and by the thousands.
Nepigon, the old Hudson Bay post which is the outfitting place for this region, is 928 miles west of Montreal, on the Canadian Pacific Railway, and on an arm of Lake Superior. The Nepigon River, which connects the greatest of lakes with Lake Nepigon, is the only roadway in all that country, and therefore its mouth, in an arm of the great lake, is the front door to that wonderful region. In travelling through British Columbia I found one district that is going to prove of greater interest to gentlemen sportsmen with the rod, but I know of no greater fishing country than the Nepigon. No single waterway or system of navigable inland waters in North America is likely to wrest the palm from this Nepigon district as the haunt of fish in the greatest plenty, unless we term the salmon a fresh-water fish, and thus call the Fraser, Columbia, and Skeena rivers into the rivalry. There is incessant fishing in this wilderness north of Lake Superior from New-year's Day, when the ice has to be cut to get at the water, all through the succeeding seasons, until again the ice fails to protect the game. And there is every sort of fishing between that which engages a navy of sailing vessels and men, down through all the methods of fish-taking—by nets, by spearing, still fishing, and fly-fishing. A half a dozen sorts of finny game succumb to these methods, and though the region has been famous and therefore much visited for nearly a dozen years, the field is so extensive, so well stocked, and so difficult of access except to persons of means, that even to-day almost the very largest known specimens of each class of fish are to be had there.
If we could put on wings early in October, and could fly down from James's Bay over the dense forests and countless lakes and streams of western Ontario, we would see now and then an Indian or hunter in a canoe, here and there a lonely huddle of small houses forming a Hudson Bay post, and at even greater distances apart small bunches of the cotton or birch-bark tepees of pitiful little Cree or Ojibaway bands. But with the first glance at the majestic expanse of Lake Superior there would burst upon the view scores upon scores of white sails upon the water, and near by, upon the shore, a tent for nearly every sail. That is the time for the annual gathering for catching the big, chunky, red-fleshed fish they call the salmon-trout. They catch those that weigh from a dozen to twenty-five or thirty pounds, and at this time of the year their flesh is comparatively hard.
Engaged in making this great catch are the boats of the Indians from far up the Nepigon and the neighboring streams; of the chance white men of the region, who depend upon nature for their sustenance; and of Finns, Norwegians, Swedes, and others who come from the United States side, or southern shore, to fish for their home markets. These fish come at this season to spawn, seeking the reefs, which are plentiful off the shore in this part of the lake. Gill nets are used to catch them, and are set within five fathoms of the surface by setting the inner buoy in water of that depth, and then paying the net out into deeper water and anchoring it. The run and the fishing continue throughout October. As a rule, among the Canadians and Canada Indians a family goes with each boat—the boats being sloops of twenty-seven to thirty feet in length, and capable of carrying fifteen pork barrels, which are at the outset filled with rock-salt. Sometimes the heads of two families are partners in the ownership of one of these sloops, but, however that may be, the custom is for the women and children to camp in tents along-shore, while the men (usually two men and a boy for each boat) work the nets. It is a stormy season of the year, and the work is rough and hazardous, especially for the nets, which are frequently lost.
Whenever a haul is made the fish are split down the back and cleaned. Then they are washed, rolled in salt, and packed in the barrels. Three days later, when the bodies of the fish have thoroughly purged themselves, they are taken out, washed again, and are once more rolled in fresh salt and put back in the barrels, which are then filled to the top with water. The Indians subsist all winter upon this October catch, and, in addition, manage to exchange a few barrels for other provisions and for clothing. They demand an equivalent of six dollars a barrel in whatever they get in exchange, but do not sell for money, because, as I understand it, they are not obliged to pay the provincial license fee as fishermen, and therefore may not fish for the market. Even sportsmen who throw a fly for one day in the Nepigon country must pay the Government for the privilege. The Indians told me that eight barrels of these fish will last a family of six persons an entire winter. Such a demonstration of prudence and fore-thought as this, of a month's fishing at the threshold of winter, amounts to is a rare one for an Indian to make, and I imagine there is a strong admixture of white blood in most of those who make it. The full-bloods will not take the trouble. They trust to their guns and their traps against the coming of that wolf which they are not unused to facing.
Up along the shores of Lake Nepigon, which is thirty miles by an air line north of Lake Superior, many of the Indians lay up white-fish for winter. They catch them in nets and cure them by frost. They do not clean them. They simply make a hole in the tail end of each fish, and string them, as if they were beads, upon sticks, which they set up into racks. They usually hang the fishes in rows of ten, and frequently store up thousands while they are at it. The Reverend Mr. Renison, who has had much to do with bettering the condition of these Indians, told me that he had caught 1020 pounds of white-fish in two nights with two gill nets in Lake Nepigon. It is unnecessary to add that he cleaned his.
INDIANS HAULING NETS ON LAKE NEPIGON
Lake Nepigon is about seventy miles in length, and two-thirds as wide, at the points of its greatest measurement, and is a picturesque body of water, surrounded by forests and dotted with islands. It is a famous haunt for trout, and those fishermen who are lucky may at times see scores of great beauties lying upon the bottom; or, with a good guide and at the right season, may be taken to places where the water is fairly astir with them. Fishermen who are not lucky may get their customary experience without travelling so far, for the route is by canoe, on top of nearly a thousand miles of railroading; and one mode of locomotion consumes nearly as much time as the other, despite the difference between the respective distances travelled. The speckled trout in the lake are locally reported to weigh from three to nine pounds, but the average stranger will lift in more of three pounds' weight than he will of nine. Yet whatever they average, the catching of them is prime sport as you float upon the water in your picturesque birch-bark canoe, with your guide paddling you noiselessly along, and your spoon or artificial minnow rippling through the water or glinting in the sunlight. You need a stout bait-rod, for the gluttonous fish are game, and make a good fight every time. The local fishermen catch the speckled beauties with an unpoetic lump of pork.
A lively French Canadian whom I met on the cars on my way to Nepigon described that region as "de mos' tareeble place for de fish in all over de worl'." And he added another remark which had at least the same amount of truth at the bottom of it. Said he: "You weel find dere dose Mees Nancy feeshermans from der Unite State, which got dose hunderd-dollar poles and dose leetle humbug flies, vhich dey t'row around and pull 'em back again, like dey was afraid some feesh would bite it. Dat is all one grand stupeedity. Dose man vhich belong dere put on de hook some pork, and catch one tareeble pile of fish. Dey don't give a —— about style, only to catch dose feesh."
To be sure, every fisherman who prides himself on the distance he can cast, and who owns a splendid outfit, will despise the spirit of that French Canadian's speech; yet up in that country many a scientific angler has endured a failure of "bites" for a long and weary time, while his guide was hauling in fish a-plenty, and has come to question "science" for the nonce, and follow the Indian custom. For gray trout (the namaycush, or lake trout) they bait with apparently anything edible that is handiest, preferring pork, rabbit, partridge, the meat of the trout itself, or of the sucker; and the last they take first, if possible. The suckers, by-the-way, are all too plenty, and as full of bones as any old-time frigate ever was with timbers. You may see the Indians eating them and discarding the bones at the same time; and they make the process resemble the action of a hay-cutter when the grass is going in long at one side, and coming out short, but in equal quantities, at the other.
The namaycush of Nepigon weigh from nine to twenty-five pounds. The natives take a big hook and bait it, and then run the point into a piece of shiny, newly-scraped lead. They never "play" their bites, but give them a tight line and steady pull. These fish make a game struggle, leaping and diving and thrashing the water until the gaff ends the struggle. In winter there is as good sport with the namaycush, and it is managed peculiarly. The Indians cut into the ice over deep water, making holes at least eighteen inches in diameter. Across the hole they lay a stick, so that when they pull up a trout the line will run along the stick, and the fish will hit that obstruction instead of the resistant ice. If a fish struck the ice the chances are nine to one that it would tear off the hook. Having baited a hook with pork, and stuck the customary bit of lead upon it, they sound for bottom, and then measure the line so that it will reach to about a foot and a half above soundings—that is to say, off bottom. Then they begin fishing, and their plan is (it is the same all over the Canadian wilderness) to keep jerking the line up with a single, quick sudden bob at frequent intervals.
The spring is the time to catch the big Nepigon jack-fish, or pike. They haunt the grassy places in little bogs and coves, and are caught by trolling. A jack-fish is what we call a pike, and John Watt, the famous guide in that country, tells of those fish of such size that when a man of ordinary height held the tail of one up to his shoulder, the head of the fish dragged on the ground. He must be responsible for the further assertion that he saw an Indian squaw drag a net, with meshes seven inches square, and catch two jack-fish, each of which weighed more than fifty pounds when cleaned. The story another local historian told of a surveyor who caught a big jack-fish that felt like a sunken log, and could only be dragged until its head came to the surface, when he shot it and it broke away—that narrative I will leave for the next New Yorker who goes to Nepigon. And yet it seems to me that such stories distinguish a fishing resort quite as much as the fish actually caught there. Men would not dare to romance like that at many places I have fished in, where the trout are scheduled and numbered, and where you have got to go to a certain rock on a fixed day of the month to catch one.
The Indians are very clever at spearing the jack-fish. At night they use a bark torch, and slaughter the big fish with comparative ease; but their great skill with the spear is shown in the daytime, when the pike are sunning themselves in the grass and weeds along-shore. But when I made my trip up the river, I saw them using so many nets as to threaten the early reduction of the stream to the plane of the ordinary resort. The water was so clear that we could paddle beside the nets and see each one's catch—here a half-dozen suckers, there a jack-fish, and next a couple of beautiful trout. Finding a squaw attending to her net, we bought a trout from her before we had cast a line. The habit of buying fish under such circumstances becomes second nature to a New Yorker. We are a peculiar people. Our fishermen are modest away from the city, but at home they assume the confident tone which comes of knowing the way to Fulton fish-market.
The Nepigon River is a trout's paradise, it is so full of rapids and saults. It is not at all a folly to fish there with a fly-rod. There are records of very large trout at the Hudson Bay post; but you may actually catch four-pound trout yourself, and what you catch yourself seems to me better than any one's else records. I have spoken of the Nepigon River as a roadway. It is one of the great trading trails to and from the far North. At the mouth of the river, opposite the Hudson Bay post, you will see a wreck of one of its noblest vehicles—an old York boat, such as carry the furs and the supplies to and fro. I fancy that Wolseley used precisely such boats to float his men to where he wanted them in 1870. Farther along, before you reach the first portage, you will be apt to see several of the sloops used by the natives for the Lake Superior fishing. They are distinguished for their ugliness, capacity, and strength; but the last two qualities are what they are built to obtain. Of course the prettiest vehicles are the canoes. As the bark and the labor are easily obtainable, these picturesque vessels are very numerous; but a change is coming over their shape, and the historic Ojibaway canoe, in which Hiawatha is supposed to have sailed into eternity, will soon be a thing found only in pictures.
There is good sport with the rod wherever you please to go in "the bush," or wilderness, north of the Canadian Pacific Railway, in Ontario and the western part of Quebec. My first venture in fishing through the ice in that region was part of a hunting experience, when the conditions were such that hunting was out of the question, and our party feasted upon salt pork, tea, and tomatoes during day after day. At first, fried salt pork, taken three times a day in a hunter's camp, seems not to deserve the harsh things that have been said and written about it. The open-air life, the constant and tremendous exercise of hunting or chopping wood for the fire, the novel surroundings in the forest or the camp, all tend to make a man say as hearty a grace over salt pork as he ever did at home before a holiday dinner. Where we were, up the Ottawa in the Canadian wilderness, the pork was all fat, like whale blubber. At night the cook used to tilt up a pan of it, and put some twisted ravellings of a towel in it, and light one end, and thus produce a lamp that would have turned Alfred the Great green with envy, besides smoking his palace till it looked as venerable as Westminster Abbey does now. I ate my share seasoned with the comments of Mr. Frederic Remington, the artist, who asserted that he was never without it on his hunting trips, that it was pure carbonaceous food, that it fastened itself to one's ribs like a true friend, and that no man could freeze to death in the same country with this astonishing provender. We had canned tomatoes and baker's bread and plenty of tea, with salt pork as the pièce de résistance at every meal. I know now—though I would not have confessed it at the time—that mixed with admiration of salt pork was a growing dread that in time, if no change offered itself, I should tire of that diet. I began to feel it sticking to me more like an Old Man of the Sea than a brother. The woodland atmosphere began to taste of it. When I came in-doors it seemed to me that the log shanty was gradually turning into fried salt pork. I could not say that I knew how it felt to eat quail a day for thirty days. One man cannot know everything. But I felt that I was learning.
One day the cook put his hat on, and took his axe, and started out of the shanty door with an unwonted air of business.
"Been goin' fish," said he, in broken Indian. "Good job if get trout."
A good job? Why the thought was like a floating spar to a sailor overboard! I went with him. It was a cold day, but I was dressed in Canadian style—the style of a country where every one puts on everything he owns: all his stockings at once, all his flannel shirts and drawers, all his coats on top of one another, and when there is nothing else left, draws over it all a blanket suit, a pair of moccasins, a tuque, and whatever pairs of gloves he happens to be able to find or borrow. One gets a queer feeling with so many clothes on. They seem to separate you from yourself, and the person you feel inside your clothing might easily be mistaken for another individual. But you are warm, and that's the main thing.
TROUT-FISHING THROUGH THE ICE
I rolled along the trail behind the Indian, through the deathly stillness of the snow-choked forest, and presently, from a knoll and through an opening, we saw a great woodland lake. As it lay beneath its unspotted quilt of snow, edged all around with balsam, and pine and other evergreens, it looked as though some mighty hand had squeezed a colossal tube of white paint into a tremendous emerald bowl. Never had I seen nature so perfectly unalloyed, so exquisitely pure and peaceful, so irresistibly beautiful. I think I should have hesitated to print my ham-like moccasin upon that virgin sheet had I been the guide, but "Brossy," the cook, stalked ahead, making the powdery flakes fly before and behind him, and I followed. Our tracks were white, and quickly faded from view behind us; and, moreover, we passed the signs of a fox and a deer that had crossed during the night, so that our profanation of the scene was neither serious nor exclusive.
The Indian walked to an island near the farther shore, and using his axe with the light, easy freedom that a white man sometimes attains with a penknife, he cut two short sticks for fish-poles. He cut six yards of fish-line in two in the middle of the piece, and tied one end of each part to one end of each stick, making rude knots, as if any sort of a fastening would do. Equally clumsily he tied a bass hook to each fish-line, and on each hook he speared a little cube of pork fat which had gathered an envelope of granulated smoking-tobacco while at rest in his pocket. Next, he cut two holes in the ice, which was a foot thick, and over these we stood, sticks in hand, with the lines dangling through the holes. Hardly had I lowered my line (which had a bullet flattened around it for a sinker, by-the-way) when I felt it jerked to one side, and I pulled up a three-pound trout. It was a speckled trout. This surprised me, for I had no idea of catching anything but lake or gray trout in that water. I caught a gray trout next—a smaller one than the first—and in another minute I had landed another three-pound speckled beauty. My pork bait was still intact, and it may be of interest to fishermen to know that the original cubes of pork remained on those two hooks a week, and caught us many a mess of trout.
There came a lull, which gave us time to philosophize on the contrast between this sort of fishing and the fashionable sport of using the most costly and delicate rods—like pieces of jewelry—and of calculating to a nicety what sort of flies to use in matching the changing weather of the varying tastes of trout in waters where even all these calculations and provisions would not yield a hatful of small fish in a day. Here I was, armed like an urchin beside a minnow brook, and catching bigger trout than I ever saw outside Fulton Market—trout of the choicest variety. But while I moralized my Indian grew impatient, and cut himself a new hole out over deep water. He caught a couple of two-and-a-half-pound brook trout and a four-pound gray trout, and I was as well rewarded. But he was still discontented, and moved to a strait opening into a little bay, where he cut two more holes. "Eas' wind," said he, "fish no bite."
I found on that occasion that no quantity of clothing will keep a man warm in that almost arctic climate. First my hands became cold, and then my feet, and then my ears. A thin film of ice closed up the fishing holes if the water was not constantly disturbed. The thermometer must have registered ten or fifteen degrees below zero. Our lines became quadrupled in thickness at the lower ends by the ice that formed upon them. When they coiled for an instant upon the ice at the edge of a hole, they stuck to it, frozen fast. By stamping my feet and putting my free hand in my pocket as fast as I shifted my pole from one hand to the other, I managed to persist in fishing. I noticed many interesting things as I stood there, almost alone in that almost pathless wilderness. First I saw that the Indian was not cold, though not half so warmly dressed as I. The circulation or vitality of those scions of nature must be very remarkable, for no sort of weather seemed to trouble them at all. Wet feet, wet bodies, intense cold, whatever came, found and left them indifferent. Night after night, in camp, in the open air, or in our log shanty, we white men trembled with the cold when the log fire burned low, but the Indians never woke to rebuild it. Indeed, I did not see one have his blanket pulled over his chest at any time. Woodcocks were drumming in the forest now and then, and the shrill, bird-like chatter of the squirrels frequently rang out upon the forest quiet. My Indian knew every noise, no matter how faint, yet never raised his head to listen. "Dat squirrel," he would say, when I asked him. Or, "Woodcock, him calling rain," he ventured. Once I asked what a very queer, distant, muffled sound was. "You hear dat when you walk. Keep still, no hear dat," he said. It was the noise the ice made when I moved.
As I stood there a squirrel came down upon a log jutting out over the edge of the lake, and looked me over. A white weasel ran about in the bushes so close to me that I could have hit him with a peanut shell. That morning some partridge had been seen feeding in the bush close to members of our party. It was a country where small game is not hunted, and does not always hide at a man's approach. We had left our fish lying on the ice near the various holes from which we pulled them, and I thought of them when a flock of ravens passed overhead, crying out in their hoarse tones. They were sure to see the fish dotting the snow like raisins in a bowl of rice.
"Won't they steal the fish?" I asked.
"T'ink not," said the Indian.
"I don't know anything about ravens," I said, "but if they are even distantly related to a crow, they will steal whatever they can lift."
We could not see our fish around the bend of the lake, so the Indian dropped his rod and walked stolidly after the birds. As soon as he passed out of sight I heard him scolding the great birds as if they were unruly children.
"'Way, there!" he cried—"'way! Leave dat fish, you. What you do dere, you t'ief?"
It was an outcropping of the French blood in his veins that made it possible for him to do such violence to Indian reticence. The birds had seen our fish, and were about to seize them. Only the foolish bird tradition that renders it necessary for everything with wings to circle precisely so many times over its prey before taking it saved us our game and lost them their dinner. They had not completed half their quota of circles when Brossy began to yell at them. When he returned his brain had awakened, and he began to remember that ravens were thieves. He said that the lumbermen in that country pack their dinners in canvas sacks and hide them in the snow. Often the ravens come, and, searching out this food, tear off the sacks and steal their contents. I bade good-bye to pork three times a day after that. At least twice a day we feasted upon trout.