III. At Mayfly Time
About the period when the angler in mountain tarns watches for the bracken-clock, his confrère by less elevated waters is eagerly looking for the coming of the mayfly. In pools set like diamonds in green woods, or in the still reaches of streams, night fishing is now much resorted to. The gauzy-winged mayfly flutters about as long as a glimmer of light plays on the face of the waters, while long after amber night has settled over field and wood and height the trout remain on the feed.
It is evening. A narrow road carries us rapidly towards fresher and cooler air. The luscious green of unshorn fields, decked with starlike forms of white and red and blue, is giving place to the domain of bramble and gorse and rock scarce veiled with soil. At the summit of the road the glories of sunset burst upon us. The sun is sinking between a thin cloud and a line of rugged hill-tops. Through this interval rays of silver and red and pearl are gleaming, dividing the blue west as though with ploughshares of heaven’s own fashioning. But to us chiefest interest lies in the gleaming waters in the middle distance. A fir-wood bounds their further shore; gorse and whin grows luxuriantly on the moor around. One or two small islets, hung with lichen-poisoned sallows, are in the larger section; the merelet is almost divided by two jutting tongues of scrub.
In ten minutes we are by the water’s edge. The gorgeous lights in the western sky have dulled; rose succeeds the fiery red, silver turns to yellow and to gray-blue. The air resounds to the wingings of tiny insects, yet there is a great peace underneath it all. Broken—yes, broken by the quavering wail of the plover pacing the grassy marge near its nest; by an occasional crash, as a heavy trout leaps high and falls back from its keen pursuit. But stay a moment yet, ere the rod is drawn out, to watch the ephemeræ dancing just above the surface of the water. They wheel in scores, they soar by hundreds; yet every movement seems to bring death close, for one here and one there, in a clumsy swerve, touches the water: its frail wings are damped so that it cannot rise again to the airy quadrille of its companions. But they mark not its absence. The dangerous game is not checked. The fallen insect makes one or two attempts to raise itself; in wild, erratic circles it spins round and round, is floated by the faint breeze of eventide toward the shore at our feet. Yard after yard it gradually comes nearer; then suddenly we see the triangular back-fin of a trout in close attendance. A flash—the fin has disappeared; another, and the dark body of a trout leaps half out the water, and as it supplely curves over the poor mayfly is forced into a maw already distended with like unfortunates.
Scores of fish are on the alert to-night—‘the water is fair wick wi’ ‘em,’ as our companion says—waiting for the downfall of the aerial rejoicers just out of their reach, though here and there an impatient one makes a huge leap for a bonne-bouche.
In a trice the rods are out and ready; every moment is of value, for tarn trout are capricious in their feeding periods, and may suddenly and absolutely cease to rise to their most cherished atoms. J—— takes left and I take right shore and begin. I am hampered at first by a series of tiny bogs, but in a few yards reach a gorse-covered promontory. This proves a capital station for a cast; my line swings far and true to where I last saw a struggling mayfly sucked down. My fly—why, a moment ago I picked up and impaled a mayfly, far less difficult to manage than the armour-plated bracken-clock. In less than five minutes my first trout was ashore, a monster over two pounds in weight. But this is a mere of great trout. I remember some six years ago the bed, which had been drained for some time, being reflooded, and a large number of yearling trout being turned in. For some seasons no angling was done. The stock grew great in size, though doubtless, seeing there are no redds, not even a streamlet passable for minnows, available, there was no increase in numbers. The feed is abundant, weeds and other cover plentiful, and, save for the cursory (and cursed) visits of a swan from a mill-dam some miles away, the enemies to fish-life are few.
While these observations are being passed, my rod is being plied assiduously. My fly, planted though it often is in tempting positions over lurking trout, is again and again drawn out untaken. A sharp eye has my quest. See! the wings of the fly, though as deftly placed on the water as my craft finds possible, are bedraggled with constant immersion, and is therefore considered unpalatable by the fish. It doesn’t take a moment to change it, and with the next cast—aimed at that monster in the lee of that islet, behind whose descending shoulders the parted waters have just gurgled together—comes success. The faint feel of a bite travels to my hand, and I strike. There is a sudden slack of the line; then, as the rod-point is raised to continue the strain, a dead pull; then to right the trout makes a sudden rush. I scarcely have followed it than forward my fish dives and downward, and to the resistance is added the entanglement of a bunch of water-weeds. Carefully I get my trout away from this. There is another run forward—a more disturbing one this time indeed—followed by a cl’ck backward and a salmon-like leap a yard out of the water. I am taken aback at the manœuvre, and Salmo levenensis has obtained some valuable yards of liberty, each adding to its chances of breaking away; and, sure enough, with what must have been a double back-turn by the fish, my line is hitched round a hidden snag, and, as my trout and I put on pressure from our opposite ends, parts.
What size did it look like as that leap was made? Nay, trouble me not. The rascal has got a hook and a piece of gut, undeniably my property, and is still at large, if a trifle discommoded. Well, well! J—— had a turn with a cunning trout from this point three evenings ago, and was defeated more ignominiously even than I; so he can’t crow over me. But that fish knows its way about in a fashion and practises manœuvres I for one don’t like.
My next trout, obtained after hooking a submerged tree and tangling in a clump of water-lilies, fights gamely and gives me some breathless moments. When it comes to the landing-net, I am surprised at its smallness, considering its splendid defence—four ounces or less. Well, back it goes! It deserves a new lease of freedom.
Now the gorging trout retire to the middle of the tarn. It is provoking to watch them rising freely far out of reach. Then the silence deepens; the sharp splashes and gurgles of rising trout gradually stop. My rod must be laid aside, for J—— is signalling across the water.
‘Come on round!’ he calls. ‘I want some baccy.’
If J—— is not fishing, he must be smoking; therefore he is perpetually running short of some adjunct to his passion. We will walk quietly round to where he is.
From the reed-beds the coot murmurs to its mate; now and again we hear soft rumblings as they paddle about. A bevy of wild-duck squabble in undertones at another point. J—— has wandered up the further shore meanwhile. A plover whirls up from his feet, ‘squealing like a stuck pig.’ He growls as we fiercely denounce his carelessness.
The soft cutterings in the reed-beds cease as the wild ‘teeu-wits’ re-echo over the tarn; worse than that, in the half-light we see a small dark body nimbly run along, and without a splash take the water. It is an otter disturbed from his nightly gleaning of crayfish. Now we come to the head of the tarn. A wide series of bogs and mud-holes, with a straggly path over the few sound spits of grass, lie in front of us. We can see the distant hills limned against the softly starlit sky. Bay and shore and bush on either side the faint blue water are in fair sight; but though the fairies have traced it with tufts of bog-cotton, the narrow track is invisible to us. One or two slight slips, ankle-deep in a slough, and we are halfway across. Here a stretch of water, perhaps eight feet wide and a foot deep, interposes—the channel by which on occasion storm-water drains from the upper bogs. Many a slab of rock has been placed here to expedite the crossing, but in a week each has sunk too deep in the soft ooze to be of use. To find the uppermost of the stones to-night will require nicety of judgment, even though the landmarks before and behind us are easily recognisable.
‘Nothing venture, nothing have.’ A frolicsome youth essayed to cross here in broad daylight not many moons ago. He made two steps safely, then trod on the edge of a stone, which capsized and threw him into the channel. He was fished out covered with mud and slime. However, to-night we encounter no such tragedy.
J—— now calls on us to hurry up. We crash through the prickly gorse to his side.
‘Do you know, you fellows, what I have just seen? A moment ago a big eel—I could see it clearly in the dark—slid down that grass-track and took the water. It must have come down from the other tarn’—a quarter of a mile away.
‘Old Jack Brock tells of meeting an eel sliding one wet night between Skeggleswater and Longsleddale. It was more than half a mile from a stream big enough for it to swim in.’
‘Bedad!’ interposes J——, whose knowledge of natural history is full of strange intervals of ignorance, ‘and do eels swim? I thought they wriggled along the bottom like snakes.’
These episodes of eel-travelling may be a little beyond the truth, but J—— doesn’t believe so, giving as evidence against our sweeping assertions to the contrary some marvellous fish-lore. After that he clutches the tobacco-pouch closely, and in a few minutes a reek of pungent smoke tells us that his passion demands whole-hearted attention.
The trout come on the feed again ere morning. They are specially eager by the shallows, where hundreds of becalmed mayfly corpses await them. J—— avers at dawn that he saw a trout rub itself against a reed on which a mayfly hung with such violence that the insect was dislodged, fell into the water, and was eaten up.