Fish are rising occasionally without absolutely breaking the water, and it is evident that their attention is devoted not to the casual insects floating on the surface, but to the larvæ ascending from the river bed, which they seize before they reach the upper world. We catch a specimen of the full-fledged fly (a Light-Olive), and, having matched it closely in the fly-book, commence operations.
It is ticklish work, this Hampshire trout fishing. Long education has developed in the natives of these waters a degree of sagacity that is almost supernatural. Their appreciation of the faintest nuance of exaggeration in colour of wing or body, in the artificial flies offered them, is unerring.
Time was, when to take six or seven brace of fish was a common occurrence. But in the memory of chalk-stream habitués there has been a gradual and steady diminution in angling averages; and now, unless the trout have a silly interval, a brace and a half or two brace is a good day's sport, and to catch these demands far greater knowledge, and the exercise of far more skill and patience than was formerly dreamt of. Then men walked boldly along the river bank, and fished with ordinary tackle and a wet fly. Now, albeit the flies used are miracles of diminutive workmanship, the gut a filament of fineness, that, with any consideration for its strength, can scarcely be reduced, to stalk and capture a two-pound trout necessitates the use of a dry fly, and a degree of caution and address scarcely less than is required for successful moose hunting.
As the best fly-fisherman in Hampshire said to me: "You want to put the exact fly just over your fish the first time, if he doesn't take it he doesn't mean to. By changing flies, and sticking to him half the day, you may worry him into an indiscretion, but it is a hundred to one that you are only educating him."
What fishing will eventually become in these streams it is difficult to imagine, for the decrease in sport arises from no reduction in the stock of fish, which are more numerous now than they ever were.
To-day I am not wielding the rod, but act merely as gillie for a master of the art, on whom the mantle of old Isaac Walton has descended. Gradually we work up stream, trying to convert these Winnal incarnations of perversity from their unholy appetite for larvæ, with exquisite imitations of various Olives and of the Red Quill. But they remain obdurate. They come, but come short. They roll up and leisurely inspect the fly, and with not less contemptuous deliberation turn tail upon it.
At length a far cast under the opposite bank is followed by a slight break in the water, a quick tension of the line, and a good fish is in difficulty. But almost immediately the point of the rod flies up, and, owing to the knot attaching the gut to the eyed hook having drawn, the fish escapes.
"None do here
Use to swear,
Oaths to fray