Bill did not belong to the union; he worked eighteen hours a day. His operations, chiefly, were conducted in a shallow bay where a brook emptied into the lake, directly opposite our cottage. There, Bill might be seen during the season, in sunshine and in rain, from long before sunrise until late at night, standing in the shallow water near shore in an attitude which he copied from a Japanese fire screen; or with Edwin Booth's majestic, tragedian stage tread, slowly wading among the pond lily pads and pickerel grass; lifting high and projecting forward in long deliberate strides, one foot after another; each step being carefully placed before his weight was shifted.
Though an awkward appearing person by himself, in a landscape Bill made a picture of symmetry and beauty and his march was the very poetry of motion.
Bill had very definite opinions concerning boats. He knew that they were generally occupied by human animals, of whose intentions he was always suspicious. Either through experience or inherited instinct, he seemed to know exactly how far a shot-gun would carry. Bige and I never had used one on him and we seldom had a gun up our sleeve while in a boat, but Bill never allowed us to approach beyond the safety line.
Day after day through many seasons Bill has stood and observed our boat cross the lake. Without moving an eyelash he would watch our approach until the boat reached a certain definite spot in the lake, when with slow flap of wide spread wings he lifted his long legs, trailing them far behind, while he flew up the lake behind the island. As soon as we had passed about our business, Bill always returned and resumed his job of fishing at the same old stand, where he "watchfully waited" for something to turn up.
Bill was the most patient fisherman I ever knew. Neither Mr. Job nor Woodrow Wilson had anything on Bill. His motto seemed to be, "all things come to him who can afford to wait."
Early in the season Mrs. Bill was busy with household duties. With coarse sticks, brush, mud and moss, in the dead branches of a tall pine, she built the family nest and laid the family eggs. She also sat upon those eggs, with her long, spindly legs hanging straight downward, one on either side of the nest, as one might sit upon a saddle suspended in mid-air. When the brood of young herons were hatched and could be left alone, the mother also went fishing with Bill, and toward the end of the season the young birds were on the job with mother and dad.
One day early in the season, Bige and I were crossing the lake. It was about ten o'clock. Bill had been watchfully waiting at his old stand since 3:30 A. M. One eye was now turned on the approaching boat, but the other eye continued its search of the waters for the long delayed morning meal. About this time, a yellow perch who also was hunting a breakfast, discovered a minnow who had strayed into deep water far from his home. Perchy immediately gave chase, while the alarmed minnow swiftly darted toward safety in his birthplace under a clump of pickerel grass near the shore. As they passed our boat, the race was headed straight for a pair of yellow legs a few rods away.
Ten seconds later, a snake like neck uncoiled and straightened while an opened pair of shears, with lightning speed descended into the water. When they lifted, the shears were closed across the body of a half pound yellow perch. Bill thus held his fish an instant, then tossed it in the air and it descended head first into his wide open mouth. A swelling slowly moving downward marked the passage through a long gullet into his crop, of a breakfast that six and a half hours Bill had been patiently fishing for.
"Sufferin' Maria!" exclaimed Bige, "What a lot of pleasure Bill had swallowing that kicking, wriggling morsel of food down half a yard of throat."