“That is just the thing that annoys me,” said the Parson; “it is, as you say, a most lovely fishing day,—I never saw a more promising one; and I have just heard that these logs will take three days floating by at the very least, and while they are on the river I defy the best fisherman in all England to land anything bigger than a graul.”
“Why,” said the Captain, “have the scoundrels been cutting a whole forest?”
“This is what Torkel tells me,” said the Parson; “he says that in the winter they cut their confounded firs, and when the snow is on the ground they just square them, haul them down to the river or its tributaries, where they leave them to take care of themselves, and when the ice melts in the spring, down come the trees with it. But there are three or four lakes, it seems, through which this river passes—that, by-the-by, is the reason why it is so clear; and, as the baulks would be drifting all manner of ways when they got into these lakes, and would get stranded on the shores instead of going down the stream, they make what they call a boom at or near the mouth of the river, that is to say, they chain together a number of baulks, end-ways, and moor them in a bight across the river, so that they catch everything that floats. Here they get hold of the loose baulks, make them into rafts, and navigate them along the lakes, launching them again into the river at the other end, and catching them again at the next boom in the same way. They have, it seems, just broken up the contents of one of these booms above us. It will take three days to clear it out, and another day for the straggling pieces.”
“Whew!” said the Captain, “three blessed days taken from the sum of our lives; what on earth is to be done?”
“Well,” said the Parson, “that is exactly what we must see about, for it is quite certain that there is nothing to be done on the water. Before I began grumbling I sent off Torkel to look for Birger—for we must hold a council of war upon it. O! there is Birger,” said he, as they crossed the little rise which forms the head of the Aal Foss and came in sight of the camp and the river below it; “Torkel must have missed him.”
“Hallo!” said Birger, who was with Piersen in one of the boats, fishing up with his boat-hook the back line of the långref, and apparently he had made an awkward mess of it—“hallo there! get another boat and come and help me, these baulks have played Old Scratch with the långref; it has made a goodly catch, too, last night, as far as I can see, but we want more help to get it in.”
The Parson had the discretion to keep his own counsel, but the fact was, it was he who was the cause both of the abundant catch and of the present trouble. The small eels had been plaguing them, for some nights successively, by sucking off and nibbling to pieces baits which they were too small to swallow, and thus preventing the larger fish from getting at them. The Parson had seen this, and had set his wits to work to circumvent them. By attaching corks to the back line, he had floated the hooks above the reach of the eels, which he knew would never venture far from the bottom, while pike, gös, id, perch, the larger eels, and occasionally even trout, would take the floating bait more readily when they found it in mid-water.
This would have done exceedingly well, had he looked at it early in the morning; that, however, he had not exactly forgotten, but had neglected to do. Time was precious, and he was unwilling to waste it on hauling the långref. Jacob, whose business it was to haul it, had been sent down to Christiansand on the preceding day, with two of the boatmen, for supplies, and had not yet returned; and the Parson, holding his tongue about his experiment, and proposing to himself the pleasure of hauling the långref when the mid-day sun should be too hot for salmon-fishing, had gone out early with his two-handed rod. In the meanwhile the baulks had come down, and the very first of them, catching the centre of the floating bight, had cut it in two, and had thus permitted the whole of the Parson’s great catch of fish to entangle themselves at their pleasure.
