Grubs are excellent bait for trout early in the season. They are found in partially decayed tree-trunks, stumps, and old timbers left in moist places. Cut into the wood with an axe, and if you find it full of holes of the size of a lead-pencil, knock it to pieces and pick out the grubs. Put them in a tin bait-box with some of the rotten wood you found them in.
Minnows of a size suitable for perch and bass fishing can usually be procured from a spring hole or the pools of a small stream. Take a rather baggy net with a small mesh, and after setting it at one end of the pool drive the minnows into it by striking on the water with a pole and punching about on the bottom. If you stir up the water the little fish will drive more easily. If your supply must be procured from a lake or pond, look among the shallows close inshore until you have found a school, then draw a small seine around them. Large minnows for pickerel or pike fishing can be caught with a hook and line. Those you are to use for skittering had better be packed in salt. The minnows you would keep alive should be put into the bait-pail as soon as caught. Bait-pails, as usually made, consist of one pail freely perforated with holes to be set into a tight outer pail. By this arrangement the water can be changed frequently without inconveniencing the little fellows. If the bait is to be carried some distance, and there is no chance to change the water, pack the space between the two pails loosely with grass. The water trickling down through the grass will take up the air needed by the fish.
Crickets are to be found under stones, loose sods, and old planks. Select the largest you can find. June-bugs, sometimes called May-bugs, hide through the heat of the day among the leaves of the trees, and sometimes by shaking a tree quite a number will fall to the ground. Grasshoppers are plentiful in meadow and pasture lands, and may easily be caught in the hands. Put June-bugs, crickets, and grasshoppers in a wide-mouthed bottle loosely stuffed with grass. Do not cork the bottle tight.
I never esteemed artificial baits, such as the rubber frog and crab, very highly. It is impossible to give the semblance of life to them in the water, and most game fish prefer live food to dead. The spoon-hook and the artificial fly, however, have proved their worth. The spoon should be of a size in keeping with the size of the game fished for, and it is well enough to have two—one bright, for use early in the morning and late in the afternoon and on dark days, the other dull-colored for use in the brightest part of the day. It is an excellent plan to bait a spoon-hook with a large worm, a minnow, or a piece of meat; then if the fish strikes and misses the hook it may get a portion of the bait and will strike again with truer aim.
There are many other things that can be used for bait, which are to be found only in your locality. What they are you can learn by observation and experiment. One can always learn something. Only recently I discovered that bass were fond of darning-needles.
Sometimes the fish have very fickle appetites, and it is well to have as many kinds of bait as you can conveniently carry. It is also a good plan to open the stomach of the first fish you catch, and offer to its companions the same kind of food found inside of it.
A Trap for Small Fish
Many of the boys and girls who live near the sea-side are interested in making and stocking aquariums, and many, no doubt, have experienced the same difficulty which I did when I used to stock aquariums myself.
I always found that the scoop-net which we use to catch the fish with is good enough for certain kinds of minnows, but there are others which are too lively or too shy to be caught in that way; so I set to work to devise some plan for their capture. I claim no originality for this trap—it is hundreds of years old; but as it answered my purpose better than anything else, I used it. The way I made it was as follows:
