Days in the Open

by Lathan A. Crandall

[Original]

HE backward look reveals many-isolated bits of experience in the out-of-doors, not one of them important enough to form the nucleus of a story of respectable size, and yet to each one crying out every time we glance in its direction: “Tell about me!” If the reader finds nothing of interest in these odds and ends, he who writes may at least hope to quiet the importunities of these clamorous voices from out of the past.

The Canasawacta Creek is usually a quiet, inoffensive stream, making its way between the low-lying hills of central New York to its union with the Chenango River. The rain had been falling steadily all day and the creek was somewhat swollen when the families in the little hamlet at South Plymouth retired for the night, but no one thought of danger. Shortly after midnight a little chap in one of those homes was awakened by his father, who lifted him out of his trundle bed and wrapped him in a blanket. The lad did not understand what had happened, even when he saw the water ankle-deep on the living-room floor, or when his father carried him through the swiftly rushing flood to the house of a neighbour on the height of land. It never occurred to him to be afraid so long as his father’s arms were about him.

In the sunshine of the next morning father and boy walked hand in hand down the street to the home which they had so hastily abandoned the night before. The creek had returned to its bed and was behaving much as usual. The boy wondered not a little at the flood-wood left stranded against the picket fence, and was not slow to begin an investigation of the changes wrought in his playground by the visitor of the previous night.

Over towards one corner of the yard was a depression in the ground with water still standing in it, and as the lad passed this pool he saw something moving. Although less than three years old, he had learned that a moving object in the water was very likely to be a fish. Young as he was, a great passion of pursuit seized him, and he grabbed with both hands at the object dimly seen through the roily water. Conviction became a certainty as he felt the fish squirm out of his grasp and received a splash of muddy water as the frightened victim struggled in the shallow pool. Clean clothes and a mother’s injunctions were forgotten in the lust of the chase. In he waded and gathered that fish to his heart with both arms. When the father returned from investigating conditions in the house, there stood the lad, wet, muddy, but triumphant. What kind of a fish? The boy neither knew nor cared. It was a fish—and that was quite enough, especially when accompanied by the unquestioning conviction that it was the biggest fish in all the world. Since that boy has grown to manhood he has often said to himself as he looked upon an unpromising bit of water, “You never can tell. If fish are to be caught in your front dooryard, where may you not find them?”

Many trout come to view as we peer into the mists of the long ago, but, among them all, two are in a class by themselves. One of them came out of the Otselic River on a day when the boy had been berrying and had made a failure. Swinging his empty pail, he came to the river just where it had dug its way into the bank and formed a deep pool over which the alders hung. No normal boy goes abroad on any day, save Sunday, without a fishhook and line in his pocket. Bringing forth these essentials to happiness, he found a pole, dug an angleworm from a muddy spot, and dropped his bait just where the water was blackest. Sunfish and perch and eels abounded in this river, but it was not famous for trout. In fact, this boy was not fishing for trout and so was all the more amazed when, after a sharp struggle, he landed a speckled monster on the grassy bank. At least he seemed a monster in size to the boy, and a conservative adult estimate would place the fish at well over a pound.

Now, failure to find berries appeared plainly providential, for here was the empty pail and the trout could be carried home alive. Under the porch at the back of the house was a half-hogshead, set into the ground, into which poured a little stream of pure, soft spring water brought from the nearby hillside through a lead pipe. Did a trout ever have a more ideal place of residence? Here he lived and thrived for many a day, fed with untiring regularity until—just here memory fails. Possibly he died of old age.

The boy had grown somewhat older and had learned to make and use the “snare,” when he went on a visit to friends in Cortland. Cortland is a thriving city now, and even then was a wide-awake and bustling village; but its chief attraction to the boy was its river—the Tioughnioga. No sooner had he said “How do you do?” to his relatives than he hurried to the river bridge to snare suckers. Now don’t sniff, you owners of hand-made split-bamboo rods and scorners of all fishing except that for trout or bass! If you will just think back along the years until you catch sight of yourself as you once were, you will realize that the boy knows but one rule when fishing, and that is, “Get there!” Methods do not matter to him so that he catches fish. Neither has he learned that dainty discrimination among the inhabitants of the water that comes with the years. We know boys, even in these days, who would rather stand on a log and catch unlimited numbers of sunfish, than to fish all day and take a half-dozen bass.