Days in the Open

by Lathan A. Crandall

Perhaps the Deacon had an experience as exciting, if not as satisfactory, as that ever allotted to any fisherman. He and his son and the Preacher were fishing on Big St. Germain. The hotel was provided with a porch which ran along the entire front. As the party came in from an afternoon with the pike, the rods were placed against this porch, butts on the ground and tips projecting above the porch roof. The Preacher was the first to finish his supper, and as he came out the front door a peculiar combination of sounds was heard. Spitting, snarling, scratching were mingled with the clicking of a reel. It was the Deacon’s reel that seemed to be working alone and unaided, and the mystery was solved only when it was discovered that a cat had climbed upon the porch roof, swallowed the minnow that the Deacon had failed to remove from the hook, and was now making frantic efforts to escape. When the Deacon was informed of what was certainly nothing short of a cat-astrophe, he hastened to the rescue. Then and there was furnished such an exhibition of artistic and skilful handling of a rod as few have been permitted to witness. If a ten-pound trout instead of a cat had been at the end of the line, the Deacon could not have done better. Did the cat run up the side of the building, the Deacon paid out line. Did it run down again, he reeled in. His poise and calm were admirable. Once, indeed, when the youngster giggled, the Deacon’s voice was heard remarking that he did not see anything to laugh at. This furnished an atom too much for the Preacher’s self-control, and he hurried into a boat and rowed hastily out to the middle of the lake where he could give vent to the emotions which rent and tore him. An hour later, when the Preacher returned, all was peaceful. Despite the Deacon’s skill—possibly because of it—the cat had gotten off.

Did you ever see a muskallonge walk over the water on its tail? It is not claimed that this is its favourite method of taking a stroll, but only that under certain exceptional circumstances it may be induced to disport itself in this manner. W. G. had always felt like fishing, but circumstances had not permitted much indulgence of this inherent desire. When he had succeeded in making arrangements for a trip to Pike Lake and found himself on the twenty-five-mile drive from the railway station to the lake, he was happy. To be sure, the city-dweller was not quite prepared for the quiet of the woods, and when night came he was heard to aver that it was so still it made him nervous. However, on the whole, he found the experience quite to his liking, and entered with enthusiasm upon pursuit of the valorous muskallonge. It was the first one he struck which furnished the remarkable phenomenon of walking upon the water. He was trolling with a steel rod and plenty of line out, when a careless muskie grabbed the hook. The figure which a moment before had been relaxed and seemingly inert, became a mass of steel springs. Over that placid face came a look of such fierceness as fairly to frighten his boat-mates. He began to reel, but that did not at all satisfy his desire for speed. Casting the rod aside, grabbing the line and standing up in the boat, he jerked that muskallonge in, seemingly a rod at a jerk. To the onlookers the fish seemed to touch only the high places on the water, and then only with his tail. Not one muskie out of a thousand has a mouth tough enough to stand such treatment, but this was an exceptional fish. He came walking into the boat as if he had been accustomed to such violent exercise from childhood. We did not need to club him; he had died of surprise.

It was a muskie that furnished us with an introduction to those tricky scales which some unregenerate fishermen are said to use. We had journeyed to the Ottonaby Lakes, north of Port Hope, in search of bass and muskallonge. The senior member of the party had never caught a specimen of the latter, and was up at sunrise every morning to be rowed up and down until breakfast-time in pursuit of this gallant fish. When the Preacher came down to breakfast one morning there was the old gentleman, the centre of an admiring group gathered about a muskallonge. There could be no doubt as to its genuineness, but when the Senior announced that it weighed thirteen pounds, the Preacher was stunned. He thought of certain fish of which he had heard whose great weight was found to be due to some pounds of shot that had been surreptitiously poured down their gullets. One look at the honest face of the Senior dispelled all such suspicions.

“Who weighed him?”

“I did,” answered the landlord. “He goes a little over thirteen pounds.” After breakfast the troubled Preacher went behind the bar in search of those scales, and was caught in the act by the landlord.

“What do you want?” questioned the proprietor.

“I want to weigh that fish.”

In a low voice that could not reach the Senior in the adjoining dining-room, the landlord said: “Never mind. I’ll tell you. That fish weighs just five pounds.”

And that unsuspicious old man went back home and bragged of his thirteen-pound muskie, while the Preacher said never a word. What’s the use of spoiling a good story?

Some people seem to be naturally skeptical about fish stories. They should not be, for tales of piscatorial adventure are peculiar in that, no matter how big they are made, they can never equal the facts. The Preacher had just come to his new parish, and after a month or so of work there had taken a trip to the Nepigon. He could do nothing less, on his return, than tell stories of big trout, for there were no others to tell about. At the dinner table in one of the homes of his parish he had been relating some of his fishing adventures on the famous stream, of an eight-pound trout taken at Victoria Pool and the numbers that went four and five pounds each, when the hostess, a vivacious and witty woman, threw up her hands and jocularly exclaimed: “For Heaven’s sake! What sort of a pastor have we drawn?”