Plenty of Trout in This Stream When Grandfather Was a Boy
The greatest necessity is to protect your fish from their natural enemies. Big fish will eat little fish, trout will eat trout, so will bass, pickerel, and suckers. You can keep the big fish out by screening the spillway at the upper dam.
There is good fun to be had in raising trout from the egg. This work has been regarded by most people as too complicated and too difficult for any but an expert. As a matter of fact, it is no more difficult than many of the occupations boys engage in, chicken raising, bee-keeping, and photography, for instance. Visit a fish hatchery if you have one near, get all the government bulletins on the subject, and, if you have available running water, you can try your hand at trout growing. It would not appeal to many, but it is really fascinating work.
SPRINGS FOR TROUT CULTURE
If there are constant, cold springs on your place, you are neglecting a golden opportunity for earning money in an easy and delightful way. A spring is capable of furnishing living room for a large family of trout. You can sell live trout at sixty-five cents to a dollar a pound to a first-class hotel. The big fish bring the smaller prices per pound, those weighing from half a pound to a pound being most popular.
Clean out your spring first and make a basin ten to twenty feet square, the bigger the better. Put a fine, galvanized iron netting over the overflow of your reservoir. Young fish can be bought from a fish hatchery in the form of eggs, fry, fingerlings, yearlings, or even larger. The government will stock your streams for you free, but it imposes certain conditions, which is quite just and proper. Get all the information you can from state fish hatcheries or the United States Bureau of Fisheries, before you decide finally.
RECLAIMING A SPRING
There is often a neighbourhood tradition concerning a wonderful spring somewhere near, a spring that never ceases to flow, no matter how complete the drought. The water is pure, cold, and clear; maybe the oldest inhabitant had it from his grandfather how the Indians used always to camp near it on their cross-country marches from the Catskills to the Blue Ridge. They call it "The Old Indian Spring." Sometimes they tell hair-raising tales of midnight adventures and hair-breadth escapes, till you wonder that the spring itself never turned red with the spilt blood. From stories of early pioneer days one gets a good idea of the very great importance of the ever faithful spring. With the certainty of a pure water supply for family and beasts, a man might safely carve a home in a primeval forest. Without it, he must push on yet another lap toward the wilderness.
I remember such a spring. Generations of red men, trekking from one hunting-ground to another or maybe waging their own peculiar war in the enemy's country, have depended on this spring for their success. Later generations of pioneers have passed that way and refreshed themselves with its sweet water. As years went by, the spring fell into disuse and gushed on forgotten. But forty years ago it was re-discovered by a searching party, identified as an historic spot, reclaimed, and made permanently useful and beautiful by public spirit.
Nobody knows just how to appreciate a spring except the person who discovers it, reclaims it, and makes it do his bidding. No bit of his own ingenuity pleases the householder quite as much as his spring, his piping, his reservoir, and his little hydraulic ram, yet one of the last springs I visited was in a New England pasture. Its only protection was a sort of fence of poles to keep the cattle out. To approach it you had to leap from hillock to hillock, in constant danger of losing your balance and sinking in a deep mud hole. The spring bubbled up clear as crystal in a most unromantic hole in the ground; its overflow simply spread out on the ground between the hummocks. It didn't look thrifty to me. Two days' work would have laid a basin rim of small stones about that spring with a piece of tile for an overflow pipe, and a shallow channel might have been dug to carry the surplus to the edge of the slope where another basin for the cattle might have been made, or to a trough.