Fishing with the Fly / Sketches by Lovers of the Art, with Illustrations of Standard Flies

by Unknown

This, in truth, is called the acme of fishing, the highest degree attainable in the school of the angler. But of what a small portion, comparatively, of the pleasure of angling does the mere casting of the fly, however artistic, and the creeling of the fish, however large, consist.

If it were all of fishing to fish; if fish were only to be obtained in pools, in a desert waste that never reflected leaf or twig; from walled-in reservoirs, where fish are fattened like a bullock for the shambles; from sluggish, muddy streams within the hearing of great towns, redolent of odors that are bred and disseminated where humanity is massed between walls of brick and mortar, or even from a perfect fish preserve, where everything is artificial except the water; or if the beginning of fishing was making the first cast and the end the creeling of the last fish, would the gentle art under such conditions have been a theme for the poet’s pen, a subject for the artist’s brush, or a topic for the interesting story during the centuries that have passed since the first line was written, or the first words sung? I think not.

Fishing for the fish alone would not have inspired Dame Juliana Berners, Izaak Walton, Charles Cotton, Sir Humphry Davy, John Bunyan, Sir Walter Scott, “Christopher North,” and other and more modern writers to tell of the peace, the quiet, the health and the pleasure to be gained in the pursuit of this pastime.

The skill exercised and the delicate tackle used by a past master of the art would have been unnecessary to cultivate or fashion, solely to supply the brain with food through the alimentary canal.

An angler’s brain is fed by absorption as well as by assimilation.

There might be reason in calling a fisherman with an eye simply to the catching of fish, a “lover of cruel sport,” but the cruelty would be of the same kind, but in a less degree, as that displayed by the butcher who supplies our tables with beef and mutton.

To an angler the pleasures of the rod and reel are far-reaching and have no boundary save when the mind ceases to anticipate and the brain to remember. I have had the grandest sport on a midwinter’s night with the snow piled high outside and the north wind roaring down the chimney, while I sat with my feet to the blaze on the hearth, holding in my hand an old fly-book. The smoke from my lighted pipe, aided by imagination, contained rod, fish, creel, odorous balsam, drooping hemlock and purling brook or ruffled lake. I seemed to hear the twittering birds, leaves rustled by the wind and the music of running water, while the incense of wild flowers saluted my nostrils. The heat of the fire was but the warm rays of the sun and the crackle of the burning wood the noise of the forest. Thus streams that I have fished once or twice have been fished a score of times.

I had nothing to show for the later fishings, but I could feel that God was good and my memory unimpaired. The fish in the pipe-smoke has been as active as was the fish in the water, and afforded as fine play. My reel has clicked as merrily in the half-dream as on the rod in the long ago, and my rod has bent to the play of the fish as though it were in my hand instead of lying flat on a shelf in a cool room up-stairs. I have had in my musings all the pleasure of actual fishing, everything but the fish in the flesh.

When Winter comes and the ravages in tackle have been repaired and all is in perfect order for another season, I put my rods where they will not be injured by the modern furnace heat, each joint of each rod placed flat on a shelf. But the tackle trunk, securely locked that no vandal hand may get to its treasures, is where my eye rests upon it daily, and my fly books are in one of the drawers of my writing desk where I can easily reach them. ‘When I take one of the books out of an evening, or at any time during my walking hours in early winter, I generally seek out some tattered fly that is wrapped carefully in a paper and placed in one of its pockets. The book may be full of flies, sombre or gorgeous in all the freshness of untried silk, mohair, feathers and tinsel; but take for instance this one with the legend written on its wrapper:

“Puffer Pond, June, 1867.—Thirty-five pounds of trout in two hours. The last of the gentlemen that did the deed.”