By Col. E. Z. C. Judson.—“Ned Buntline.”
Fishermen are born such—not made! That is my private opinion, publicly expressed. It is founded upon the experience of full half a century on ocean, lake, river, and brook. I have taken a mature man with me on a fishing trip, who had never cast “a line in pleasant places,” lent him rod and tackle, made a few casts in his presence, caught perhaps a half a dozen trout, and then watched his imitative power combined with the tact born in him. If he was one of the right sort he would go right on improving every hour, and in a little while begin to fill his creel with the best of us.
My personal knowledge of fish and fishing began early. My father had few superiors as an angler, and trouting was his specialty. He made his own rods, lines and flies. The first was a tapering ashen pole—generally about ten feet long—scraped, oiled and varnished till it was as smooth and bright as glass. The line was made from horse-hair and braided with a care and patience that used to be a wonder to me.
The blue-jay, the red-headed woodpecker, the pheasant and wood-duck were shot for fly-feathers. When I was a wee toddler in skirts I used to hold hooks and snells and play at “helping papa.”
All this was done here at the head of the Delaware, where both my father and myself were born. But a change came. When I was about six years old my father bought a large tract of wild land in the wildest part of Wayne County, Pennsylvania, and settled on it. The Lackawaxen Creek ran right through it, and that then lovely stream was literally alive with speckled trout. From the day we entered our log house there I was a fisher-boy. I caught trout every day in the summer, for a big spring rose within a rod of the house and from it ran a lively brook to the main stream, ten rods away, and even a pin-hook and linen thread would draw them out.
As I grew older I would go with my father to the big eddies and deep holes, where he would lure the largest to his fly and I was only too—too utterly happy when allowed to wade waist deep in the water to carry or float his string of trout toward home.
Since then never a summer has passed, except when actively engaged in naval or military service for my country, that has not found me fishing somewhere. I have covered the best waters in Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont; Canada and the British Provinces know me of old; California, Oregon and British Columbia—all along the Big Rockies—have seen me testing flies and bait, the former often tied rudely on the spur of necessity, but generally very effectively. For where trout are very plenty, food is scarce, and they will bite at anything. I speak of trout mostly, for that is my favorite fish. Salmon next, although the work comes in when you strike anything over eight or ten pounds, and sport degenerates when it becomes labor. I have heard of “labors of love,” but I never took stock in anything of the kind.
In all this active piscatorial life, I have studied Fishermen as well as fish. And I have come to the conclusion which opens this article—that fishermen are born for it and can’t he manufactured out of raw material!
I have felt thankful to our Father above that nine out of ten of the tourists who take to the streams in easy reach, are indifferent fishermen. For thereby the streams still contain fish. Were all who fish in them skillful and hoggish, in a little while there would be no fishing except in “far-away” places, difficult to reach.
I do not claim to hold a Master’s Degree as a fly-fisherman.