From Edinburgh to India & Burmah

by W. G. Burn Murdoch

I will now proceed to write about fish. As the sun set they were rising beside us, making rings in the golden flood, and the reflected woods of the far side of the river, so I put on a Loch Leven fly cast, and got a beauty right away, of about one pound; a shimmering, silvery fish, between a sea-trout and a whiting as to colour, and I missed other rises. A Woods and Forests' man on board told me he had recently caught a similar fish on a small fly rod; it weighed five pounds and leapt like a sea-trout, but no one apparently knows much about the possibilities of fishing here with rod and modern tackle. We then got a hand-line and a cod-hook from the engineer, and baited with squeezed bread, the size of a pigeon's egg, and fished on the bottom, and almost at once had on a heavy fish. It pulled tremendously and got a lot of line out, and wandered up and down the middle of the river; on a salmon rod it would have played long and heavily. We got it hand over hand alongside, aft the paddle-box, and a Burman in a canoe hitched a noose over its tail, and we hoisted it on board. I couldn't see the beast very clearly, as it was growing dusk, and all hands crowded round us to give advice. It looked rather like a cod, and weighed thirty-five lbs. I'd have guessed it to be eighteen lbs., but its weight was quite out of proportion to its measurements. Shortly after we got another—twenty lbs. They have red firm flesh, and to eat are like sturgeon, they say. The sporting silvery fish was called Mein and Butter fish, and they are said to be very good to eat, but they have a beard, which doesn't answer to my standard of a game fish. I got about a dozen of these smaller fellows of about one lb. each, not a bad way of putting in an hour or so, when the time does not allow of gunning ashore.

31st—Tegine.—This morning we passed on our right the elephant Kedar Camp, where natives are preparing to rope in wild elephants as they do in Mysore. The bank was steep, about level with the top of our funnel. The low jungle had been cleared, and we saw screens and houses of green thatch and palm leaves. A very brown Britisher came out of his tent as we passed, his face half white with soap lather, and his shirt sleeves rolled up; he did unintelligible semaphore signalling with both arms, a razor in one hand, paper in the other. He likewise spoke to us in words that were barely audible for the sound of the rush of the water. When we pieced together what each had heard, it came to "what the blankety blank has come over your—tut tut-down-stream cargo boat? She was to bring me tea and sugar! And I've no whiskey, and—" but there was a stiff turning just at this part of the river, and the skipper and pilot and everyone on board gave it all their attention, or we'd have been ashore. Soon after we met the dilatory down-river cargo boat, and waited where the channel was wide and she passed, its master shouting to us that the channel somewhere further up was "only four feet six, and very difficult." She had stranded somewhere for twenty-four hours or so. There were apparently only two passengers on board! I don't think these good days for passengers can last, the crowd is bound to come.

Next small item in to-day's entertainment. An otter, rather larger than any I've seen at home, performed to us on a sandbank, danced, and rolled over its own shadow, or possibly a fish, in apparent exuberance of spirit. It was a very pretty sight through the glass, and I think I could have got him with a rifle, but it was rather far to risk a shot and wounding with my Browning's colt pistol—the Woods and Forest man, by the way, had a Browning colt, and rather fancied himself as a shot. He told me his terrier puts up otters pretty often in the streams in the jungle, in family parties, greatly to the amusement of the otters. So there's another heading for a game book here; that might begin with elephant and finish up with mouse-deer and button-quail. What a list of water-fowl there would be, and where would turtle go?—under Game or Fish? They lay their eggs on the sandbanks in numbers, and these fetch quite a big price, four annas each. I'd willingly sacrifice a night's sleep to see one come out of the water up the sand, and to "turn it" would make me feel at the Ultima Thule of the world abroad.

All the way along the edge of the river, where there are not trees, there is Kaing or elephant grass—grass that waves some eighteen feet high and runs far inland, and here and there are bits of tree jungle. Every now and then we see some bird or beast which we have not seen before outside of a Zoo; a grand eagle is in sight just now, no vulture this fellow; he looks twice the size of our golden eagle, and sits motionless on a piece of driftwood in the middle of a sandbank. I can only just make out his or her mate soaring against the woods on the hills behind. On a bank to our right there's a whole crowd of large birds—as we get closer I can count their feathers with my glasses; they are not beauties—vultures of some kind, and gorged at that, to judge from their lazy movements; their plumage is a grey, chocolate colour; their lean bare neck and heads are black or deep plum colour. On the very edge of the sandbank there's a string of white sea-swallows, sitting each on its own reflection. There are several kinds, and they rise as we pass, and I see, for the first time, the Roseate Tern, a sea-swallow with deep lavender and black feathers, rather telling with its scarlet bill. To complete this menagerie's inventory we pass four elephants bathing; two on the bank are dry, and blow sand over themselves from their trunks, and are the same dry khaki colour as the banks; the other two lie in the water, their great tubby sides, big as a whale's back, are black as sloes. Through the glass we see them rise slowly and stalk up the bank, getting their little feet all sandy again.

We went aground about five or six P.M., and are aground, and will probably take root here. The Chittagong crew are talking and working like niggers to kedge her off, and she won't budge. I'm sorry for the Captain; it seems running things rather fine to expect him to take his ship drawing four feet, over a bar only covered three feet.

In the pause, with the glasses I spy geese on a distant point, so with the steward as interpreter, engage a dug-out that came alongside to trade to take me in pursuit, but as I get out the gun, a Burman's boat comes down and passes within a few yards of them and they shift. The boatman tells me there are deer about—points to woods and jungle within a mile on the river's right bank, but time will not allow us to go after them. So we make a shooting engagement for the "morn's morn" if we are still on the sandbank.