Woodland Paths

by Winthrop Packard

I knew a man once who used to jab for angleworms with a crowbar, and it was a rather astonishing thing to watch him and see the results. The angleworm’s hearing is crude in the extreme. Indeed, hearing in the ordinary sense of the word he has none. Mary Garden might sing at the mouth of his burrow and he would never know it. Sousa’s finest march on fifty instruments—count ’em fifty—might be played on the bandstand just over his head and he would never feel one thrill. The only sound he gets is a crunching and grubbing in the earth near him. This he feels, for he is the chief food of the grubbing mole, and that sound means but one thing to him,—that he is being dug for. So when he heard that crowbar wriggling and crunching in the gravel beneath he used to flee to the surface in numbers.

This man always whistled an eerie little tune while he wriggled the bar. He said he was calling them, and it was quite like magic the way in which they hustled to the surface and crawled about his feet. Most people fail in this method. It takes a peculiar motion to the bar and a good eye in choosing the spot where the worms are. And then, few people know the tune.

Nightfall and the robin’s method are best. Wait till the full darkness of a moist night. Hang a lantern about your neck and get down on your marrow bones by a grassy roadside. Worms do not see, and are not sensitive to light. You have but to crawl quietly forward and pick them up with a quick snatch, for the worm can feel, and he gets back into his burrow with an agility which is surprising.

On the right kind of a May night I have seen the roadside of a Massachusetts village the scene of more than one such spectacle. A stranger from the big world, seeing a very fat man crawling by the roadside with a lantern hung about his neck, making frantic dabs here and there, and hauling forth great worms that resisted and hung on valiantly and stretched like red rubber, might well have said that here was voodoo worship or a Dickey initiate gone mad. But it was nothing of the sort,—merely the crack local fisherman getting his bait.

I have looked in vain in Izaak Walton for a pæan on angleworms or a description of a proper method for making a bob for eels, and I thereby find the “Compleat Angler” incomplete. However, Izaak was an admirable fisherman in the rather patient and conservative way of the England of his time. He advises to bait for eels “with a little, a very little, lamphrey, which some call a pride, and may in the hot months be found many of them in the river Thames, and in many mud-heaps in other rivers; yea, almost as usually as one finds worms in a dung-hill.”

He should have seen a Yankee catch eels with a pole and line with a big wad of worms tied on the end of the line and no hook at all, for such is a “bob,” as we know it in Norfolk County. The making of a bob is not a pleasant affair for the angleworms, which seem born for destruction, so many are the creatures that prey on them, and I am glad of Darwin’s assurance that, in spite of the fact that they wriggle when rent, they have little fineness of perception and feeling and do not suffer—much.

This crack fisherman who was so stout and who used to get his bait by lantern light at night, to whom my memory runs, always made a bob of shoemaker’s thread, because it was fine and of great strength. He had a long wire needle like an upholsterer’s needle, and with this he would deftly string great angleworms from head to tail, sliding them one by one down upon his shoemaker’s thread till he had a rope of them twelve feet long or so. Then tying the ends together he looped this up till it hung in a wad of loops as big as his two fists. This, hung upon the end of his line, was all he needed for a night’s fishing.

The way of its use is this. First catch your night, one of those nights when there is a promise of soft rain in the sky and the wind that is to bring it just sighs gently over the trees from the southward. Too much wind is bad, for it so ruffles the surface that the fish cannot find you. A very gentle ripple, on the contrary, is helpful, for it makes a dancing path of light from your fire, up which the eels may trail you to the very spot where hangs the bob.

The stout fisherman used to take along at least two boys who would be useful in gathering wood for the fire and in other matters. Then, picking the exactly most favorable spot on the dam where the deep, dark water shoulders the bank, he built his fire after the full darkness had come. In common with many others I regret the passing of the old-time cedar rail fence. Wire abominations may be cheaper, but who ever heard of building a fishing fire out of tariff-nurtured, wire-trust, fencing material? Fishing fire material of the proper sort is rare nowadays, and I can but feel that the youth of the present generation are born to barren years.

With the fire well alight and the deep half-bushel basket placed handy by, the fisherman would make his line fast to the tip of that long, light, supple but strong birch pole and cast the big bob far from him with a generous splash into the water, letting it sink till within a foot or two of bottom. How far under the dark water the eels might see that flickering fire and be drawn to it as moths circle about a light at night I cannot say, but I think it was very far, for on favorable nights it seemed as if all the eels in the pond must have been drawn thither. I know that fishing without a fire you may catch one eel or perhaps two, but you will never get such numbers as come to a proper blaze made of the dryest of good old cedar rails.