Forgotten Treasures #18: FISHING WITH A WORM--Part I
 

FISHING WITH A WORM
by Blis Perry
Houghton Mifflin Company
1916

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Part I

"The last fish I caught was with a worm."--IZAAK WALTON.

A defective logic is the born fisherman's portion. He is a pattern of
inconsistency. He does the things which he ought not to do, and he leaves
undone the things which other people think he ought to do. He observes the
wind when he should be sowing, and he regards the clouds, with temptation
tugging familiarly at his heartstrings, when he might be grasping the useful
sickle. It is a wonder that there is so much health in him. A sorrowing
political economist remarked to me in early boyhood, as a jolly red-bearded
neighbor, followed by an abnormally fat dog, sauntered past us for his
nooning: "That man is the best carpenter in town, but he will leave the most
important job whenever he wants to go fishing." I stared at the sinful
carpenter, who swung along leisurely in the May sunshine, keeping just ahead
of his dog. To leave one's job in order to go fishing! How illogical!

Years bring the reconciling mind. The world grows big enough to include
within its scheme both the instructive political economist and the truant
mechanic. But that trick of truly logical behavior seems harder to the man
than to the child. For example, I climbed up to my den under the eaves last
night--a sour, black sea-fog lying all about, and the December sleet
crackling against the window-panes--in order to varnish a certain fly-rod.
Now rods ought to be put in order in September, when the fishing closes, or
else in April, when it opens. To varnish a rod in December proves that one
possesses either a dilatory or a childishly anticipatory mind. But before
uncorking the varnish bottle, it occurred to me to examine a dog-eared,
water-stained fly-book, to guard against the ravages of possible moths. A
half hour went happily by in rearranging the flies. Then, with a
fisherman's lack of sequence, as I picked out here and there a plain
snell-hook from the gaudy feathered ones, I said to myself with a generous
glow at the heart: "Fly-fishing has had enough sacred poets celebrating it
already. Isn't there a good deal to be said, after all, for fishing with a
worm?"

Could there be a more illogical proceeding? And here follows the
treatise,--a Defense of Results, an Apology for Opportunism,--conceived in
agreeable procrastination, devoted to the praise of the inconsequential
angleworm, and dedicated to a childish memory of a whistling carpenter and
his fat dog.

Let us face the worst at the very beginning. It shall be a shameless
example of fishing under conditions that make the fly a mockery. Take the
Taylor Brook, "between the roads," on the headwaters of the Lamoille. The
place is a jungle. The swamp maples and cedars were felled a generation
ago, and the tops were trimmed into the brook. The alders and mooseweed are
higher than your head; on every tiny knoll the fir balsams have gained a
footing, and creep down, impenetrable, to the edge of the water. In the
open spaces the Joe-Pye weed swarms. In two minutes after leaving the upper
road you have scared a mink or a rabbit, and you have probably lost the
brook. Listen! It is only a gurgle here, droning along, smooth and dark
under the tangle of cedar-tops and the shadow of the balsams. Follow the
sound cautiously. There, beyond the Joe-Pye weed, and between the stump and
the cedar-top, is a hand's breadth of black water. Fly-casting is
impossible in this maze of dead and living branches. Shorten your line to
two feet, or ever less, bait your hook with a worm, and drop it gingerly
into that gurgling crevice of water. Before it has sunk six inches, if
there is not one of those black-backed, orange-bellied, Taylor Brook trout
fighting with it, something is wrong with your worm or with you. For the
trout are always there, sheltered by the brushwood that makes this half mile
of fishing "not worth while." Below the lower road the Taylor Brook becomes
uncertain water. For half a mile it yields only fingerlings, for no
explainable reason; then there are two miles of clean fishing through the
deep woods, where the branches are so high that you can cast a fly again if
you like, and there are long pools, where now and then a heavy fish will
rise; then comes a final half mile through the alders, where you must wade,
knee to waist deep, before you come to the bridge and the river. Glorious
fishing is sometimes to be had here,--especially if you work down the gorge
at twilight, casting a white miller until it is too dark to see. But alas,
there is a well-worn path along the brook, and often enough there are the
very footprints of the "fellow ahead of you," signs as disheartening to the
fisherman as ever were the footprints on the sand to Robinson Crusoe.

But "between the roads" it is "too much trouble to fish;" and there lies the
salvation of the humble fisherman who disdains not to use the crawling worm,
nor, for that matter, to crawl himself, if need be, in order to sneak under
the boughs of some overhanging cedar that casts a perpetual shadow upon the
sleepy brook. Lying here at full length, with no elbow-room to manage the
rod, you must occasionally even unjoint your tip, and fish with that, using
but a dozen inches of line, and not letting so much as your eyebrows show
above the bank. Is it a becoming attitude for a middle-aged citizen of the
world? That depends upon how the fish are biting. Holing a putt looks
rather ridiculous also, to the mere observer, but it requires, like
brook-fishing with a tip only, a very delicate wrist, perfect tactile sense,
and a fine disregard of appearances.

There are some fishermen who always fish as if they were being photographed.
The Taylor Brook "between the roads" is not for them. to fish it at all is
back-breaking, trouser-tearing work; to see it thoroughly fished is to learn
new lessons in the art of angling. To watch R., for example, steadily
filling his six-pound creel from that unlikely stream, is like watching
Sargent paint a portrait. R. weights two hundred ten. Twenty years ago he
was a famous amateur pitcher, and among his present avocations are violin
playing, which is good for the wrist, taxidermy, which is good for the eye,
and shooting woodcock, which before the days of the new Nature Study used to
be thought good for the whole man. R. began as a fly-fisherman, but by dint
of passing his summers near brooks where fly-fishing is impossible, he has
become a stout-hearted apologist for the worm. His apparatus is most
singular. It consists of a very long, cheap rod, stout enough to smash
through bushes, and with the stiffest tip obtainable. The lower end of the
butt, below the reel, fits into the socket of a huge extra butt of bamboo,
which R. carries unconcernedly. To reach a distant hole, or to fish the
lower end of a ripple, R. simply locks his reel, slips on the extra butt,
and there is a fourteen-foot rod ready for action. He fishes with a line
unbelievably short, and a Kendal hook far too big; and when a trout jumps
for that hook, R. wastes no time in manoeuvring for position. The unlucky
fish is simply "derricked,"--to borrow a word from Theodore, most saturnine
and profane of Moosehead guides.

"Shall I play him awhile?" shouted an excited sportsman to Theodore, after
hooking his first big trout.

"----no!" growled Theodore in disgust. "Just derrick him right into the
canoe!" A heroic method, surely; though it once cost me the best
square-tail I ever hooked, for Theodore had forgotten the landing-net, and
the gut broke in his fingers as he tried to swing the fish aboard. But with
these lively quarter-pounders of the Taylor Brook, derricking is a safer
procedure. Indeed, I have sat dejectedly on the far end of a log, after
fishing the hole under it in vain, and seen the mighty R. wade downstream
close behind me, adjust that comical extra butt, and jerk a couple of
half-pound trout from under the very log on which I was sitting. His device
on this occasion, as I well remember, was to pass his hook but once through
the middle of a big worm, let the worm sink to the bottom, and crawl along
it at his leisure. The trout could not resist.

Once, and once only, have I come near equaling R.'s record, and the way he
beat me then is the justification for a whole philosophy of worm-fishing.
We were on this very Taylor Brook, and at five in the afternoon both baskets
were two thirds full. By count I had just one more fish than he. It was
raining hard. "You fish down through the alders," said R. magnanimously.
"I'll cut across and wait for you at the sawmill. I don't want to get any
wetter, on account of my rheumatism."

This was rather barefaced kindness,--for whose rheumatism was ever the worse
for another hour's fishing? But I weakly accepted it. I coveted three or
four good trout to top off with,--that was all. So I tied on a couple of
flies, and began to fish the alders, wading waist deep in the rapidly rising
water, down the long green tunnel under the curving boughs. The brook
fairly smoked with the rain, by this time, but when did one fail to get at
least three or four trout out of this best half mile of the lower brook?
Yet I had no luck. I tried one fly after another, and then, as a forlorn
hope,--though it sometimes has a magic of its own,--I combined a brown
hackle for the tail fly with a twisting worm on the dropper. Not a rise! I
thought of R. sitting patiently in the saw mill, and I fished more
conscientiously that ever.

"Venture as warily, use the same skill,
Do your best, whether winning or losing it,
If you choose to play!--is my principle."

Even those lines, which by some subtle telepathy of the trout brook murmur
themselves over and over to me in the waning hours of an unlucky day,
brought now no consolation. There was simply not one fish to be had, to any
fly in the book, out of that long, drenching, darkening tunnel. At last I
climbed out of the brook, by the bridge. R. was sitting on the fence, his
neck and ears carefully turtled under his coat collar, the smoke rising and
the rain dripping from the inverted bowl of his pipe. He did not seem to be
worrying about his rheumatism.

"What luck?" he asked.

"None at all," I answered morosely. "Sorry to keep you waiting."

"That's all right," remarked R. "What do you think I've been doing? I've
been fishing out of the saw-mill window just to kill time. There was a
patch of floating sawdust there,--kind of unlikely place for trout,
anyway,--but I thought I'd put on a worm and let him crawl around a little."
He opened his creel as he spoke. "But I didn't look for a pair of 'em," he
added. And there, on top of his smaller fish, were as pretty a pair of
three-quarter-pound brook trout as were ever basketed.

"I'm afraid you got pretty wet," said R. kindly.

"I don't mind that," I replied. and I didn't. What I minded was the
thought of an hour's vain wading in that roaring stream, whipping it with
fly after fly, while R., the foreordained fisherman, was sitting comfortably
in a sawmill, and derricking that pair of three-quarter-pounders in through
the window! I had ventured more warily than he, and used, if not the same
skill, at least the best skill at my command. My conscience was clear, but
so was his; and he had had the drier skin and the greater magnanimity and
the biggest fish besides. There is much to be said, in a world like ours,
for taking the world as you find it and for fishing with a worm.

One's memories of such fishing, however agreeable they may be, are not to be
identified with a defense of the practice. Yet, after all, the most
effective defense of worm-fishing is the concrete recollection of some brook
that could be fished best or only in that way, or the image of a particular
trout that yielded to the temptation of an angleworm after you had flicked
fly after fly over him in vain. Indeed, half the zest of brook fishing is
in your campaign for "individuals,"--as the Salvation Army workers say,--not
merely for a basketful of fish qua fish, but for a series of individual
trout which your instinct tells you ought to lurk under that log or be
hovering in that ripple. How to get him, by some sportsmanlike process, is
the question If he will rise to some fly in your book, few fishermen will
deny that the fly is the more pleasurable weapon. Dainty, luring, beautiful
toy, light as thistle-down, falling where you will it to fall, holding when
the leader tightens and sings like the string of a violin, the artificial
fly represents the poetry of angling. Given the gleam of early morning on
some wide water, a heavy trout breaking the surface as he curves and
plunges, with the fly holding well, with the right sort of rod in your
fingers, and the right man in the other end of the canoe, and you perceive
how easy is that Emersonian trick of making the pomp of emperors ridiculous.

END PART I.