Forgotten Treasures #14: SPECKLED TROUT--PART 1

Chapter V of "Locusts and Wild Honey" by John Burroughs

Houghton, Mifflin and Company; 1907

________________________________________________

SPECKLED TROUT

I

The legend of the wary tour, hinted at in the last sketch, is to be further
illustrated in this and some following chapters. We shall get at more of
the meaning of those dark waterlines, and I hope, also, not entirely miss
the significance of the gold and silver spots and the glancing iridescent
hues. The trout is dark and obscure above, but behind this foil there are
wondrous tints that reward the believing eye. Those who seek him in his
wild remote haunts are quite sure to get the full force of the sombre and
uninviting aspects,--the wet, cold, the toil, the broken rest, and the huge
savage, uncompromising nature,--but the true angler sees farther than these,
and is never thwarted of his legitimate reward by them.

I have been a seeker of trout from my boyhood, and on all the expeditions in
which this fish has been the ostensible purpose I have brought home more
game than my creel showed. In fact, in mature years I find I got more of
nature into me, more of the woods, the wild, nearer to bird and beast, while
threading my native streams for trout, than in almost any other way. It
furnished a good excuse to go forth; it pitched one in the right key; it
sent one through the fat and marrowy places of field and wood. Then the
fisherman has a harmless, preoccupied look; he is a kind of vagrant that
nothing fears. he blends himself with the trees and the shadows. All his
approaches are gently and indirect. He times himself to the meandering,
soliloquizing stream; its impulse bears him along. At the foot of the
waterfall he sits sequestered and hidden in its volume of sound. The birds
know he has no designs upon them, and the animals see that his mind is in
the creek. His enthusiasm anneals him, and makes him pliable to the scenes
and influences he moves among.

Then what acquaintance he makes with the stream! He addresses himself to it
as a lover to his mistress; he wooes it and stays with it till he knows its
most hidden secrets. It runs through his thoughts not less than through its
banks there; he feels the fret and thrust of every bar and boulder. Where
it deepens, his purpose deepens; where it is shallow, he is indifferent. He
knows how to interpret its every glance and dimple; its beauty haunts him
for days.

I am sure I run no risk of overpraising the charm and attractiveness of a
well-fed trout stream, every drop of water in it as bright and pure as if
the nymphs had brought it all the way from its source in crystal goblets,
and as cool as if it had been hatched beneath a glacier. When the heated
and soiled and jaded refugee from the city first sees one, he feels as if he
would like to turn it into his bosom and let it flow through him a few
hours, it suggests such healing freshness and newness. How his roily
thoughts would run clear; how the sediment would go downstream! Could he
ever have an impure or an unwholesome wish afterward? The next best thing
he can do is to tramp along its banks and surrender himself to it influence.
If he reads it intently enough, he will, in a measure, be taking it into his
mind and heart, and experiencing its salutary ministrations.

Trout streams coursed through every valley my boyhood knew. I crossed them,
and was often lured and detained by them, on my way to and from school. We
bather in them during the long summer noons, and felt for the trout under
their banks. A holiday was a holiday indeed that brought permission to go
fishing over on Rose's Brook, or up Hardscrabble, or in Meeker's Hollow;
all-day trips, from morning till night, through meadows and pastures and
beechen woods, wherever the shy, limpid stream led. What an appetite it
developed! a hunger that was fierce and aboriginal, and that the wild
strawberries we plucked as we crossed the hill teased rather than allayed.
When but a few hours could be had, gained perhaps by doing some piece of
work about the farm or garden in half the allotted time, the little creek
that headed in the paternal domain was handy; when half a day was at one's
disposal, there were the hemlocks, less than a mile distant, with their
loitering, meditative, log-impeded stream and their dusky, fragrant depths.
Alert and wide-eyed, one picked his way along, startled now and then by the
sudden bursting-up of the partridge, or by the whistling wings of the
"dropping snipe," pressing through the brush and the briers, or finding an
easy passage over the trunk of a prostrate tree, carefully letting his hook
down through some tangle into a still pool, or standing in some high, sombre
avenue and watching his line float in and out amid the moss-covered
boulders. In my first essayings I used to go to the edge of these hemlocks,
seldom dipping into them beyond the first pool where the stream swept under
the roots of two large trees. From this point I could look back into the
sunlit fields where the cattle were grazing; beyond, all was gloom and
mystery; the trout were black, and to my young imagination the silence and
the shadows were blacker. But gradually I yielded to the fascination and
penetrated the woods farther and farther on each expedition, till the heart
of the mystery was fairly plucked out. During the second or third year of
my piscatorial experience I went through them, and through the pasture and
meadow beyond, and through another strip of hemlocks, to where the little
stream joined the main creek of the valley.

In June, when my trout fever ran pretty high, and an auspicious day arrived,
I would make a trip to a stream a couple of miles distant, that came down
out of a comparatively new settlement. It was a rapid mountain brook
presenting many difficult problems to the young angler, but a very enticing
stream for all that, with its two saw-mill dams, its pretty cascades, its
high, shelving rocks sheltering the mossy nests of the phoebe-bird, and its
general wild and forbidding aspects.

But a meadow brook was always a favorite, The trout like meadows; doubtless
their food is more abundant there, and, usually, the good hiding-places are
more numerous. As soon as you strike a meadow the character of the creek
changes: it goes slower and lies deeper, it tarries to enjoy the high, cool
banks and to half hide beneath them; it loves the willows, or rather the
willows love it and shelter it from the sun; its spring runs are kept cool
by the overhanging grass, and the heavy turf that faces its open banks is
not cut away by the sharp hoofs of the grazing cattle. Then there are the
bobolinks and the starlings and the meadowlarks, always interested
spectators of the angler; there are also the marsh marigolds, the
buttercups, or the spotted lilies, and the good angler is always an
interested spectator of them. In fact, the patches of meadow land that lie
in the angler's course are like the happy experiences in his own life, or
like the fine passages in the poem he is reading; the pasture oftener
contains the shallow and monotonous places. In the small streams the cattle
scare the fish, and soil their element and break down their retreats under
the banks. Woodland alternates the best with meadow: the creek loves to
burrow under the roots of a great tree, to scoop out a pool after leaping
over the prostrate trunk of one, and to pause at the foot of a ledge of
moss-covered rocks, with ice-cold water dripping down. How straight the
current goes for the rock! Note its corrugated, muscular appearance; it
strikes and glances off, but accumulates, deepens with well-defined eddies
above and to one side; on the edge of these the trout lurk and spring upon
their prey.

The angler learns that it is generally some obstacle or hindrance that makes
a deep place in the creek, as in a brave life; and his ideal brook is one
that lies in deep, well-defined banks, yet makes many a shift from right to
left, meets with many rebuffs and adventures, hurled back upon itself by
rocks, waylaid by snags and trees, tripped up by precipices, but sooner or
later reposing under meadow banks, deepening and eddying beneath bridges, or
prosperous and strong in some level stretch of cultivated land with great
elms shading it here and there.

But I early learned that from almost any stream in a trout country the true
angler could take trout, and that the great secret was this, that, whatever
bait you used, worm, grasshopper, grub, or fly, there was one thing you must
always put upon your hook, namely, your heart: when you bait your hook with
your heart the fish always bite; they will jump clear from the water after
it; they will dispute with each other over it; it is a morsel they love
above everything else. With such bait I have seen the born angler (my
grandfather was one) take a noble string of trout from the most unpromising
waters, and on the most unpromising day. He used his hook so coyly and
tenderly, he approached the fish with such address and insinuation, he
divined the exact spot where they lay: if they were not eager, he humored
them and seemed to steal by them; if they were playful and coquettish, he
would suit his mood to theirs; if they were frank and sincere, he met them
halfway; he was so patient and considerate, so entirely devoted to pleasing
the critical trout, and so successful in his efforts,--surely his heart was
upon his hook, and it was a tender, unctuous heart, too, as that of every
angler is. How nicely he would measure the distance! how dexterously he
would avoid an overhanging limb or bush and drop the line exactly in the
right spot! Of course there was a pulse of feeling and sympathy to the
extremity of that line. If your heart is a stone, however, or an empty
husk, there is no use to put it upon your hook; it will not tempt the fish;
the bait must be quick and fresh. Indeed, a certain quality of youth is
indispensable to the successful angler, a certain unworldliness and
readiness to invest yourself in an enterprise that does n't pay in the
current coin,. Not only is the angler, like the poet, born and not made, as
Walton says, but there is a deal of the poet in him, and he is to be judged
no more harshly; he is the victim of his genius: those wild streams, how
they haunt him! he will play truant to dull care, and flee to them; their
waters impart somewhat of their own perpetual youth to him. My grandfather
when he was eighty years old would take down his pole as eagerly as any boy,
and step off with wonderful elasticity toward the beloved streams; it used
to try my young legs a good deal to follow him, specially on the return
trip. And no poet was ever more innocent of worldly success or ambition.
For, to paraphrase Tennyson,--

"Lusty trout to him were scrip and share,
And babbling waters more than cent for cent."

He laid up treasures, but they were not in this world. In fact, though the
kindest of husbands, I fear he was not what the country people call a "good
provider," except in providing trout in their season, though it is doubtful
if there was always fat in the house to fry them in. But he could tell you
they were worse off than that at Valley Forge, and that trout, or any other
fish, were good roasted in the ashes under the coals. He had the Walton
requisite of loving quietness and contemplation, and was devout withal.
Indeed, in many ways he was akin to those Galilee fishermen who were call to
be fishers of men. How he read the Book and pored over it, even at times, I
suspect, nodding over it, and laying it down only to take up his rod, over
which, unless the trout were very dilatory and the journey very fatiguing,
he never nodded!

II

The Delaware is one of our minor rivers, but it is a stream beloved of the
trout. Nearly all its remote branches head in mountain springs, and its
collected waters, even when warmed by the summer sun, are as sweet and
wholesome as dew swept from the grass. The Hudson wins from it two streams
that are fathered by the mountains from whose loins most of its beginnings
issue, namely, the Rondout and the Esopus. These swell a more illustrious
current than the Delaware, but the Rondout, one of the finest trout streams
in the world, makes an uncanny alliance before it reaches its destination,
namely, with the malarious Wallkill.

In the same nest of mountains from which they start are born the Neversink
and the Beaverkill, streams of wondrous beauty that flow south and west into
the Delaware. From my native hills I could catch glimpses of the mountains
in whose laps these creeks were cradled, but it was not till after many
years, and after dwelling in a country where trout are not found, that I
returned to pay my respects to them as an angler.

My first acquaintance with the Neversink was made in company with some
friends in 1869. We passed up the valley of the Big Ingin, marveling at its
copious ice-cold springs, and its immense sweep of heavy-timbered
mountain-sides. Crossing the range at its head, we struck the Neversink
quite unexpectedly about the middle of the afternoon, at a point where it
was a good-sized trout stream. It proved to be one of those black mountain
brooks born of innumerable ice-cold springs, nourished in the shade, and
shod, as it were, with thick-matted moss, that every camper-out remembers.
The fish are as black as the stream and very wild. They dart from beneath
the fringed rocks, or dive with the hook into the dusky depths--an integral
part of the silence and the shadows. The spell of the moss is over all.
The fisherman's tread is noiseless, as he leaps from stone to stone and from
ledge to ledge along the bed of the stream. How cool it is! He looks up
the dark silent defile, hears the solitary voice of the water, sees the
decayed trunks of fallen trees bridging the stream, and all he has dreamed,
when a boy, of the haunts of beasts of prey--the crouching feline tribes,
especially if it be near nightfall and the gloom already deepening in the
woods--comes freshly to mind, and he presses on, wary and alert, and
speaking to his companions in low tones.

After an hour or so the trout became less abundant, and with nearly a
hundred of the black sprites in our baskets we turned back. Here and there
I saw the abandoned nests of the pigeons, sometimes half a dozen in one
tree. In a yellow birch which the floods had uprooted, a number of nests
were still in place, little shelves or platforms of twigs loosely arranged,
and affording little or no protection to the eggs or the young birds against
inclement weather.

Before we had reached our companions the rain set in again and forced us to
take shelter under a balsam. When it slackened we moved on and soon came up
with Aaron, who had caught his first trout, and, considerably drenched, was
making his way toward camp, which one of the party had gone forward to
build. After traveling less than a mile, we saw a smoke struggling up
through the dripping trees, and in a few moments were all standing round a
blazing fire. But the rain now commenced again, and fairly poured down
through the trees, rendering the prospect of cooking and eating our supper
there in the woods, and of passing the night on the ground without tent or
cover of any kind, rather disheartening. We had been told of a bark shanty
a couple of miles farther down the creek, and thitherward we speedily took
up our line of march. When we were on the point of discontinuing the
search, thinking we had been misinformed or had passed it by, we came in
sight of a bark-peeling, in the midst of which a small log house lifted its
naked rafters toward the now breaking sky. It had neither floor nor roof,
and was less inviting of first sight than the open woods. But a board
partition was still standing, out of which we built a rude porch on the east
side of the house, large enough for us all to sleep under if well packed,
and eat under if we stood up. There was plenty of well-seasoned timer lying
about, and a fire was soon burning in front of our quarters that made the
scene social and picturesque, especially when the frying-pans were brought
into requisition, and the coffee, in charge of Aaron, who was an artist in
this line, mingled its aroma with the wild-wood air. At dusk a balsam was
felled, and the tips of the branches used to make a bed, which was more
fragrant than soft; hemlock is better, because its needles are finer and its
branches more elastic.

There was a spirt or two of rain during the night, but not enough to find
out the leaks in our roof. It took the shower or series of showers the next
day to do that. They commenced about two o'clock in the afternoon. The
forenoon had been fine, and we had brought into camp nearly three hundred
trout; but before they were half dressed, or the first panfuls fried, the
rain set in. First came short, sharp dashed, then a gleam of treacherous
sunshine, followed by more and heavier dashes. The wind was in the
southwest, and to rain seemed the easiest thing in the world. From fitful
dashes to a steady pour the transition was natural. We stood huddled
together, stark and grim, under our cover, like hens under a cart. The fire
fought bravely for a time, and retaliated with sparks and spiteful tongues
of flame; but gradually its spirit was broken, only a heavy body of coal and
half-consumed logs in the center holding out against all odds. The
simmering fish were soon floating about in a yellow liquid that did not look
in the least appetizing. Point after point gave way in our cover, till
standing between the drops was no longer possible. The water coursed down
the underside of the boards, and dripped in our necks and formed puddles on
our hat-brims. We shifted our guns and traps and viands, till there was no
longer any choice of position, when the loaves and the fishes, the salt and
the sugar, the pork and the butter, shared the same watery fate. The fire
was gasping its last. Little rivulets coursed about it, and bore away the
quenched but steaming coals on their bosoms. The spring run in the rear of
our camp swelled so rapidly that part of the trout that had been hastily
left lying on its banks again found themselves quite at home. For over two
hours the floods came down. About four o'clock Orville, who had not yet
come from the day's sport, appeared. To say Orville was wet is not much; he
was better than that,--he had been washed and rinsed in at least half a
dozen waters, and the trout that he bore dangling at the end of a string
hardly knew that they had been out of their proper element.

But he brought welcome news. He had been two or three miles down the creek,
and had seen a log building,--whether house or stable he did not know, but
it had the appearance of having a good roof, which was inducement enough for
us instantly to leave our present quarters. Our course lay along an old
wood-road, and much of the time we were to our knees in water. The woods
were literally flooded everywhere. Every little rill and springlet ran like
a mill-tail, while the main stream rushed and roared, foaming, leaping,
lashing, its volume increased fifty-fold. The water was not roily, but of a
rich coffee-color, from the leachings of the woods. No more trout for the
next three days! we thought, as we looked upon the rampant stream.

After we had labored and floundered along for about an hour, the road turned
to the left, and in a little stumpy clearing near the creek a gable uprose
on our view. It did not prove to be just such a place as poets love to
contemplate. It required a greater effort of the imagination than any of us
were then capable of to believe it had ever been a favorite resort of
wood-nymphs or sylvan deities. It savored rather of the equine and the
bovine. The bark-men had kept their teams there, horses on the one side and
oxen on the other, and no Hercules had ever done duty in cleansing the
stables. But there was a dry loft overhead with some straw, where we might
get some sleep, in spite of the rain and the midges; a double layer of
boards, standing at a very acute angle, would keep off the former, while the
mingled refuse of hay and much beneath would nurse a smoke that would prove
a thorough protection against the latter. And then, when Jim, the
two-handed, mounting the trunk of a prostrate maple near by, had severed it
thrice with easy and familiar stroke, and, rolling the logs in front of the
shanty, had kindled a fire, which, getting the better of the dampness, soon
cast a bright glow over all, shedding warmth and light even into the dingy
stable, I consented to unsling my knapsack and accept the situation. The
rain had ceased, and the sun shone out behind the woods. We had trout
sufficient for present needs; and after my first meal in an ox-stall, I
strolled out on the rude log bridge to watch the angry Neversink rush by.
Its waters fell quite as rapidly as they rose, and before sundown it looked
as if we might have fishing again on the morrow. We had better sleep that
night than either night before, though there were two disturbing
causes,--the smoke in the early part of it, and the cold in the latter. The
"no-see-ums" left in disgust; and, though disgusted myself, I swallowed the
smoke as best I could, and hugged my pallet of straw the closer. But the
day dawned bright, and a plunge in the Neversink set me all right again.
The creek, to our surprise and gratification, was only a little higher than
before the rain, and some of the finest trout we had yet seen we caught that
morning near camp.

_____________________________________________

END PART 1

Wolfgang wrote:
Chapter V of "Locusts and Wild Honey" by John Burroughs

Houghton, Mifflin and Company; 1907

________________________________________________

SPECKLED TROUT


I really do enjoy these postings, Wolfgang. Thanks for finding and
sharing. I did use one reference in #3 in Google. Perhaps someone
familiar with the locale could confirm I got the general area correct?

http://tinyurl.com/ylhhss

--
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