A Fishing forum. FishingBanter

If this is your first visit, be sure to check out the FAQ by clicking the link above. You may have to register before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages, select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below.

Go Back   Home » FishingBanter forum » rec.outdoors.fishing newsgroups » Fly Fishing
Site Map Home Register Authors List Search Today's Posts Mark Forums Read Web Partners

Forgotten Treasures #10: AMERICAN SALMON



 
 
Thread Tools Display Modes
  #1  
Old April 1st, 2006, 12:51 AM posted to rec.outdoors.fishing.fly
external usenet poster
 
Posts: n/a
Default Forgotten Treasures #10: AMERICAN SALMON

It has been my intention to space these out at roughly one month intervals
but I found this gem earlier today and it is just TOO good to sit
on........besides, no one has ever accused me of holding too closely to good
intentions.

Gentlemen.....ladies.....I give you salmon fishing.....on the
Clackamas.....with Rudyard Kipling!

HUZZA!



AMERICAN SALMON*
_________________________________________________
The race is neither to the swift nor the battle to the strong; but time and
chance cometh to all.



I HAVE lived!

The American Continent may now sink under the sea, for I have taken the best
that it yields, and the best was neither dollars, love, nor real estate.

Hear now, gentlemen of the Punjab Fishing Club, who whip the reaches of the
Tavi, and you who painfully import trout over to Octamund, and I will tell
you how old man California and I went fishing, and you shall envy.

We returned from The Dalles to Portland by the way we had come, the steamer
stopping en route to pick up a night's catch of one of the salmon wheels on
the river, and to deliver it at a cannery down-stream.

When the proprietor of the wheel announced that his take was two thousand
two hundred and thirty pounds weight of fish, "and not a heavy catch
neither," I thought he lied. But he sent the boxes aboard, and I counted the
salmon by the hundred--huge fifty-pounders hardly dead, scores of twenty and
thirty pounders, and a host of smaller fish. They were all Chenook salmon,
as distinguished from the "steel head" and the "silver side." That is to
say, they were royal salmon, and California and I dropped a tear over them,
as monarchs who deserved a better fate; but the lust of slaughter entered
into our souls, and we talked fish and forgot the mountain scenery that had
so moved us a day before.

The steamer halted at a rude wooden warehouse built on piles in a lonely
reach of the river, and sent in the fish. I followed them up a scale-strewn,
fishy incline that led to the cannery. The crazy building was quivering with
the machinery on its floors, and a glittering bank of tin scraps twenty feet
high showed where the waste was thrown after the cans had been punched.

Only Chinamen were employed on the work, and they looked like
blood-besmeared yellow devils as they crossed the rifts of sunlight that lay
upon the floor. When our consignment arrived, the rough wooden boxes broke
of themselves as they were dumped down under a jet of water, and the salmon
burst out in a stream of quicksilver. A Chinaman jerked up a twenty-pounder,
beheaded and detailed it with two swift strokes of a knife, flicked out its
internal arrangements with a third, and case it into a blood-dyed tank. The
headless fish leaped from under his hands as though they were facing a
rapid. Other Chinamen pulled them from the vat and thrust them under a thing
like a chaff-cutter, which, descending, hewed them into unseemly red gobbets
fit for the can.

More Chinamen, with yellow, crooked fingers, jammed the stuff into the cans,
which slid down some marvellous machine forthwith, soldering their own tops
as they passed. Each can was hastily tested for flaws, and then sunk with a
hundred companions into a vat of boiling water, there to be half cooked for
a few minutes. The cans bulged slightly after the operation, and were
therefore slidden along by the trolleyful to men with needles and
soldering-irons who vented them and soldered the aperture. Except for the
label, the "Finest Columbia Salmon" was ready for the market. I was
impressed not so much with the speed of the manufacture as the character of
the factory. Inside, on a floor ninety by forty, the most civilized and
murderous of machinery. Outside, three footsteps, the thick-growing pines
and the immense solitude of the hills. Our steamer only stayed twenty
minutes at that place, but I counted two hundred and forty finished cans
made from the catch of the previous night ere I left the slippery,
blood-stained, scale-spangled, oily floors and the offal-smeared Chinamen.

We reached Portland, California and I crying for salmon, and a real-estate
man, to whom we had been intrusted by an insurance man, met us in the
street, saying that fifteen miles away, across country, we should come upon
a place called Clackamas, where we might per-chance find what we desired.
And California, his coat-tails flying in the wind, ran to a livery-stable
and chartered a wagon and team forthwith. I could push the wagon about with
one hand, so light was its structure. The team was purely American--that is
to say, almost human in its intelligence and docility. Some one said that
the roads were not good on the way to Clackamas, and warned us against
smashing the springs. "Portland," who had watched the preparations, finally
reckoned "He'd come along, too;" and under heavenly skies we three
companions of a day set forth, California carefully lashing our rods into
the carriage, and the by-standers overwhelming us with directions as to the
saw-mills we were to pass, the ferries we were to cross, and the sign-posts
we were to seek signs from. Half a mile from this city of fifty thousand
souls we struck (and this must be taken literally) a plank road that would
have been a disgrace to an Irish village.

Then six miles of macadamized road showed us that the team could move. A
railway ran between us and the banks of the Willamette, and another above us
through the mountains. All the land was dotted with small townships, and the
roads were full of farmers in their town wagons, bunches of tow-haired,
boggle-eyed urchins sitting in the hay behind. The men generally looked like
loafers, but their women were all well dressed.

Brown braiding on a tailor-made jacket does not, however, consort with
hay-wagons. Then we struck into the woods along what California called a
camina reale--a good road--and Portland a "fair track." It wound in and out
among fire-blackened stumps under pine-trees, along the corners of log
fences, through hollows, which must be hopeless marsh in the winter, and up
absurd gradients. But nowhere throughout its length did I see any evidence
of road-making. There was a track--you couldn't well get off it, and it was
all you could do to stay on it. The dust lay a foot thick in the blind ruts,
and under the dust we found bits of planking and bundles of brushwood that
sent the wagon bounding into the air. The journey in itself was a delight.
Sometimes we crashed through bracken; anon, where the blackberries grew
rankest, we found a lonely little cemetery, the wooden rails all awry and
the pitiful, stumpy head-stones nodding drunkenly at the soft green
mullions. Then, with oaths and the sound of rent underwood, a yoke of mighty
bulls would swing down a "skid" road, hauling a forty-foot log along a
rudely made slide.

A valley full of wheat and cherry-trees succeeded, and halting at a house,
we bought ten-pound weight of luscious black cherries for something less
than a rupee, and got a drink of icy-cold water for nothing, while the
untended team browsed sagaciously by the road-side. Once we found a way-side
camp of horse-dealers lounging by a pool, ready for a sale or a swap, and
once two sun-tanned youngsters shot down a hill on Indian ponies, their full
creels banging from the high-pommelled saddle. They had been fishing, and
were our brethren, therefore. We shouted aloud in chorus to scare a wild
cat; we squabbled over the reasons that had led a snake to cross a road; we
heaved bits of bark at a venturesome chipmunk, who was really the little
gray squirrel of India, and had come to call on me; we lost our way, and got
the wagon so beautifully fixed on a khud-bound road that we had to tie the
two hind wheels to get it down.

Above all, California told tales of Nevada and Arizona, of lonely nights
spent out prospecting, the slaughter of deer and the chase of men, of
woman--lovely woman--who is a firebrand in a Western city and leads to the
popping of pistols, and of the sudden changes and chances of Fortune, who
delights in making the miner or the lumber-man a quadruplicate millionaire
and in "busting" the railroad king.

That was a day to be remembered, and it had only begun when we drew rein at
a tiny farm-house on the banks of the Clackamas and sought horse feed and
lodging, ere we hastened to the river that broke over a weir not a quarter
of a mile away. Imagine a stream seventy yards broad divided by a pebbly
island, running over seductive "riffles" and swirling into deep, quiet
pools, where the good salmon goes to smoke his pipe after meals. Get such a
stream amid fields of breast-high crops surrounded by hills of pines, throw
in where you please quiet water, long-fenced meadows, and a hundred-foot
bluff just to keep the scenery from growing too monotonous, and you will get
some faint notion of the Clackamas. The weir had been erected to pen the
Chenook salmon from going further up-stream. We could see them, twenty or
thirty pounds, by the score in the deep pools, or flying madly against the
weir and foolishly skinning their noses. They were not our prey, for they
would not rise at a fly, and we knew it. All the same, when one made his
leap against the weir, and landed on the foot-plank with a jar that shook
the board I was standing on, I would fain have claimed him for my own
capture.

Portland had no rod. He held the gaff and the whiskey. California sniffed
up-stream and down-stream, across the racing water, chose his ground, and
let the gaudy fly drop in the tail of a riffle. I was getting my rod
together, when I heard the joyous shriek of the reel and the yells of
California, and three feet of living silver leaped into the air far across
the water. The forces were engaged.

The salmon tore up-stream, the tense line cutting the water like a tide-rip
behind him, and the light bamboo bowed to breaking. What happened thereafter
I cannot tell. California swore and prayed, and Portland shouted advice, and
I did all three for what appeared to be half a day, but was in reality a
little over a quarter of an hour, and sullenly our fish came home with
spurts of temper, dashes head on and sarabands in the air, but home to the
bank came he, and the remorseless reel gathered up the thread of his life
inch by inch. We landed him in a little bay, and the spring weight in his
gorgeous gills checked at eleven and one half pounds. Eleven and one half
pounds of fighting salmon! We danced a war-dance on the pebbles, and
California caught me round the waist in a hug that went near to breaking my
ribs, while he shouted:--"Partner! Partner! This is glory! Now you catch
your fish! Twenty-four years I've waited for this!"

I went into that icy-cold river and made my cast just above the weir, and
all but foul-hooked a blue-and-black water-snake with a coral mouth who
coiled herself on a stone and hissed maledictions.

The next cast--ah, the pride of it, the regal splendor of it! the thrill
that ran down from finger-tip to toe! Then the water boiled. He broke for
the fly and got it. There remained enough sense in me to give him all he
wanted when he jumped not once, but twenty times, before the up-stream
flight that ran my line out to the last half-dozen turns, and I saw the
nickelled reel-bar glitter under the thinning green coils. My thumb was
burned deep when I strove to stopper the line.

I did not feel it till later, for my soul was out in the dancing weir,
praying for him to turn ere he took my tackle away. And the prayer was
heard. As I bowed back, the butt of the rod on my left hip-bone and the top
joint dipping like unto a weeping willow, he turned and accepted each inch
of slack that I could by any means get in as a favor from on high. There lie
several sorts of success in this world that taste well in the moment of
enjoyment, but I question whether the stealthy theft of line from an
able-bodied salmon who knows exactly what you are doing and why you are
doing it is not sweeter than any other victory within human scope. Like
California's fish, he ran at me head on, and leaped against the line, but
the Lord gave me two hundred and fifty pairs of fingers in that hour. The
banks and the pine-trees danced dizzily round me, but I only reeled--reeled
as for life--reeled for hours, and at the end of the reeling continued to
give him the butt while he sulked in a pool. California was further up the
reach, and with the corner of my eye I could see him casting with long casts
and much skill. Then he struck, and my fish broke for the weir in the same
instant, and down the reach we came, California and I, reel answering reel
even as the morning stars sing together.

The first wild enthusiasm of capture had died away. We were both at work now
in deadly earnest to prevent the lines fouling, to stall off a down-stream
rush for shaggy water just above the weir, and at the same time to get the
fish into the shallow bay down-stream that gave the best practicable
landing. Portland bid us both be of good heart, and volunteered to take the
rod from my hands.

I would rather have died among the pebbles than surrender my right to play
and land a salmon, weight unknown, with an eight-ounce rod. I heard
California, at my ear, it seemed, gasping: "He's a fighter from
Fightersville, sure!" as his fish made a fresh break across the stream. I
saw Portland fall off a log fence, break the overhanging bank, and clatter
down to the pebbles, all sand and landing-net, and I dropped on a log to
rest for a moment. As I drew breath the weary hands slackened their hold,
and I forgot to give him the butt.

A wild scutter in the water, a plunge, and a break for the head-waters of
the Clackamas was my reward, and the weary toil of reeling in with one eye
under the water and the other on the top joint of the rod was renewed. Worst
of all, I was blocking California's path to the little landing bay
aforesaid, and he had to halt and tire his prize where he was.

"The father of all the salmon!" he shouted. "For the love of Heaven, get
your trout to bank, Johnny Bull!"

But I could do no more. Even the insult failed to move me. The rest of the
game was with the salmon. He suffered himself to be drawn, skipping with
pretended delight at getting to the haven where I would fain bring him. Yet
no sooner did he feel shoal water under his ponderous belly than he backed
like a torpedo-boat, and the snarl of the reel told me that my labor was in
vain. A dozen times, at least, this happened ere the line hinted he had
given up the battle and would be towed in. He was towed. The landing-net was
useless for one of his size, and I would not have him gaffed. I stepped into
the shallows and heaved him out with a respectful hand under the gill, for
which kindness he battered me about the legs with his tail, and I felt the
strength of him and was proud. California had taken my place in the
shallows, his fish hard held. I was up the bank lying full length on the
sweet-scented grass and gasping in company with my first salmon caught,
played and landed on an eight-ounce rod. My hands were cut and bleeding, I
was dripping with sweat, spangled like a harlequin with scales, water from
my waist down, nose peeled by the sun, but utterly, supremely, and
consummately happy.

The beauty, the darling, the daisy, my Salmon Bahadur, weighed twelve
pounds, and I had been seven-and-thirty minutes bringing him to bank! He had
been lightly hooked on the angle of the right jaw, and the hook had not
wearied him. That hour I sat among princes and crowned heads greater than
them all. Below the bank we heard California scuffling with his salmon and
swearing Spanish oaths. Portland and I assisted at the capture, and the fish
dragged the spring balance out by the roots. It was only constructed to
weigh up to fifteen pounds. We stretched the three fish on the grass--the
eleven and a half, the twelve and fifteen pounder--and we gave an oath that
all who came after should merely be weighed and put back again.

How shall I tell the glories of that day so that you may be interested?
Again and again did California and I prance down that reach to the little
bay, each with a salmon in tow, and land him in the shallows. Then Portland
took my rod and caught some ten-pounders, and my spoon was carried away by
an unknown leviathan. Each fish, for the merits of the three that had died
so gamely, was hastily hooked on the balance and flung back. Portland
recorded the weight in a pocket-book, for he was a real-estate man. Each
fish fought for all he was worth, and none more savagely than the smallest,
a game little six-pounder. At the end of six hours we added up the list.
Read it. Total: Sixteen fish; aggregate weight, one hundred and forty
pounds. The score in detail runs something like this--it is only interesting
to those concerned: fifteen, eleven and a half, twelve, ten, nine and three
quarters, eight, and so forth; as I have said, nothing under six pounds, and
three ten-pounders.

Very solemnly and thankfully we put up our rods--it was glory enough for all
time--and returned weeping in each other's arms, weeping tears of pure joy,
to that simple, bare-legged family in the packing-case house by the
water-side.

The old farmer recollected days and nights of fierce warfare with the
Indians "way back in the fifties," when every ripple of the Columbia River
and her tributaries hid covert danger. God had dowered him with a queer,
crooked gift of expression and a fierce anxiety for the welfare of his two
little sons--tanned and reserved children, who attended school daily and
spoke good English in a strange tongue.

His wife was an austere woman, who had once been kindly, and perhaps
handsome.

Very many years of toil had taken the elasticity out of step and voice. She
looked for nothing better than everlasting work--the chafing detail of
housework--and then a grave somewhere up the hill among the blackberries and
the pines.

But in her grim way she sympathized with her eldest daughter, a small and
silent maiden of eighteen, who had thoughts very far from the meals she
tended and the pans she scoured.

We stumbled into the household at a crisis, and there was a deal of
downright humanity in that same. A bad, wicked dress-maker had promised the
maiden a dress in time for a to-morrow's rail-way journey, and though the
barefooted Georgy, who stood in very wholesome awe of his sister, had
scoured the woods on a pony in search, that dress never arrived. So, with
sorrow in her heart and a hundred Sister-Anne glances up the road, she
waited upon the strangers and, I doubt not, cursed them for the wants that
stood between her and her need for tears. It was a genuine little tragedy.
The mother, in a heavy, passionless voice, rebuked her impatience, yet sat
up far into the night, bowed over a heap of sewing for the daughter's
benefit.

These things I beheld in the long marigold-scented twilight and whispering
night, loafing round the little house with California, who un-folded himself
like a lotus to the moon, or in the little boarded bunk that was our
bedroom, swapping tales with Portland and the old man.

Most of the yarns began in this way:--"Red Larry was a bull-puncher back of
Lone County, Montana," or "There was a man riding the trail met a
jack-rabbit sitting in a cactus," or "'Bout the time of the San Diego land
boom, a woman from Monterey," etc.

You can try to piece out for yourselves what sort of stories they were.

_________________________________________________
*From "American Notes", Rudyard Kipling, 1891.

This work is in the public domain. To the best of my knowledge, no
copyright laws are violated by it's inclusion here.



 




Thread Tools
Display Modes

Posting Rules
You may not post new threads
You may not post replies
You may not post attachments
You may not edit your posts

vB code is On
Smilies are On
[IMG] code is Off
HTML code is Off
Forum Jump

Similar Threads
Thread Thread Starter Forum Replies Last Post
The problem with the Columbia river fisheries hugh80 General Discussion 5 January 15th, 2006 07:24 AM
Forgotten Treasures #7: MY NATIVE SALMON RIVER--PART 2 Wolfgang Fly Fishing 9 December 29th, 2005 06:10 AM
Forgotten Treasures #7: MY NATIVE SALMON RIVER--PART 1 Wolfgang Fly Fishing 0 December 27th, 2005 10:12 PM
Forgotten Treasures #1: THE CONFESSIONS OF A DUFFER Wolfgang Fly Fishing 15 May 19th, 2005 05:05 AM
Salmon in London I UK Game Fishing 0 November 24th, 2003 09:09 AM


All times are GMT +1. The time now is 01:15 PM.


Powered by vBulletin® Version 3.6.4
Copyright ©2000 - 2024, Jelsoft Enterprises Ltd.
Copyright ©2004-2024 FishingBanter.
The comments are property of their posters.