Forgotten Treasures #19: THE SPECKLED BROOK TROUT--PART X

THE SPECKLED BROOK TROUT

PART X: ALONG A TROUT-STREAM.
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"It is a spot beyond imagination

Delightful to the heart-where roses bloom

And sparkling fountains murmur; where the earth

Is gay with many-colored flowers."-FIRDAUSI



An ill man is walking down Broadway to his office. Overworked for months,
he shrinks from the hard, practical duties of rushing modern business. The
half-grown foliage of late May is on the trees in Bowling Green and Battery
Park. Robins are calling to each other there. He joys in the fresh wind,
and the gulls soaring above North River!

How green the grass is! And there, peeping through, he sees several wild
violets, blue as the sky at which they gaze. Presto! The jaded and
listless look is gone from the man's face; his heart leaps and hope comes
strong and welcome; for before him, summoned by memory, are the violets and
the vistas, the thorn-blossoms, robins, pheasants, arbutus, and lilies along
the chattering flow of his favorite trout-stream!



Trinity bells are pealing "Rock of Ages"; but the echoes of those peals sing
another song to him in his need of rest. It is: "Only two weeks more! Then
you shall be fishing for trout on the Little Slagle River!"



How slowly the fortnight drags by! But a morning comes when, before three
o'clock,
he is actually wading that stream. At last! Since midnight all the jewels
of the skies of June have been shining keenly. It is wild, remote, with
even the camp a mile away. He is at the entrance to the Lower Glen. Over
the high banks are thickets of thorn-bushes, their wealth of snow-white
blossoms filled with dewdrops which have caught and hold the starlight!



Through that sweetest of all earthly things, wild-flower air, comes the far
hooting of owls in lonely nocturne. There are whiffs of mint scents, faint
smells of fragrant birch and pine-balsam. The slight stir of a sleepy
breeze wakes a low whisper in some of the tree-tops, while the stream sings
to the sleeping forest, with



. . . . . ."the still sound

Of falling water-lulling as the song

Of Indian bees at sunset, when they throng

Around the fragrant Nilica, and deep

In its blue blossoms, hum themselves to sleep."



"In the night the great old troutes bite very boldly," said Isaak Walton: so
the angler is wading the stream at what the roused camp-cook has called and
"unearthly" hour. Far better, he is here to drink in the beauty of the
sylvan environment as the mystic hour runs from gold of stars to gold of
sunshine.



The stream is wide enough for casting flies without trouble from the white
thorn-bushes. Fifty feet below him is a deep pool, just beyond the wraith
of foam at the foot of short rapids. Gloom and mystery lie over and in it;
he can see the white of foam slowly eddying over its black water under two
leaning pines. He moves slowly, then pauses with rubber-clad feet on the
while and golden gravel, covered with two feet of rushing water.



Poising the pliable lancewood rod, while the left hand pulls the line from
the reel in unison at each pass of the rod back and forth above him, he
extends the line with its leader and flies until forty feet of line are in
motion. Then, true as bow from arrow, light as down, fluttering as if
alive, the White Miller lures go straight to the centre of the pool, and
kiss the water.



A flash, gleam, flying spray as a large trout darts from his home under the
bank! It is an experience that has often thrilled the real angler. The
fish has jumped at and missed the leading fly!



But the next cast is successful. An even fiercer rush, and the angler, with
the well-known turn of the wrist on the rod, has the fish hooked! Straight
down stream flies the quarry, the reel screaming and the heart of the angler
beating hard and fast! A long struggle follows. Almost in the landing-net
twice, and yet the trout makes savage rushes for liberty! Soon the prize is
secured; joy of possession as a wild, twelve-inch king of the jewelled coat
lies on the bed of fern-leaves in the bottom of the trout-creel! For this,
and for the gladness of returning health among some of earth's fairest
scenes, the angler has journeyed almost 1,000 miles. Already he is mastered
by the spell of the remote, wild life, with its mystery and music.



Three beautiful trout are taken from the pool while the starlight dies and
the sky grows lighter. Then, startling the ear of earliest dawn, a solitary
bird fills the forest with its first note, clear, pure, and thrilling, as if
Heaven itself had sent its own winged messenger to herald the coming day!
Then another bird takes up the song; then another and another, until all the
woods are vocal with melody-now near and joyous, now far and sweet, like
"the horns of elf-land faintly blowing."



"Skir-reee!" cries a scared chipmunk as he darts away. A gray squirrel,
with tail well cocked, barks and scolds at a safe distance. From far down
the stream comes the low drumming of a partridge. Across the bend is a
sudden splash, followed by the rattling cry of a kingfisher, who has had his
first dive of the day for nothing. A screaming hawk sails away from the dry
tree that tops the high bank. "Up all night?" inquires a quail.



The hypnotism and delight of it to the man escaped from a busy city office
are beyond all expression in words! Blessed hours of recreation!



In the air is the faint odor of smoke, and of boiling coffee. The cook has
gone farther down the stream with a heavy lunch-basket, has put six big
potatoes before a kindled camp-fire on the brookside, and then has caught
five larger trout from a deeper pool; breakfast there is nearly ready. The
roasted potatoes are done to a turn-how well the cook can prepare them! And
out from the little frying-pan come the five trout, swimming a half hour
ago, and now garnished with tender water-cress from that bank of it close to
hand. Abundant coffee, cream, toast, butter! The breakfast is served on
two snowy napkins spread over a mossy knoll; the dishes are pieces of
freshly cut birch bark, the seat is a birch log. Peerless dining-room-a
June sky curved in azure benediction above a wild pine-forest filled with
sough of wind through its aisles-with bird-notes, with the voice (so glad!)
of the soul of the wilderness-the talking stream whose rapids reflect the
early sunlight down one of the long aisles, and cause it to dance on the
foliage. Not all the chefs and banquets in the cities of the round world
could produce such a meal as this, with such a breakfast-chamber!



For the wealth of beauty is everywhere. Laurel and rhododendron blossoms
are around him-wild lilies, trailing arbutus, and white strawberry blossoms!
Finally, the forest rises above a blue carpet of violets. How the angler
loves them! He stops the cook from plucking them for a boutonnière. He
almost wishes, as he lies beside a thick cluster of their blooms, that he
might strike hands and feet in the kind earth, take root himself beside his
favorite flowers, and nevermore abandon the happy companionship. The
little, nodding, blue comrades! He feels that they are sentient-know and
are grateful for his love and insight. He is charmed by their wild, shy
life. As he lies prone and drinks from the spring below the bank, one of
them takes advantage of a sudden gust of wind to actually nod at him several
times!



"It is just a little violet on the bank above the spring;

Just a little point of blue that nods before the saucy air:

And as he notes the beauty of the wee and winsome thing,

He feels that it is glad to see him back and drinking there."



And now comes proof that the angler sees and knows the beauty of his
environment. For he is not fishing. He could talk for hours of rods,
lines, leaders, and reels-of camping, guides, tents, pack-horses, canoes; of
the various flies to be used according to season, location, lights, hours of
the day or night, on a dozen widely separated streams. He has fished on the
Peribonca in Quebec, the best salmon-streams in Newfoundland, the far-famed
Nepigon, and the fierce waters of a dozen rivers in British Columbia that
are guarded by black mountains whose bases were green with foliage; while
their peaks, sometimes two miles high, carried snow-banners in every high
wind. He knows Pennsylvania's best trout-streams; and the waters of the
Muskoka Region; besides the Au Sable, Shuswap, Two Medicine and St. Mary's
Lakes in Montana, and Square and the Sourdnahonk Lakes in Maine. Trout from
the Margaree in Cape Breton, from the Tabusintac and Bartibog Rivers in New
Brunswick, and the Morell Stream on Prince Edward Island, have been brought
to his creel by hundreds. The best cruising for edible salt-water
fishes-that around Albemarle and Pamlico Sounds-is familiar to him. But
nowhere else exist such wildness, remoteness, wealth of sylvan enchantment,
such flavor to trout, such health and life in air and water, such music in
a stream, as along the peerless little Slagle River!



He is realizing this, and is happy to the point of fear. He could easily
fill his creel with trout; yet he does not cast the flies. For he is in a
hypnotized state. He will not even light his morning cigar; its smoke would
pollute the air of a place which has "become religion." And he would sooner
take a drink of whiskey before St. Peter, the ancient fisherman who now
guards the gates of Paradise, than here, right in a Paradise upon earth.



The rod is laid on the half-submerged log where he sits, with his
rubber-clad feet in the water. He really hears and sees!



What a contrast to the scenes he beheld last summer along Granite Creek,
which flows into the head of St. George's Pond in Newfoundland! There, the
hillsides were yellow with ripe bake-apple berries; barrens were gray with
Arctic moss; caribou grazed in plain sight on many hills. Moose-birds, tame
by reason of their ignorance of human presence, roosted on the ends of the
little logs on the camp-fire before the tripod tent. Marsh-hens called and
fluttered; and at night, from far above, could be heard the quacking of
ducks and the thrilling "honk! honk! honk!" of the stout-hearted old wild
ganders, each winging his way toward Labrador at the head of invisible
wedges of night-flying geese. Great trout were in the pools of that stream;
and the steel-gray color of its gravelly bed was very beautiful. And yet,
even among such scenes, the angler had longed for the music, the flower and
bird life, foliage and mystery of the Slagle! Its waters flow around his
legs now! And they seem to talk to him as they rush:



"Where have you been, my devotee?

Why have you roamed so far from me?

Thrice welcome back to my fair shore!

Now learn to love me more and more."



He sees the flash of the body of a brook trout as he leaps from the brook,
in pursuit of a butterfly, wandering too near the water's surface for
safety. The line and flies have drifted from the log. Flash! A trout
strikes one of the lures, pulls the rod into the stream, and the owner
scrambles after it. Now he is casting again, and filling the creel. Nearly
every effort brings some response. In pools, behind rocks, on the ripples,
here by the bank, there beneath those logs, yonder in the foam of the
rapids, and in places where least suspected, glittering beauty,
crimson-spotted, always ready for a bait, lurk and play the wild brook
trout. The wild trout is the ideal fish, the fish of the poets and the
sportsman, who often feels that the breeding-pond is the half-way house to a
fish-stall in a market.



And so he wanders down the brook, happy, filling his hours with best
recreation. Steeper, higher, wilder, in lordly, many-colored scenes, grow
the banks of the Glen. Great trout lie in the waters which eddy, rush, and
glance in silvery willfulness over an intaglio of white and golden gravel
that beautifies the swift current.



Thus, all too quickly, passes the angler's day. The late afternoon light is
over all as he again stops, and looks, and listens.



To his right is a high knoll, mottled with moss-growths, its base sandalled
with the white star-points of wild strawberry blooms, and the tiny pale-blue
flowers of forget-me-nots. Beyond, is the brown, far-spreading carpet of
the forest, splashed by blue of violets, white of lilies, yellow of
daffodils! The whole left bank is a mass of dark wintergreen growth, edged
at the water with mint and cress. Yonder is a little slope exquisite with
the pale pink flowers of the anemone. Buds of wild honeysuckle are opening
down there on the little island. Blossoms of laurel, rhododendron, trailing
arbutus! Forest odors, bird-notes, whispering stream, murmuring foliage!
Mottled patches of sunlight and shadow dance under the great trees where,
last night, the strident calls of the whippoorwills were ringing. A mother
partridge is trying to coax her brood of chicks across that log over the
stream! Beautiful! No wonder the gray-haired angler loves it all. "The
infinite Night with her solemn aspect, Day, and the sweet approach of Even
and Morn, are full of meaning for him. He loves the green Earth with her
streams and forests, her flowery leas and eternal skies-loves her with a
sort of passion in all her vicissitudes of light and shade: his spirit
revels in her grandeur and charms-expands like the breeze over wood and
lawn, over glade and dingle, stealing and giving odors. Nature is to him no
longer an insensate assemblage of colors and perfumes, but a mysterious
Presence with which he communes in unutterable sympathies."



So this angler looks, listens, and feels more and more.



Every water-curve is full of grace, fantasy, and ease of motion, like a
wind-swayed flag. And he studies the currents, full of color, clearness,
mantlings of shadows, prismatic lights running over the white gravel of the
bed, or darting through the foam-fire. And at still pauses is as much in
the water as above it-boughs, foliage, blue sky, drifting clouds, all
softened and etherealized by reflection.



"Sweet views which in our world above

Can never well be seen,

Are imaged by the water's love

Of this fair forest green.

And all is interfused beneath

With an Elysian glow;

An atmosphere without a breath-

A softer day below."



This effect is heightened by the music of the water-flow. Old anglers have
ears trained to nicest sense of sound in the music of running water, and
will know the physical conditions, even when unseen, which cause many of the
notes of sound in a trout-brook. The impact of hurrying water on the air
causes vibrations that determine the notes of the liquid oboe.



When deflected from a bank in mass, the water has the swishing sound of
swift volume-crisp and full of life. Confined and made rapid in a little
cañon or cut, its tone is deepened and becomes sonorous.



Or it falls over a half-buried timber and deepens to a low roar, which is
slashed with purling dots of sound as drops fall singly into the current.
From underneath this shell of swift water come echoes of partly drowned
notes from the back-current below, and purls from roots and boughs around
which the turned stream hurries. Gurgles ensue-the compressed air below
varying in density with the varying volume of the water-leaps, the tones of
the back-flow struggling through, with the whisper of air intermingled as it
comes from the breaking bubbles with which the boiling pool is brightly
opaque.



Or a fallen tree with its hundreds of boughs and twigs forms obstructive
points of sounding current-tiny, but the whole furnishing a low, droning
complaint. All these notes are varied by the width of stream, volume,
depth, speed, angles of obstruction, character of the bed, kind, amount, and
density of foliage, incline and height of banks, changes in echoes and
resonance being endless, and even being affected by the dryness or humidity
of the air, and the mingling of foliage sounds as winds are light or strong.



Up the stream is a broad shallow where the brook flows over partly submerged
rocks, spread evenly, with a slumberous sound, like a steady wind moving
through thick woods. Falling over the even edge of a wide dam the water has
much the same sound. Unobstructed on inclines, rapidly flowing water in
small volume has the inimitable purl, so exquisite that even in music the
sweetest sounds are called liquid, like a tinkling rill. And the notes that
blend from different water-tones are always in concord, never in dissonance.
Flowing under many conditions, meeting multiform obstacles over even a
single rod of its course, these notes combine and make a certain "tone" or
pitch of musical sound. Put a log across the brook, choke it with rocks, or
remove those already there, and all the minor sounds are changed-also the
general tone and pitch of the water-music. Or the stream will part with
some portion of its water volume, which will run into still nooks and
limpidly go to sleep.



Thus the tone, volume, and blended orchestral effects of the water along a
rushing trout-stream are endless in variety and beauty-but all perfect. And
the feeling of the hearing, sensitive student will be played upon until some
echo of that music will be roused in his own spirit as he studies it all in
its light and gloom, sunshine and shadow, storm and peace. So in all ages
the best poets have studied and sung of the sound of flowing water, and have
peopled their musical brooks with singing nymphs and wraiths of
water-sprites.



Wild life, hypnotism, the home of Health! The true angler sees much, but
will realize that as compared with what is about him he sees very little.



Pluck a single leaf and look at it carefully. Even a skilled artist must
keep it before him as a model, to mimic the delicate veinings and exact
shape. Break a bough from a maple-tree, and try to see it. Some of the
leaves are mere lines to the sight-edgewise; others are foreshortened; many
are shaded by companions. Through them reigns an intensity of reflection
and brilliant semi-transparence acting upon and through surfaces extremely
complex in shape, curve, and relative position. The light is in among the
leaves and alters the appearance of the bough from within as well as
without. Turn it, hold it in any position, and it is perfect; yet not
another bough in all these miles of forest is just like it! Multiply the
woods until they are a wilderness swayed by wind or quiet in unity of
rest-flecked by driving cloud-shadows or flooded with moonlight or sunshine.
Manifestly, we cannot see them. Only a few of even the subtle and weird
patterns woven by ferns and mosses, and flowering grasses and plants, on the
floor of the forest can be noted or understood.



Above all, Mystery reigns. The stream drowses under long, partly seen roofs
of foliage, or under loving, interlacing boughs of water-tunnel whose
portals and winding sides are a tapestry of leaf and twig, misty with rain,
unearthly as they shine in the wan smile of dying sunlight; even more real
and divine in ghostly semi-darkness at night! Opaline lights play through
still lagoons in deep glades where the twin sisters of Silence and Twilight
keep noonday watch, and "all cheated hours sing vespers." Foliage melting
away in distance to mystery of banks and masses, softest shadows deepening
into black gloom, lonely stretches of the stream covered with Nature-Glory
in their remote windings! Yet over each small section of such a scene is
the mystery of color, form, interlaced shade. Here is what a man of
sharpest sight has said of it



"The stones and gravel of the banks catch green reflections from the boughs
above. The bushes receive grays and yellows from the ground. Every
hair-breath of polished surface gives back a little bit of blue of the sky
or gold of sun. This local color is again disguised and modified by the hue
of the light, or quenched in the gray of the shadows."



But over all and in all reigns the deeper Mystery of Life. Visible forms
and their beauty are not the strongest attractions of the trout-stream.
Grant that mystery of soft depth of gloom, grace of motion in water, and of
greatest delicacy of color are before the angler. What enchantment is there
in even all this lovely environment to create such fierce longing for it,
such content when possessed? Blue sky-fire may burn like a steadfast
sapphire through emerald foliage; the pride of fern-plumes may wave and
rustle in their green refreshment, -gold and pearl may throb in clouds whose
shadows wing their way over mountain, glen, and forest, -all through a
sun-shafted fantasia of gold-dusted wine-air which is perfumed by arbutus,
lily, violet, and forget-me-not,-the blossoming life all in a tangle of
fragrant day-dreams. Fairy tints may dance and quiver through that baby of
prismatic mist, the tiny rainbow as it spans the cascade. All the glamour
and riot of wild freshness may dwell in the mysterious woods, waters, sky,
as a June breeze makes the whole a harp of whispering leaves, purling
crystal, and curving blue. Place the angler in closest touch with it all,
as he wades the stream with ears, heart, and spirit receptive and
alert, -foliage near, rushing water about him, changing, intermingling light
and shadow over him as it falls in dancing fretwork. Yet even all this does
not explain his great love. What causes it?



It is because in this Nature about him is a Mystery of Life. An evasive,
sleeplessly unwearied living principle dwells in the leaf he may pluck and
crush, and is forming its colors, shaping its forms. Fern and flower,
traced with life-streaming veins, specially textured, with hues that blend
and part again, substantially present, possessed, yet hold a secret of
living being and growing life that forever eludes his search, and always
will. Life even more mystic than the spirit that he feels in himself is
present before him, inscrutable, regnant, locked and barred away from his
knowledge. Thus for him Nature wears a double aspect-that of substantial
presence and infinite remoteness. She dominates him with love of possession
and of unattainable desire. He looks with mortal eyes upon her material
features; yet he may gaze forever upon the veil that hides her invisible
secret of life, and she is yet Isis-a Magnet of Mystery. Therefore he
kneels, a rapt, glad, and humble devotee, before the closed gates, the thin
wall beyond which are the secrets of her vivifying existence. Besides, she
stands, like himself, between an Eternity of the Past and one of the Future,
seeming to call and beckon from a fathomless Abyss whose depths his eyes
will never pierce. She is fairest of the fair in visible forms; yet in her
mystery of life she is unseen and unapproachable even in closest communion.
So he loves her with unutterable love.



But he knows all is benign, and the vital import of the power that has
created. But how, and by what facts and mysteries of life? No answer
comes. He will not fathom the secrets; but he will realize more and more
the divine wisdom in making so much unknown as all is borne forward. He
will be sure that it is inconceivable that all is not of holy import and
being-sure that all the mystery is blessed. Half-read messages and tones of
sphere-music will come to him as he wonders at the Earth, and at himself,
standing there with her, both between two Eternities. And thus his faith is
satisfied, and his love is crowned!



The result is inevitable. With bowed and reverent head the angler hopes
that when he has crossed the Delectable Mountains, and, one poor thread in
the web of universal history, has waved back his mute farewells to his
favorite trout-stream before he enters the Unknown and is swallowed by
Oblivion, a merciful and loving Heaven may furnish to him the counterpart of
this brook. Will he not find a heavenly stream on the Other Side? Will
not its waters sing as with a new song, its forests whisper, its flowers
enchant? Yes, for there stands the message of Holy Writ, the last words of
John, Seer and Prophet-words of inspiration and promise: "And he shewed me a
pure river of water of life."



END THE SPECKLED BROOK TROUT

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Wolfgang

This work is in the public domain. To the best of my knowledge, its
inclusion here violates no U.S. or other copyright laws.