Going Fishing E-Book

Negley Farson

• Herausgeber: Merlin Unwin Books
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Seitenzahl: 315

Beschreibung

'This is just the story of some rods, and the places they take you to. It begins with surf-casting on the New Jersey coast when I was 13, and carries on to such scenes as flyfishing the headwaters of the Kuban in the upper Caucasus, and casting for rainbow trout in the rivers of southern Chile, with a volcano erupting every ten minutes within plain view. 'There is not a record, or even a very big fish in it; and some of the finest things fishing has given me I have found beside the steams of the West Country in England. Chiefly, I love my rods because of their associations, the places they have brought me to. They have been part of my kit when I travel, for many years. 'This magic wand has revealed to me some of the loveliest places on earth. That is the story of this book.'                                                                                                      – Negley Farson

Leseprobe

Going Fishing

What the critics have said about Negley Farson’s Going Fishing:

‘I first read Going Fishing in 1943 when, as a prisoner of war, I was serving a term of solitary confinement following an escape attempt and a friendly guard smuggled the book into my cell. For a couple of months it was my only literature, so I can claim to have read it pretty thoroughly! But Negley Farson proved much more than a solace; he was a revelation. Of all the fishing books I had read, his was the best. It still is.’

– Hugh Falkus

‘One of the great foreign correspondents of the twenties and thirties, Negley Farson of the Chicago Daily News would always take his fishing rod with him wherever he went. In the Kalahari Desert or in the foothills of the Andes, it was always there, ready to be used at the first opportunity; and in the mountains of the Caucasus, in the company of Alexander Wickstead, the Moscow correspondent of The Times, it was probably of help in keeping them both alive.’

– Conrad Voss Bark

‘Of absorbing interest and great variety ... the book does not contain a single boring line.’

– Angling magazine

‘You don’t have to be a fisherman to cherish this lovely book. If you love the outdoors, give yourself a treat.’

– Angling Times

Where the dark rivers curve down from Exmoor

Contents

1 The early days; surf-casting along the New Jersey sands; the cattyrackers of the Delaware Bay; and the wild geese of the Carolinas

2 Russian revolution – and Leonid Andriev’s yellow perch; a voluntary exile in British Columbia; the lonely houseboat; and keeping yourself alive with rod and gun

3 Saga of the Pacific salmon

4 The spell of the Shetlands; on the north-west tip of Scotland; and gillies

5 Less than an hour from London; days in the Hebrides; and Murdo MacDermid

6 Six wandering years; drives around Ireland – and political fishing; horses over the Caucasus; fishing the headwaters of the Kuban; an English hermit in Moscow; unfriendly frontiers on the Danube

7 Four countries in one year: Chile, England, France and Norway; rainbow trout before the volcano of Chillan; over the Andes; and exiled dictator

8 Fishing the West Country of England; reward

9 The fish chef of the old ‘Olympic’; the passionate fishermen of the Haute Savoie

10 The swift rivers of Norway

11 Yugoslavia; mountain climbing; and poaching the Regent’s River

12 Kenya – the best trout fishing in Africa; advice on walking near elephants; the laughter of Kikuyu girls

List of full-page Tunnicliffe illustrations

Where the dark rivers curve down from Exmoor

Surf-casting is not a duffer’s sport

You are allowed only ten ducks and four geese a day

It was always a battle if they made for the reeds

Millions and millions of salmon get snuffed out like a candle

I had secured my houseboat then

This was the home of the seals

He was a clean fish, with the sea-lice still on him

The road to Benbecula

One sunset we came out on a high spur of mountains

They come as close to being Centaurs as modern man and horse can get

Down to the snow-capped volcanoes of the lake country

An imperturbable scene which fills you with contentment

Light-backed trout with vivid red spots

Then the trout fell through a hole in my wretched net…

A man stood there eyeing me

For Reginald Bruce of Elmhurst Farm

Statement

This is just the story of some rods, and the places they take you to. It begins with surf-casting on the New Jersey coast, when I was thirteen, and carries on to such scenes as flyfishing the headwaters of the Kuban in the upper Caucasus, and casting for rainbow trout in the rivers of southern Chile, with a volcano erupting every ten minutes within plain view. There is not a record, or even a very big fish in it; and some of the finest things fishing has given me, I have found beside the streams of the West Country in England. I do not know the names of a tenth of the flies in the book, and thank the Lord I don’t want to. I would not be at all upset if you opened my own fly-boxes and showed me a dozen strangers. I did not know the name of the finest fly I ever had, nor did the man who tied it: he was an English captain in the Army of Occupation, at Cologne, and he said it had worked well for him in southern Germany. After a prodigious career, a trout took it away from me one night in the Balkans. What I do know are a couple of dozen old reliables, and I think I know where and how to use them. As time goes on I shall add others to this coterie, when I’ve found them useful.

I love rods, I suppose, with the same passion that a carpenter, a violinist, or a Monaco pigeon shot love their implements. I love using them. But, if I can’t, I can get a lot of fun by just taking them out of their cases and looking at them. A pair of trout rods helped to keep me alive when I was facing a riddle of poverty out in British Columbia where they provided free food; and I’ve used them for politics – to make a wild Irishman talk, when he wouldn’t have otherwise. Although I once thought I was going to come to no good through fishing, I’ve even made money out of it – my little ‘Duplex’ rod has provided me with many articles. But chiefly I love rods because of their associations, the places they have brought me to. They have been part of my kit, when I travel, for many years. This magic wand has revealed to me some of the loveliest places on earth. That is the story of this book.

NEGLEY FARSON

1

The early days; surf-casting along the New Jersey sands; the Cattyrackers of the Delaware Bay; and the wild geese of the Carolinas

I went into the hazel wood

Because a fire was in my head.

I cut and peeled a hazel wand

And hooked a berry on a thread

And when white moths were on the wing

And moth-like stars came fluttering out

I threw the berry in a stream

And caught a little silver trout.

The New Jersey coast lay bleaching under the winter sun. The lighthouse blazed like a white bone. The dune grass stood still. And the green ocean lay like a pond. There were no footmarks along the sand.

The summer was over, one of those long summers of childhood. I was walking along the tide mark, examining the driftwood and wreckage cast up by a recent pounding storm. There was always mystery in these bits of broken timber and rusted metal, some of which had been lying off the beach for years. The strewn, irregular line of the highest surge of waves was a continuous story after each storm. But I was searching for a specific treasure. It was always the same; a particular type of tackle that we used off that coast – a triangular brass swivel, to one end of which would be left, usually, a broken bit of parted Cuttyhunk line; a three-ply twisted gut cast from another loop; and a four-ounce pyramidal sinker dangling from the other.

This was the rig of the surf-casters, those men who waded far out into the sea, and cast with a stout two-handed greenheart or snakewood, far out, hundreds of feet beyond the onrushing combers, to where the great striped channel bass lay crunching clams in the dappled lagoons of the sea floor. I found this tackle, entangled around waterlogged planks or twisted in some conglomerate wreckage, chiefly because of the delicacy of this sport. For, making a full-armed cast with the big quadruple reel, this four-ounce sinker was slung like a bullet into the sky. You controlled the spinning reel with your thumb, barely braking; and, if you had a backlash when the sinker was in full flight – even the Cuttyhunk parted.

You stood there, watching helplessly, as your tackle sailed outwards, having severed all connections with you, to drop into the open sea. Sometimes a channel bass, or a flounder, or a weakfish would take the clam or bit of shedder-crab with which the hook was baited, and ultimately die. These, too, were washed ashore. The storms dug into the sea sands and beat everything up. We once found part of a yard of an old sailing ship. And it was ripping and snarling at one of these bits of decayed fish that I found Joe. The fish was a monstrous thing, with a mouth about a foot wide, ugly teeth, all head, and no tail; we used to call them ‘all-mouths’. Joe was the doughtiest bull terrier I ever encountered.

As I said, the summer was over. Joe was a castaway himself. I’d like to know what sort of a person his master was, for some people did leave their dogs and cats when they went away. And Joe seemed to have been soured by it. He had, for several days, a grudge against all mankind. But I was out of a dog at that moment, and so a flirtation ensued that took me the better part of a dangerous afternoon. The end of it was that Joe followed me home, his hackle rising every time I turned to speak to him, until I got him into the backyard, and shut the gate. Joe was caught.

This was perhaps the finest channel bass season, this tail-end of autumn; and with the setting in of real winter the ‘frost fish’ would come up along the coast, and there would be night after night when, with a bucket of long-necked clams, I would go out and fish for ling. Joe accompanied me, sitting by my side on moonlit nights, pondering in his dog-way, over the mysteries and melancholy of the lonely sea.

It said so many things to me! It was over thirty-five years later, out on Lake Victoria in Uganda, when I had some natives tell me, wide-eyed, their legends of the Sese Islands (they said to me they had no special name for every kind of fish, they were just ‘the Things in the Water’) that I touched again the fringe of this imagination which used to thrill, depress, and fill me with such breathless meditation on those enchanted nights. I pictured the sea’s depths and filled them with every shape, any of which I might hook; these Things in the Water.

That was the right name for them. In the long native canoe on Lake Victoria, I was still wondering what we would catch. The water still held mystery. The anxiety had not diminished. It has not yet.

In those early days fishing was uphill work. There was a certain amount of ignominy attached to it. It was too often associated with failures, with ne’er-do-wells, with not-getting-on; and, in our Calvinistic civilisation, where to be poor was considered almost a crime, such a waste of time as fishing was considered unpardonable. The result was that some of the finest men I have ever known were fanatic fishermen. It took, for some people, great courage.

The female members of my family would rather eat anything from the fishmonger than what I caught. For some reason (and they would never reveal it) my fish were suspect. Perhaps they thought them unorthodox.

A true surf-caster is a man who loves the sea. Far beyond the prize of any great fish he might land, is the exhilaration of the waves. In the summer along the New Jersey coast they came in in sets of three, in great, racing combers. You could hear their dull booms far inland. Then there was the smell of the salt marsh. When the wind was offshore these arching seahorses raced in with long white manes streaming from their tips. From the marsh at sunset you heard the cry of shore-fowl. The haunting, space-hinting cry of the curlew; is there a more moving call by any sea? There were days of dull mist which blurred the headlands. Then a white fog, with the hot sun behind it, when the hissing surf shone like burnished silver. And then the long hot afternoons when the mirage came and the liners far off the yellow coast came past in streamers, or sailed upside down.

These are the things which fill the eye, and heart, and mind of the veteran surf-caster. These are often all that he brings home after a hard day’s work, with the sandpipers dancing along the shore. Surf-casting is not a duffer’s sport. And you are sure to catch many more fish from a boat.

For some reason, perhaps experience, we had the belief that the striped channel bass always struck best by night. There was a rod maker along that coast who gave as a prize each year ‘a handsome snakewood rod’, with German silver mounting, and agate guides, to the person who caught the biggest channel bass. One year the man who lived next door to me won it with a 42–pounder. He was very professional, having taken a house where he could command the sea, and having a glass case in that house full of greenheart, snakewood, and split-cane rods. Below the case was a chest of drawers containing Vom Hofe reels, Pfluegers, with ratchet and drag, and cast-off so that the spool could run free without turning the handle. Being an intensely religious man he never fished on Sundays; but that had nothing to do with ‘practising’. So, when other people were at church, he and some of his old cronies would totter stiffly down to the beach and practise casting with just the sinker. For some reason – because of the ecstasy of it, I suppose – he seemed to get his strength back the minute he took his stance to make a cast.

Surf casting is not a duffer’s sport

It was a delight to watch the even parabola of his sinker, sailing surely to precisely where he had intended it. A backlash, from him, would have been sacrilege. But there were other casters, among the summer lot, who were not so skilful. One summer day a novice, making the sweeping sidewise cast among a lot of enthusiasts at the end of our local wooden pier, rotated with all his might to shoot his sinker out to sea, but, unfortunately, caught a Japanese in the ear. The hook was driven with such force that it pulled the ear forward and entered the Jap’s skull. The lead sinker then swiftly spun around his head, and, clunk! hit him on the forehead and almost brained him.

But we, we locals, detested pier fishing. It meant a crowd; and that meant you lost the chief thing in surf-casting – the luxury of your own solitude. That, and trying to solve the sea – guessing whether this or that sand-bar had shifted – these things are the very essence of surf fishing. Then, to haul 2 or 3lb fish up like a bucket is an entirely different thing from beaching a fighting 25-pounder through heavy waves. There, every bit of your skill and intelligence is called upon. And quickly. In these conditions, with a heavy undertow and the last receding wave adding pounds to your line-pull, you can make a mistake only once.

Not able to play Sancho Panza to my revered neighbour, and feeling (quite correctly) that I had little chance of ever winning that fine prize rod myself, I attached myself to the next–best fisherman I knew along that stretch of coast. He was an old ex-German. I did not know what his profession was, or his politics; nor did I care. All I knew was that if I did want to be in at the killing of one of these monster fish, he was the man for me. He felt likewise.

You cannot buy enthusiasm. Nor a small boy who will run a mile to fetch your bait. Or someone who will sit silent, for hours, while you ruminate. Someone who will eagerly hold your rod while you take a snooze. Or, even more wondrous companion, a boy who will collect driftwood for a fire on cold nights, when the driftwood burns green from the copper in it; and you two sit, avidly eating the bait – the fat clams you have roasted in the embers. Clams scorned by the channel bass.

But one moonlit night they did not scorn them. The German had waded far out and made his cast. Now he was drying himself by our fire. He had taken up all slack. With the click on, his rod was leaning over a ‘Y’ that he always brought along to rest it on – for these surf rods are not light things; if you can afford it, you use a heavy belt with a leather cup to hold the butt of your rod against you while you are fighting a fish. And the reel screamed!

I did not know a word of German then. But I heard a sputter of them. He was into a big fish. There was no doubt about that, the way the German’s rod was bending – and jerking. Joe’s bark showed that even he had realised this moment’s significance. For the German nearly went crazy. What had happened was that he had jammed his reel. If my wealthy neighbour had reels with gadgets that made me envious, this German had tackle which made my heart ache. His reel not only had a drag, but super-super-drags. And one of them had ‘frozen’. The spool was locked solid. The only thing to do now was run back and forth to the surf, or up and down the coast, as the fish played him!

In this unforeseen tug-of-war the fat German showed almost an indecent agility. One minute he would be shouting commands to me from atop the sand dunes (though what I could do about it, I could not see!); the next he would be racing past me towards the surf. The bass had made a run out for deep water. The fish had the upper hand for some time. ‘Big von! Big von!’ the German kept shouting at me. But the bend of his rod had already told me that. Finally loud Teuton yelps from the sand dunes announced that the German was beaching him.

And very skilfully he did it! Watching for an incoming wave, he went backwards with it. The fish was tired. The German got him just ahead of the wave and raced shorewards with it, keeping a taut line, bringing the fish with it as the wave surged far up the sands. Then he held it. The wave retreated. And there in the moonlight flapped a huge striped channel bass.

Then I broke the line.

I had tried to pull the fish farther upwards with it. Fatal ignorance! His dead weight snapped the Cuttyhunk forthwith. But I landed it. I ran down and fell upon it, thrusting my hand and arm well up through its gills. A scratchy gesture. But when the next wave came we were holding the prize up in the moonlight – just to look at it.

Every man has a fish in his life that haunts him; that particular big one which got away. Sometimes even I lie awake and groan at nights over an 8lb sea trout I had on for 2 hrs. and 40 mins. on a 3x cast up at Laxo in the Shetlands. It gets a pound bigger every time I tell about it. And how big that German’s striped bass would have been, had the next wave carried it back, I cannot say. But when we went down into the town and woke up Mr. Seager (the rod maker) in the dead of night, so that he could weigh it while it was still wet, it pulled down the spring-scale to only 25½lb. It did not qualify even among the first three that season. It won no prize. But it won an imperishable place in my memory, for it was the first big game fish that I had ever seen killed.

I still see the night, for it was by a flume, with the silent lighthouse on the other side; and in this flume we used to stand on the cross-beams and scoop up the herring, with dip nets, as they tried to rush the fall of peat-coloured water to get into Deal Lake. Our swift, sweeping dips, almost as fast as paddles, ended with a thud when a fish was in our net. We kids sold them around the town for about tuppence each. Then, in the spring, the small fish came out of the lake (probably spawned a couple of years back) about the size of large Marchand sardines. These we caught in masses and sold them for bait, or put some in jam jars and salted them down. (I know that herrings are supposed to spawn in the sea; and that their ova, in jelly-like masses, are alleged to sink to the bottom. Yet these were certainly herring that we caught going up that flume.) Always the same technique: the big hook was inserted through the mouth, out through a gill, then turned round and pulled through the fish again near the tail. On this triangular-swivel tackle the 3-ply cast always had a cork (just an ordinary bottle cork) split and closed over it, so that it could be slid along. By this means we adjusted the ratio of the cast so that the hook could always float several inches clear from the bottom, which kept it away from crabs.

With these we caught weakfish, which, with their hundreds of spots and fine mouths, look like trout, and are actually called Bay Trout as you go southwards along the Atlantic coast, although they do not have the adipose fin. They have a fine, firm white flesh, are magnificent eating, and are one of the gamer sea fish.

We also used crabs for bait. The American crab sheds his shell, I think every year; and he does so in four stages. First he is a hard-shell; then a crack-shell – he is ready to shed; then a ‘shedder’. With this last you may take the two sharp end tips, bend them back, and break him out. There he lies in your hand; the same colouring of dark green, with white and blue claws – but with the essential character that his skin is already so tough – ready to form the hard shell again – that he will stick on your hook; and, unless you are clumsy, stand any amount of casting. He is delicious to eat then; and ‘Soft-Shell’ American crabs, fried in sizzling fat and breadcrumbs, served with Tartar sauce, are a dish to delight any gourmet. These are another of the rewards of a surf-caster’s life; for, in the long summer months the shallow salt lagoons are full of these soft-shell crabs, helpless objects, some of which you will see being carried along on the hard-shells’ backs.

But to the surf-caster, there is probably nothing that can touch a run of ‘Bluies’. These are a fighting fish of the mackerel family which run in schools. You use a lead ‘squid’. Viewed laterally, it is a sharp-edged, sharp-pointed object, made of lead, very like a double spear point. A cross-section of its centre would be a very sharp-pointed diamond. On one end of this is a heavy black hook. And so fiercely do the ‘bluies’ strike that they will often snap this hook off. You use a wire trace, burnish the lead squid silver-bright with your knife each day before you use it; then you cast this, like a Devon or a Dowegiac, into the tide rip or patch of bay where you think the bluefish are schooling. With your big-spooled, quadruple reel you reel in the instant the squid hits the water. It darts toward you through the green sea like a flashing fish. When a bluie hits that, your rod almost leaves your hands. It is always a battle to land him.

Then, on the great sweep of Barnegat Bay, we ‘chummed’ for bluies, sailing a cat-boat with the sheets fairly free, or one of those spoon-bowed sneak-boxes (which we used later duck shooting), towing astern a bag full of crushed-up menhadden – a herring-like fish, which stinks like hell, you think, because about the only other time you see it is when the New Jersey farmers are using it for fertiliser. These oily menhaddens leave a broad streak of oil in the wake of your sailboat. The bluefish love menhaddens. They come racing across the bay towards that tell-tale, promising oil streak – and there, darting through it, is your trolling ‘squid’.

If you are alone in a sneak-box (it is only comfortable for two anyway) you will have your hands full with both sail and fish at the same time.

In the meantime, as the summer days go on, your skin becomes tanned like leather; your eyebrows turn white from salt and sun; and your hair becomes bleached white as a baby Swede’s. Drying your line at night, walking along the balcony of the old wooden hotel which used to lie near Barnegat Light, you were so healthy, content, still thrumming with the day’s sport, that you felt all this was too good to be true.

Well, it was. Lying there at nights during one of the vacations from my University, watching the beam of the Light, my ears filled with that satisfying sound of the ceaseless surf below me, I knew that my days of long leave would soon be ended. I would have to work pretty soon; the fishing-rods would be put away. Two weeks a year for my own self would be about the most I could hope for. And not these long golden summers.

But then there is the inland fishing, fresh water, which brings with it other settings and an entirely different philosophy. I mean, by philosophy, the thoughts and meditations which come to you while you are fishing. For freshwater thoughts have not the grandeur which comes from viewing the vast Atlantic. You must realise I am not talking now about fishing from piers and jetties, with other people, or even with buildings in sight of you; I speak of what the deep-dyed surf-caster always longs for – just the sea and himself.

And I exempt from this, of course, fishing for sea trout or salmon in the raw sweeps of romantic Scotland, or in the Hebrides, or the Shetlands, when the heather turns wine-red at sunset. No scenes could be grander than those.

But, otherwise, you may become contemplative until you are a very Izaak Walton under your willow tree, or have the grace to meet Nature with an open heart like Lord Grey of Fallodon; but, you must admit, your rewards will be less physically exhilarating. Your philosophical reflections may be – they are almost sure to be – more delicate, perhaps reach a finer perception – the salt sea jars you too much – but they are more on the contemplative than the active side.

In the States we have two fish, the small-mouth and the large-mouth bass, which we Americans feel have never received their proper recognition from fishermen of other countries. We used to think that they were the gamest fish, inch for inch and pound for pound, that swims. (Except a little fish called the ‘bonefish’ which you find in the shallows of the coral reefs off the Florida Keys.) I used to believe that – until I met the sea trout. Yet even now, inch for inch, pound for pound, I rather think it is a toss up.

The small-mouth is far and away the gamer of the two bass. To be at his best he ought to be in the cold, clear, spring-fed lakes of upper New York State, or some of the cold northern lakes, such as those in Wisconsin. When he strikes, if he hits a surface, or sub-surface bait, he will leap into the sky like Nijinsky, fighting on the surface all the time until you get him into the boat. And on each of these leaps your heart stops, for you know he is violently flicking his stubborn head, trying to shake out your lure.

For these fine freshwater game fish, you bait-cast. Here again you use the quadruple reel (one turn of the handle means four turns of the spool); and here again your intelligent thumb, ever so delicately braking, must control the spinning reel so that you do not get a backlash. It is one-handed casting, with a rod seldom over six feet long, with a finely knit un-oiled silk line. This braided, unfinished silk line is the very acme of pliability. And, as I have said, your brains must be in your thumb.

You cast with ‘plugs’. A surface bait like the Wilson Wobbler, a white-painted, cigar-shaped thing, with scarlet fluting; compact, painted Dowegiacs, which look like minnows – and even a white-painted float with a revolving head – which putters along the surface like a tug-boat; and the instant your plug hits the water you must start to reel it toward you. Nobody can prove exactly why the bass do strike at some of these lures – they can’t think that white thing zig-zagging through the water is a fish. Nor with the Jamison Coaxer, a white, egg-shaped arrangement, with one hook fastened to another, paralleled by a scarlet feather. I myself think they strike from anger. For I have painted a clothes-pin red, cast it over their nests (when the male bass was patrolling them); and had them wham at it in perfect fury. Bass are also very fond of small grasshoppers and crickets.

I lived for years on a spring lake in the lower Catskills. I knew bass from the time I was 13 years old. And it was always a struggle, in the more infantile years, not to fish for bass over their nests. This rage of theirs was always their undoing. And here is an interesting thing: the bass (unless there was some freak of Nature that year) never came up to spawn until the temperature of these icy lakes had risen to 52 degrees Fahrenheit. Then, when they had made these round, whitish nests with their tails, the female had laid her eggs and the male had fertilised them with his milt, the female went off. It was always the male bass who was left to patrol the nest. He guarded it against other bass, or alligator-faced pike or pickerel.

These lakes turned blue in certain angles of the sun. They were cloaked in pine or beech or oak or chestnut. Their shores and their islands were grey granite rocks. It was a fine, hard scenery. There was nothing soft about the home of the small-mouth bass. In the autumn, with the turning leaves, these shores were a flame of red and yellow glory. You usually fished from a moving boat. You never anchored – not when you were bait-casting. When you cast your plug skilfully between some granite ledges – and had the fish carry it out of water with his leap – then you had one of the greatest thrills that fishing in the Americas can offer you.

The small-mouth has a hard, fighting mouth. He does not run as big as the large-mouth; a 4lb small-mouth, for example, would be considered very fine, almost an exceptional fish, certainly an unusual one, whereas a 4lb large-mouth is what we would call ‘just middling’. A good fish, but nothing to brag about.

With the large-mouth, we had a style of fishing which was fascinating. I believe, Leonard in New York now makes a special rod for it. It is split cane, but short and stiff, like a stumpy trout rod. It is tough, because with this style of fishing, you have to strike with great force to drive the hook in. We used live small frogs.

I know it sounds inhumane. But a ‘frog-fisher’ always looks down on the man who uses the mechanical lures, sneering that he is ‘fishing with machinery!’ And to cast a live frog correctly required a skilled and gentle hand. For many years I fished with one of the finest ‘frog casters’ in the United States. At any rate, he made it almost a matter of course to win every prize given by the big sporting magazines.

But this doctor did not fish for prizes. He was a Southerner, from the Deep South, and a gentleman of the purest heart. He both looked and talked like the old President Theodore Roosevelt, who, he asserted, was what an all-round man should be. And, although he had just enough to keep him comfortable, this fine old doctor didn’t care a whoop for either money, fame, even medical distinction; he lived the year round for just one month – July.

Every morning in July, except Sunday, a local man arrived at the doctor’s door with 75 small, live frogs in a box. Then the doctor got into his old-fashioned car. Back he would come at sunset, red as a strawberry; and some dozen or so monster bass would be lying under a wet gunnysack. Where he got them from, such a continual supply of big ones, the neighbourhood never could make out. And then, too, the neighbours were not particularly interested; for, as I have said, this was in the money-making age, and most of the wealthy men who had their summer homes around that lake were merely tolerant of the doctor, liking him, but thinking him rather a fool – to go off fishing in the hot sun that way.

But he baited me so often about my ‘fishing with machinery’ that I took to frog-casting in sheer self-defence. I caught his fever.

There was a shallow, sandy-bottomed lake that it took us some hours to get to. A mite too slack, this reedy-marged expanse, for the vigorous small-mouth. There was a sort of backbone of willows that seemed to grow almost out of the water along the centre of it.

‘Negley,’ the old doctor would say, baiting a fresh frog through its lips, ‘the big old bass, the wise ones, lie under the shade of those willows in the heat of the day. Now there’s one ... just ... there ... that I’ve stirred once or twice ...’

As he said ‘just there’ the doctor made his cast – plenty of line already stripped off the reel over the fingers of one hand; the dressed silk line, in this case, ‘shooting’ easily through the guides. The art is to cast your frog so that there is no jerk. You mustn’t kill him, or take the life out of him, by jerking his head about. You must drop him gently on the willows.

‘Y-e-e-s ...’ said the doctor, reminiscently; ‘he must be at least five pounds ... that fellow under there.’

And as he said that he was gently coaxing the frog off the willow branch into the water. The frog dropped. Instantly, it began to swim – with kicks. If the bass didn’t take it then, the doctor pulled the line in, strip fashion, so that each pull straightened out the frog’s legs, and each pause gave it time to kick again. But usually a big waiting bass was ready for it.

There was a swirl – and the swimming frog was taken under.

‘But you don’t strike now, Negley!’

No, the doctor explained; that would only mean that you pulled the frog out of the bass’s mouth. ‘Because these large-mouth always take a frog, first, sideways. Then they swim off and down a bit, blow it out, then take it in head on!’ So, while he was saying this, I watched with apprehensive stare the line sliding through the big guides of the Leonard rod. The doctor made no attempt to stop it; on the contrary, he was obediently paying it out – so that the bass should feel no pull.

Then there was a pause when the line stopped moving. The doctor’s jaw muscles began to set. Then the line started slowly moving out again. Carefully, oh so carefully, the doctor gently took in all the slack; then he leaned back – struck!

Well, if you have ever stirred a paddle around in a bath tub, you can imagine the rumpus that was aroused. A huge bass – five, six, possibly eight pounds, had had the hook driven deep into him. He was wild. He came from the surface, the spray flying away from him, arched, turned like a fighting plane in a dog-fight – and crashed back into the water again.

‘Away!’ shouted the doctor; ‘get me away from those willows! Work out into the lake! For God’s sake – keep your side to him. Wait – don’t move – he’s making a run! Ah – got you, you beauty!’

The fish had flung out into the sunny air, crashed back again. And, in all these contradictory commands, I had won the valuable space between us and the shore. The art of frog-casting will make you dissatisfied with the artificial lures. Its drama is more visible, because you are watching your frog for most of the time – a thing you seldom get the chance of doing when you are fishing with a live minnow. Always, after the doctor and I had killed a few satisfactory fish, we would deliberately chance losing one merely for the opportunity of watching the bass handle the frog; they always did what the doctor said – took it from the side, then swam off and down to blow it out. You never came closer to watching a fish thinking than when you saw one of these deep-shouldered bass eye the frog ... and bear down on it to swallow it head on. Then, when you struck, at these close distances, you witnessed all the frantic energy you had set in motion.

As to the cruelty of this sport, it cannot be any more unpardonable than baiting a live minnow through the back and letting the doomed thing swim. Sometimes the frogs would come back with their ‘trousers’ ripped off, or long triangular rips in their green and white skin; this meant that a pike or pickerel had taken a snatch at it, with their long rows of slanting teeth. We always killed these frogs immediately and threw them ashore.

The doctor, too, had a sense of fair play, even with frogs; he never used one for more than four casts. ‘Then he’s served his time,’ he would say with a smile, looking at me over the tops of his spectacles; ‘he’s a free frog.’ So, when we pulled ashore under some shady tree for luncheon, the old man always released a dozen or so lively little ones. His