With Rod and Line in Colorado Waters. France Lewis B.

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СКАЧАТЬ down stream – the Doctor followed in humiliation. We whipped every foot of the way down through the cañon to our horses, but not a fin rewarded our efforts. The forenoon was gone; I felt sorry for the Doctor; my sympathies went out to him as they always do for the under dog in the fight. I had no heart to express anything but unbounded satisfaction for the morning’s enjoyment. But I believe he thinks to this day I was lying.

      AGAPAE

      Did you never go fishing when a boy, and come home at the close of a Saturday without so much as a single chub dangling on a string to console you for the anticipated dressing because of your interdicted absence? I have. But the chagrin of the ten-year-old is nothing in comparison to the mortification of the middle-aged boy under similar circumstances. However, there were no inquisitive bores in our camp. The Doctor was determined to again try his luck in Williams’ Fork; nothing but the remembrance of my early experience could have induced me to join him.

      The day after our successful failure, equipped as before, we took our way over the hills and through the sage brush, reaching our destination about nine o’clock. The tackle was quickly adjusted, and keeping out of the way of that infernal pine, I dropped a brown-bodied gray hackle gently upon the placid water. The fly had hardly touched the surface, when suddenly from out the depths there flashed an open-mouthed beauty, and that hackle disappeared as, turning head down and revealing his glittering side, its captor plunged again into the till then silent pool. It made my pulse throb a little quicker, but I was not paying as much attention to that as to the trout. He made a dart up stream with the hook firmly fixed; I brought him gradually round and coaxed him to the surface to ascertain what sort of a leviathan I had encountered; then I got excited and felt that if I did not get him ashore very soon he was not my trout. Just below the pool, ten yards or so, was a shelving beach a few feet in length, and I gradually worked my way to it, keeping a taut line on my bonanza. While I was doing this I remembered having read a whole column of imagination, written by somebody named Murray, wherein he described his “happiness” under like circumstances; cracking bamboo and spinning silk, with a half dozen Johns with landing nets, were the burden of his effusion, and he wound the matter up after a three hours’ fight, with a trout seventeen inches long, when I expected to learn at least of a ten-pound salmon lifted out by one of the Johns above mentioned. I wanted to hit the fellow with a club for making an ass of himself. I was hungry for trout, and inside five minutes I had drawn my prize up to and on that gravelly beach, had him by the gills, and he was seventeen inches flush, big as Mr. Murray’s and no fuss about it. Just as I got my fish secured I heard the Doctor threshing round in the willows, about two rods away, and in a moment after he held up to my envious gaze more than a match for my capture. Our exchange of congratulations was hurried; the Doctor cast in his hopper; I stuck to the gray hackle, and inside half an hour I had landed a dozen good-sized trout, and the Doctor had “yanked out” as many more. The pool and the Doctor were redeemed; we had not quite “fished it out,” had only taken those with sharp appetites. But that kind of success demoralizes one for the time being, so we moved off down the creek, trying the eddies and below the riffles; now and again dropping the fly under the lee of the larger boulders in mid stream, with varying success, until we reached our horses. Our creels were full enough to carry with comfort and we started for camp, discussing the causes of the failure of the day before, but arriving at no satisfactory solution.

      The rapidity with which news of success in trouting will travel through the various camps in one’s vicinity is somewhat singular, and is only equaled by the celerity with which the reports of the quantity captured is multiplied. Having more than we could consume, we gave some to our nearest neighbor, who came over to see our catch. We learned the next day that we had caught anywhere from twenty-five pounds to a hundred, and I am unable to say how many went exploring for trout on the day following. That some were unsuccessful I know, because several swore to me that there was not even a minnow in Williams’ Fork. There was one young gentleman in particular who appealed to me in a tone of remonstrance after a day spent in unsuccessful labor down the Grand. He was dressed in light drab pants, cheviot shirt, and a broad-brimmed felt hat, the band of which was stuck full of flies of all sizes and a multitude of colors. He had a fifty-dollar rod and a fifteen-dollar reel of wonderful combination; his eyes, emphatic with disgust, glaring through his glasses, he avowed there were no fish in the Park. He held up a crimson fly that would have driven crazy any fish except a sucker, and would have scared a sucker if sunk to his level, and wanted to know of me if I didn’t think it a fine fly. I told him I did. He said he had whipped five miles of water with that fly and could not get a rise. I told him that the trout was a queer fish, and that perhaps he had better try a blue flannel rag, and offered to give him a piece of my shirt, but he got mad, tore around, and threatened, in popular parlance, to take off the top of my head. Believing this to be a more painful operation than scalping, I apologized, and the difficulty was promptly adjusted. Then I gave him a gray hackle and told him that that was to the trout what bread was to civilized man, a staple article of which he seldom grew tired, or if he did, to try the brown hackle, which, still like the bread, was a wholesome change; that if he could get neither the gray nor the brown, then to take a grasshopper, pull off his legs and wings, and string it upon a number six Kirby; that such a hook would take a three ounce or a three pound trout with equal facility.

      The next evening I saw my new acquaintance; his drab pants were ruined, his rod had been shivered into kindling wood, his reel lay in a pool of the Grand twenty feet deep. He had cast that gray hackle with a brown body into that pool; it had been seized upon by a trout something “near a yard long;” the angler had succeeded in landing its head upon the rocks, then his rod gave way and he fell on the fish, rolled into the river, lost the remains of his tackle and his hat with the flies, and some other tenderfoot who happened providentially that way, had pulled him out by the collar. He was happy, and said he would write to his mother, for which I commended him. This morning I saw him following a trail down the Grand; he had provided himself with some hackles and had a pole cut from a plum bush. I predicted for him success or a watery grave.

      In tender consideration of the tyro in these waters, I may be permitted to make a few suggestions as to tackle, based upon my own experience. In the matter of lures the taste of the trout must be considered; as to all else you may consult your own. It is well to have in your fly-books a little of everything, but of gray and brown hackles, as already intimated, coachmen and professors, an abundance. The best reel is one that combines lightness and durability, and is incapable of fouling your line, no matter how negligent you may be; a click reel of hard rubber and metal, with a revolving disk, the handle fixed upon the outer edge, and weighing, with thirty yards of line, about five ounces, will answer well. For lines there is, to my mind, nothing equal to the braided and tapered water-proof silk (size F); being the best, they are the cheapest, easily managed, and less liable to snarl or call for a tax upon your patience. For a rod always select one of three joints; they hang more evenly and have a “better feel.” Ash butt and second joint, with lancewood tip; Greenheart or Bethabara; try any and all; break them on the least provocation, which means a ten-inch trout or less, but wreck two or three by the “yanking process,” or otherwise. Then, when you feel that you can handle a rod with the same deftness a mother her first-born, save up your money and buy a first-class split bamboo. When you get it have faith in it, for if properly made it will bend, if necessity demands, till the tip touches the butt, yet do not needlessly try that conclusion with it; neither must you attempt to lift your fish out of the water with it. When you have fairly exhausted your trout, take the line in your disengaged hand; there are moments between struggles when you can swing your catch safely to land, without a movement on his part; when he will came out as straight as the plumb line Amos saw. If in his struggles his troutship should clear the water, something I never saw a trout do, bow the rod to him, of course, as he returns, so that he may not get his unsupported weight upon the beautiful toy. Keep a taut line upon your prey – by this I do not mean that you should give him no line, but let the strain be steady, giving only when you must. After the first few rushes, you may generally with safety press your thumb upon the line, and let him feel the spring of your rod; that will kill him quickly. The climax in the poem of trouting is the spring of the split bamboo. In striking, remember you have not a plum bush sapling and that it is not incumbent upon you to bail СКАЧАТЬ