On a Highland Holiday 1.—Adventures with Herring T ROUT and salmon,
no doubt, are the aristocracy of the fishy world. They are, anyhow, the fish most accustomed to die noble deaths—noble, that is to say, from the human point of view—as, just as certainly, they are the fish with which refined angling literature almost exclusively concerns itself. What fashionable literary fishermen of modern times ever dared include a chapter on, say, cote-fish, in one of his annual volumes of essays on the gentle art ? Fishing, he might say, would cease at once to be either gentle or an art, to his mind, were he capable of doing so : though a better reason, perhaps, is that tole-fish make execrable eating and are not worth anybody's trouble to catch. On the other hand, if the one were as rare as the other, I would rather eat a kipper than a trout any day : which levels things up somewhat. And then look at the delightful adventures a kipper may carry you through from the day you catch it as a herring till it comes finally to your plate, succulent and butter-brown, and so utterly individual in flavour !
From this it will be seen that I am not really what is known as a fisherman. I enjoy catching a trout, and I have caught many, in lochs and rivers all about the west of Scotland ; but I do not enjoy standing in cold water all through a soaking day in the mere hope of catching trout. There is the difference between the born angler and the simple plebeian catcher of fish : be- longing to the latter breed, I prefer adventures with herring to the hope of adventures with trout or salmon.
The best thing about being a herring enthusiast is that, if you go to the right place, the fish are always in evidence. Nor is it even necessary to take an active part in the netting ; as a passive herring-fisher in this little Argyllshire port where I am now, for instance, I find endless entertainment, as you would, merely in watching the drifters coming to the pier to unload their early morning catches. You lounge about staring at the full baskets as they are swung out of the holds : then stroll over to the packing yard to look at the girls gutting and salting ; or pass an hour, easily enough, in watching the great black-backed gulls, with their fierce haughty yellow eyes, that swoop insolently down to steal fish almost out of the packers' hands. Here the herring is dominant, though dead : fresh out of those green Atlantic seas between Mull and Benbecula, it fills the air with a fine free odour—not fishy, but of the tides and salt winds and seaweed. It occupies the ground and the atmosphere alike, the Emperor—or more appro- priately, Lord of the Isles, and we are all its servants, willing or bound. Mine; of course, is an idle homage. but I am not alone in it. From dawn to dark the pier is overrun by little barefoot boys with quick wandering eyes and fingers practised at the work of appropriating an evening meal on the sly. And there is " Blackpool." That is no comic-paper appellation for the typical Lancashire man on holiday. This other passive herring- fisher really does believe in Blackpool, gloriously and wholeheartedly ; and he is delightful with that brilliant aptitude for marvelling at strange sights in child-like phrases, which only those, perhaps, whose true summer Paradise is Blackpool, poSsess. Yet, yearning as he does for that•Paradise—I am sure his mind is never without a vision of Blackpool sands—nevertheless he is a mighty traveller, with an eye for beauty and a ready appreciation of it in less exquisite places. He has been on a charabanc tour round Loch Lomond,- and to-morrow, he tells me, he is going on a day-trip to Skye, having heard that Macleod of Macleod lives there in a champion great castle. We met first in watching the gutting process, when he was lamenting, aloud, the lack of a camera, " one o' them little smaul ones that snap op, like, ye know." You could get them, I understood, in Blackpool. But it wasn't to be expected that every place should have such advantages, and there were some champion pretty lasses here, ye knaw, not had at aul. " Eh, bahye gooni, but they're quick, ye knaw—beautiful." " Blackpool's " enthusiasm was catching. It made you feel that in spite of the drizzle, absolutely no sight outside Lancashire could be more worth travelling to see than this. But I must confess that I felt a little damped when a moment later be asked what kind of fish these were—" traout, is it ?
" Na," replied one of the girls, without looking up, " de'il a troot in the sea. It's hair'n."
That made "Blackpool " beam with pleasure : he was finding things out. "Hayrun ! Ah've 'ad mackerel to my tay, and shell-fish, ye Imaw, and craabs. . . . " It was a natural enough bewilderment, but " Blackpool " is not, very evidently, the. kind of man to be daunted by trifles in his quest of knowledge, and presently, after he had said " My !- " twice, and changed the position of his hat, the truth dawned. " Ah ! So it's 'erring, is it . . . bahye goorn ! 'Erring ! Well now, ye knaw, do ye see, that is champion. . . . " .
The trout fisher, aloof and scornful as he is by nature, would, I am sure, have had no patience with such a person as " Blackpool." Nor, I believe, would anything at all persuade him that lounging about a little Atlantic pier, watching gulls and cats and uncouth looking people covered with fish-scales, could conceivably be other than a shocking waste of time. Perhaps I should be inclined to agree were I condemned to spend a whole holiday in such a way ; but this, in truth, is no more than a prelude to the real adventures of the herring fishing. It is a kind of apprenticeship—yet a delicious one, because so idle— during which we followers of the vulgar fish merely soak in atmosphere. We drift about, smelling again the cockles and tar and sweetbrier of the western islands, reviving memories in sight of the crimson fuchsia bells that hang in every fisher-cottage garden, and maybe doing a little mackerel trolling with a spoon-bait of an evening. There is no hurry ; but one pleasant blue morning we get up early and go out with the drifter fleet, or, better still, one night of phosphorus and stars we set our herring nets across a loch mouth and stay awake till dawn overlooking them. It was only last night, in fact, that we did so. We made a birchwood fire in a cave and drank tea while the. nets filled with fish and therein is some of the real magic of the herring fishing, which. is indescribable. I know that only the almost-certainty of a quite unprece- dented basket -of trout could hire me away from it.
- - "'AMISH MACLAREN: •
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