ANGLER'S APOLOGIA
By E. LOUDON
" WHAT is it," asked a Latin at dinner, " that the Englishman enjoys about fishing? " Most of us there were fishermen, as far as time and business allowed. If we had not been dreaming of the season since November, as Grey used to, we knew the Tay and Tweed had opened. One of us had held a rod on the Test ; and another had inherited his greenheart from a grandfather president of a mill's working men's club, that used to pluck roach from Trent tributaries before the 1914-18 war. We had argued for an Avon where nightingales sing all day against amber-clear waters of Shielhope ; for wet against dry flies ; for silkworm gut against horse-hair. But we had never before, being parochial, been asked for an apologia on why we fished.
We began with the pleasures of skill. Angling, said one who had just bought a splitcane, is an art, and the fisherman's craft begins before he leaves home, when he plans his tackle and flies. Casting is a delicate skill in itself, that no rodsman learns in a day. It takes seasons to master the force and flick that sends a line snaking between close banks and lights a fly gaily without drag. Each year the bait fisherman adds to his knowledge of fish—of feeding times, of colour and firmness of paste to suit the water'l colour and flow, of where the carp lie, to save himself hauling up roach, which are dull fish, or eels which should be caught in a trap. (Chub, we agreed, he would mind less about, if only because chavender is from chevaine, Old French for chef, signifying fat-face, or because Izaac Walton dabbed for this " fearfullest of fish" from behind the Tottenham bushes.) But still he will keep his honey-and-aniseed specials for carp, for the deep, bronze-sided fifteen pounders that will play half an hour and then jump from the bank when landed. Only a pike, of lake fish, plays 'as well, and that green wolf, that " fears not a shadow or to be seen of anybody," hardly needs enticing ; he will eat his own weight in a day for greed.
In fly-fishing, even the strike needs skill. It takes patience to strike a bony-mouthed fish, especially when the weather is fine and the trout lie near the top of shadowed gravel runs. (When I first read how Grey at Winchester held up a cricket match while he landed a 34,- lb. trout from the Itchen, I marvelled more at the strike than the cast.) Then, as he.fishes, the angler begins to enjoy the country he works in—the deep south-ctuntry lakes where perch keep company with otters and kingfishers, and the banks sound with the parched evening chirrup of grasshopper warblers ; Clumber where pike rove under reflections of vast rhododendron and pine, and beech of which Evelyn wrote, " The very shavings are good for fining of wine " ; streams up from Llandovery to Twm Shon Catti, where Borrow put up to hear the tale of Twm's outlaw children, and where the only sounds all day are the whistles of blackcap, or mew of one of Britain's thirteen kites wheeling overhead. He begins- to notice the trees, and to remember that Winchester drains were built of elm a hundred years ago, and that the walnuts' fruits made " noyer " for the monks. He thinks how the roots of the weary salex babylonica are binding the bank more strongly than alder— and when he sees the cramped little smooth-leaved oaks about some lowland loch, he imagines the " cabbage" oak that Oliver Gold- smith sat in to write The Vicar of Wakefield must have been very like these.
All the time he fishes he is learning from the land. He begins to learn then he explores his first stream as a child " To snare the mole, or with ill-fashioned hook To draw the incautious minnow from the brook ;" when he learns that minnow need no hooks, but will swim into a jam-jar tor curiosity, and the fierce little stickle-backs are better sport. Up streams he learns how caddis grow, that amazed Tom Waterbaby ; where brandling breed and dragonfly hatch ; how to tell a sitting woodlark from a meadow-pipit, and what is due to a Clouded Yellow, supposing one should meet her. He stores up a hundred details that will serve him later as an angler ; when he no longer grills minnows to eat with nasturtium leaves, he will still lighten them in white tins for pike in dark water.
The fly-fisher learns fly-lore by experience, and slowly discovers his favourites. For the fast streams of central Wales, I have not done better than Zulu and Blue Hackled Hare's Ear ; I keep all my hackles long and long, and shape all my flies at the water with scissors and feather. But the first English Treatyse on Fyshyng, written 45o years ago, advised as. many flies as there are months in the year, and kinds have multiplied with every angler since. There is only one golden rule for flies, and that is: Study the stream you are on, and suit your bait to season and place. All good fishermen know Somerset trout are the only careles, trout, and then Only for a day or two after the mayfly are spent. Great fishermen can draw grayling when they will ; others, less great, still think a day well spent in trying for one of these fastidious sweet-smelling fish, if only to study their markings when they are landed or to explore the bright reaches of Wye and Nadder where they are most abundant.
The pleasures of fishing do not cease at the river-bank. Sooner or later a quaint fish-like humour begins to divert the angler's read- ing, and sends him to search out Wordsworth's sonnet to Walton, because Wordsworth was Grey's favourite poet ; or to early culinary recipes to discover how the Franklin, who would never have kept a dull dish in stew, flavoured' his carp. He thinks it fitting that the fish that swam overland to St. Godric at Durham, not to leave him without meat for his guest at the feast of St. John the Baptist, should have been that king of fish, a salmon. Once he has failed to take a " priest " to one, he does not marvel any more, as laymen do, how the carp survived its fourteenth-century journey here over- land. And he laughs as laymen never laugh over the chronicles of the Houghton Fishing Club, whose members came down to Stock- bridge each Grannom season in the r86o's, and wrote pages of .im- patient verse against the clear May weather, and terrified all the trout for miles with inch-long flies.
His memories are all of streams, and pilgrimages up their banks and monsters escaped and netted! No fisherman need ever count sheep in bed. He can fall asleep remembering some loch in the Pentlands full of the best trout ever tasted, blue-backed silver-sided two-and-three-pounders to be caught from a dinghy before breakfast. (As a rule, loch trout are dingier and more flavourless than stream trout, and I have mostly found the deeper-bodied spawners best eating from a stream, and moulters from a lake. But in the loveliest loch I know, both are good, primed with ambrosial weed and worms.) He can remember how he would set out from the manse at four in the morning, for the six-mile walk to the water, up a slow rise of moor with a Warlock-fluting curlew overhead, and how the ring- ousels would skim away over the cattle as he came. (On my loch I used a green rod the colour of harewood, to match the pine and Douglas fir that overshadowed the banks.) He can remember the pochard and eiderduck he has seen there, and the grey lag geese.
But when all this has been said, the profounder reasons for fishing are still not given. They are harder to put into words, because they are enjoyed without being analysed. But one of them seems to lie in the truth that to fish you must cast away care. To fish well, or to fish at all, you must become absorbed in the lore of rivers ; you must " study to be quiet " ; you must learn to wait upon life that runs at a slower pace than men or cities. With a rod ripeness is all, and Dyscrecyon will serve you longer than Fyve Wyttes. Out of this grows the second profound reason for fishing. It is that fishing admits you to the country. As a scientist, or rambler, or nature-lover, you are not admitted ; but as an angler, with the tools of your craft, you are given with shepherd and farmer the tradesman's right of way. Anglers are sensitive people, and it re- lieves them to know that the dipper up the bank cannot hold them unnecessary, nor the sandworts open their eyes at their intrusion. The country accepts a fisherman as one whose business has brought him, as one who obeys growth and season because he lives by them, and as one who will find a good use for all he can learn of the land.
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