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FISHING WITH A WORM

by

BLISS PERRY

Boston and New York
Houghton Mifflin Company

MDCCCCXVI






FISHING WITH A WORM

   "The last fish I caught was with a worm."--IZAAK WALTON.

A defective logic is the born fisherman's portion. He is a pattern of
inconsistency. He does the things which he ought not to do, and he
leaves undone the things which other people think he ought to do. He
observes the wind when he should be sowing, and he regards the clouds,
with temptation tugging familiarly at his heartstrings, when he might
be grasping the useful sickle. It is a wonder that there is so much
health in him. A sorrowing political economist remarked to me in early
boyhood, as a jolly red-bearded neighbor, followed by an abnormally fat
dog, sauntered past us for his nooning: "That man is the best carpenter
in town, but he will leave the most important job whenever he wants to
go fishing." I stared at the sinful carpenter, who swung along
leisurely in the May sunshine, keeping just ahead of his dog. To leave
one's job in order to go fishing! How illogical!

Years bring the reconciling mind. The world grows big enough to include
within its scheme both the instructive political economist and the
truant mechanic. But that trick of truly logical behavior seems harder
to the man than to the child. For example, I climbed up to my den under
the eaves last night--a sour, black sea-fog lying all about, and the
December sleet crackling against the window-panes--in order to varnish
a certain fly-rod. Now rods ought to be put in order in September, when
the fishing closes, or else in April, when it opens. To varnish a rod
in December proves that one possesses either a dilatory or a childishly
anticipatory mind. But before uncorking the varnish bottle, it occurred
to me to examine a dog-eared, water-stained fly-book, to guard against
the ravages of possible moths. This interlude proved fatal to the
varnishing. A half hour went happily by in rearranging the flies. Then,
with a fisherman's lack of sequence, as I picked out here and there a
plain snell-hook from the gaudy feathered ones, I said to myself with a
generous glow at the heart: "Fly-fishing has had enough sacred poets
celebrating it already. Is n't there a good deal to be said, after all,
for fishing with a worm?"

Could there be a more illogical proceeding? And here follows the
treatise,--a Defense of Results, an Apology for Opportunism,--conceived
in agreeable procrastination, devoted to the praise of the
inconsequential angleworm, and dedicated to a childish memory of a
whistling carpenter and his fat dog.

Let us face the worst at the very beginning. It shall be a shameless
example of fishing under conditions that make the fly a mockery. Take
the Taylor Brook, "between the roads," on the headwaters of the
Lamoille. The place is a jungle. The swamp maples and cedars were
felled a generation ago, and the tops were trimmed into the brook. The
alders and moosewood are higher than your head; on every tiny knoll the
fir balsams have gained a footing, and creep down, impenetrable, to the
edge of the water. In the open spaces the Joe-Pye weed swarms. In two
minutes after leaving the upper road you have scared a mink or a
rabbit, and you have probably lost the brook. Listen! It is only a
gurgle here, droning along, smooth and dark, under the tangle of
cedar-tops and the shadow of the balsams. Follow the sound cautiously.
There, beyond the Joe-Pye weed, and between the stump and the cedar-top,
is a hand's breadth of black water. Fly-casting is impossible in this
maze of dead and living branches. Shorten your line to two feet, or even
less, bait your hook with a worm, and drop it gingerly into that
gurgling crevice of water. Before it has sunk six inches, if there is
not one of those black-backed, orange-bellied, Taylor Brook trout
fighting with it, something is wrong with your worm or with you. For
the trout are always there, sheltered by the brushwood that makes this
half mile of fishing "not worth while." Below the lower road the Taylor
Brook becomes uncertain water. For half a mile it yields only
fingerlings, for no explainable reason; then there are two miles of
clean fishing through the deep woods, where the branches are so high
that you can cast a fly again if you like, and there are long pools,
where now and then a heavy fish will rise; then comes a final half mile
through the alders, where you must wade, knee to waist deep, before you
come to the bridge and the river. Glorious fishing is sometimes to be
had here,--especially if you work down the gorge at twilight, casting a
white miller until it is too dark to see. But alas, there is a
well-worn path along the brook, and often enough there are the very
footprints of the "fellow ahead of you," signs as disheartening to the
fisherman as ever were the footprints on the sand to Robinson Crusoe.

But "between the roads" it is "too much trouble to fish;" and there
lies the salvation of the humble fisherman who disdains not to use the
crawling worm, nor, for that matter, to crawl himself, if need be, in
order to sneak under the boughs of some overhanging cedar that casts a
perpetual shadow upon the sleepy brook. Lying here at full length, with
no elbow-room to manage the rod, you must occasionally even unjoint
your tip, and fish with that, using but a dozen inches of line, and not
letting so much as your eyebrows show above the bank. Is it a becoming
attitude for a middle-aged citizen of the world? That depends upon how
the fish are biting. Holing a put looks rather ridiculous also, to the
mere observer, but it requires, like brook-fishing with a tip only, a
very delicate wrist, perfect tactile sense, and a fine disregard of
appearances.

There are some fishermen who always fish as if they were being
photographed. The Taylor Brook "between the roads" is not for them. To
fish it at all is back-breaking, trouser-tearing work; to see it
thoroughly fished is to learn new lessons in the art of angling. To
watch R., for example, steadily filling his six-pound creel from that
unlikely stream, is like watching Sargent paint a portrait. R. weighs
two hundred and ten. Twenty years ago he was a famous amateur pitcher,
and among his present avocations are violin playing, which is good for
the wrist, taxidermy, which is good for the eye, and shooting woodcock,
which before the days of the new Nature Study used to be thought good
for the whole man. R. began as a fly-fisherman, but by dint of passing
his summers near brooks where fly-fishing is impossible, he has become
a stout-hearted apologist for the worm. His apparatus is most singular.
It consists of a very long, cheap rod, stout enough to smash through
bushes, and with the stiffest tip obtainable. The lower end of the
butt, below the reel, fits into the socket of a huge extra butt of
bamboo, which R. carries unconcernedly. To reach a distant hole, or to
fish the lower end of a ripple, R. simply locks his reel, slips on the
extra butt, and there is a fourteen-foot rod ready for action. He
fishes with a line unbelievably short, and a Kendal hook far too big;
and when a trout jumps for that hook, R. wastes no time in manoeuvring
for position. The unlucky fish is simply "derricked,"--to borrow a word
from Theodore, most saturnine and profane of Moosehead guides.

"Shall I play him awhile?" shouted an excited sportsman to Theodore,
after hooking his first big trout.

"----no!" growled Theodore in disgust. "Just derrick him right into the
canoe!" A heroic method, surely; though it once cost me the best
square-tail I ever hooked, for Theodore had forgotten the landing-net,
and the gut broke in his fingers as he tried to swing the fish aboard.
But with these lively quarter-pounders of the Taylor Brook, derricking
is a safer procedure. Indeed, I have sat dejectedly on the far end of a
log, after fishing the hole under it in vain, and seen the mighty R.
wade downstream close behind me, adjust that comical extra butt, and
jerk a couple of half-pound trout from under the very log on which I
was sitting. His device on this occasion, as I well remember, was to
pass his hook but once through the middle of a big worm, let the worm
sink to the bottom, and crawl along it at his leisure. The trout could
not resist.

Once, and once only, have I come near equaling R.'s record, and the way
he beat me then is the justification for a whole philosophy of
worm-fishing. We were on this very Taylor Brook, and at five in the
afternoon both baskets were two thirds full. By count I had just one
more fish than he. It was raining hard. "You fish down through the
alders," said R. magnanimously. "I 'll cut across and wait for you at
the sawmill. I don't want to get any wetter, on account of my
rheumatism."

This was rather barefaced kindness,--for whose rheumatism was ever the
worse for another hour's fishing? But I weakly accepted it. I coveted
three or four good trout to top off with,--that was all. So I tied on a
couple of flies, and began to fish the alders, wading waist deep in the
rapidly rising water, down the long green tunnel under the curving
boughs. The brook fairly smoked with the rain, by this time, but when
did one fail to get at least three or four trout out of this best half
mile of the lower brook? Yet I had no luck I tried one fly after
another, and then, as a forlorn hope,--though it sometimes has a magic
of its own,--I combined a brown hackle for the tail fly with a twisting
worm on the dropper. Not a rise! I thought of E. sitting patiently in
the saw mill, and I fished more conscientiously than ever.

  "Venture as warily, use the same skill,
   Do your best, whether winning or losing it,
   If you choose to play!--is my principle."

Even those lines, which by some subtle telepathy of the trout brook
murmur themselves over and over to me in the waning hours of an unlucky
day, brought now no consolation. There was simply not one fish to be
had, to any fly in the book, out of that long, drenching, darkening
tunnel. At last I climbed out of the brook, by the bridge. R. was
sitting on the fence, his neck and ears carefully turtled under his
coat collar, the smoke rising and the rain dripping from the inverted
bowl of his pipe. He did not seem to be worrying about his rheumatism.

"What luck?" he asked.

"None at all," I answered morosely. "Sorry to keep you waiting."

"That's all right," remarked R. "What do you think I 've been doing? I
've been fishing out of the saw-mill window just to kill time. There
was a patch of floating sawdust there,--kind of unlikely place for
trout, anyway,--but I thought I'd put on a worm and let him crawl
around a little." He opened his creel as he spoke. "But I did n't look
for a pair of 'em," he added. And there, on top of his smaller fish,
were as pretty a pair of three-quarter-pound brook trout as were ever
basketed.

"I 'm afraid you got pretty wet," said R. kindly.

"I don't mind that," I replied. And I didn't. What I minded was the
thought of an hour's vain wading in that roaring stream, whipping
it with fly after fly, while R., the foreordained fisherman, was
sitting comfortably in a sawmill, and derricking that pair of
three-quarter-pounders in through the window! I had ventured more
warily than he, and used, if not the same skill, at least the best
skill at my command. My conscience was clear, but so was his; and he
had had the drier skin and the greater magnanimity and the biggest
fish besides. There is much to be said, in a world like ours, for
taking the world as you find it and for fishing with a worm.

One's memories of such fishing, however agreeable they may be, are not
to be identified with a defense of the practice. Yet, after all, the
most effective defense of worm-fishing is the concrete recollection of
some brook that could be fished best or only in that way, or the image
of a particular trout that yielded to the temptation of an angleworm
after you had flicked fly after fly over him in vain. Indeed, half the
zest of brook fishing is in your campaign for "individuals,"--as the
Salvation Army workers say,--not merely for a basketful of fish qua
fish, but for a series of individual trout which your instinct tells
you ought to lurk under that log or be hovering in that ripple. How to
get him, by some sportsmanlike process, is the question. If he will
rise to some fly in your book, few fishermen will deny that the fly is
the more pleasurable weapon. Dainty, luring, beautiful toy, light as
thistle-down, falling where you will it to fall, holding when the
leader tightens and sings like the string of a violin, the artificial
fly represents the poetry of angling. Given the gleam of early morning
on some wide water, a heavy trout breaking the surface as he curves and
plunges, with the fly holding well, with the right sort of rod in your
fingers, and the right man in the other end of the canoe, and you
perceive how easy is that Emersonian trick of making the pomp of
emperors ridiculous.

But angling's honest prose, as represented by the lowly worm, has also
its exalted moments. "The last fish I caught was with a worm," says the
honest Walton, and so say I. It was the last evening of last August.
The dusk was settling deep upon a tiny meadow, scarcely ten rods from
end to end. The rank bog grass, already drenched with dew, bent over
the narrow, deep little brook so closely that it could not be fished
except with a double-shotted, baited hook, dropped delicately between
the heads of the long grasses. Underneath this canopy the trout were
feeding, taking the hook with a straight downward tug, as they made for
the hidden bank. It was already twilight when I began, and before I
reached the black belt of woods that separated the meadow from the
lake, the swift darkness of the North Country made it impossible to see
the hook. A short half hour's fishing only, and behold nearly twenty
good trout derricked into a basket until then sadly empty. Your
rigorous fly-fisherman would have passed that grass-hidden brook in
disdain, but it proved a treasure for the humble. Here, indeed, there
was no question of individually-minded fish, but simply a neglected
brook, full of trout which could be reached with the baited hook only.
In more open brook-fishing it is always a fascinating problem to decide
how to fish a favorite pool or ripple, for much depends upon the hour
of the day, the light, the height of water, the precise period of the
spring or summer. But after one has decided upon the best theoretical
procedure, how often the stupid trout prefers some other plan! And when
you have missed a fish that you counted upon landing, what solid
satisfaction is still possible for you, if you are philosopher enough
to sit down then and there, eat your lunch, smoke a meditative pipe,
and devise a new campaign against that particular fish! To get another
rise from him after lunch is a triumph of diplomacy, to land him is
nothing short of statesmanship. For sometimes he will jump furiously at
a fly, for very devilishness, without ever meaning to take it, and
then, wearying suddenly of his gymnastics, he will snatch sulkily at a
grasshopper, beetle, or worm. Trout feed upon an extraordinary variety
of crawling things, as all fishermen know who practice the useful habit
of opening the first two or three fish they catch, to see what food is
that day the favorite. But here, as elsewhere in this world, the best
things lie nearest, and there is no bait so killing, week in and week
out, as your plain garden or golf-green angleworm.

Walton's list of possible worms is impressive, and his directions for
placing them upon the hook have the placid completeness that belonged
to his character. Yet in such matters a little nonconformity may be
encouraged. No two men or boys dig bait in quite the same way, though
all share, no doubt, the singular elation which gilds that grimy
occupation with the spirit of romance. The mind is really occupied, not
with the wriggling red creatures in the lumps of earth, but with the
stout fish which each worm may capture, just as a saint might rejoice
in the squalor of this world as a preparation for the glories of the
world to come. Nor do any two experienced fishermen hold quite the same
theory as to the best mode of baiting the hook. There are a hundred
ways, each of them good. As to the best hook for worm-fishing, you will
find dicta in every catalogue of fishing tackle, but size and shape and
tempering are qualities that should vary with the brook, the season,
and the fisherman. Should one use a three-foot leader, or none at all?
Whose rods are best for bait-fishing, granted that all of them should
be stiff enough in the tip to lift a good fish by dead strain from a
tangle of brush or logs? Such questions, like those pertaining to the
boots or coat which one should wear, the style of bait-box one should
carry, or the brand of tobacco best suited for smoking in the wind, are
topics for unending discussion among the serious minded around the
camp-fire. Much edification is in them, and yet they are but prudential
maxims after all. They are mere moralities of the Franklin or
Chesterfield variety, counsels of worldly wisdom, but they leave the
soul untouched. A man may have them at his finger's ends and be no
better fisherman at bottom; or he may, like R., ignore most of the
admitted rules and come home with a full basket. It is a sufficient
defense of fishing with a worm to pronounce the truism that no man is a
_complete_ angler until he has mastered all the modes of angling.
Lovely streams, lonely and enticing, but impossible to fish with a fly,
await the fisherman who is not too proud to use, with a man's skill,
the same unpretentious tackle which he began with as a boy.



But ah, to fish with a worm, and then not catch your fish! To fail with
a fly is no disgrace: your art may have been impeccable, your patience
faultless to the end. But the philosophy of worm-fishing is that of
Results, of having something tangible in your basket when the day's
work is done. It is a plea for Compromise, for cutting the coat
according to the cloth, for taking the world as it actually is. The
fly-fisherman is a natural Foe of Compromise. He throws to the trout a
certain kind of lure; an they will take it, so; if not, adieu. He knows
no middle path.

  "This high man, aiming at a million,
   Misses an unit."

The raptures and the tragedies of consistency are his. He is a scorner
of the ground. All honor to him! When he comes back at nightfall and
says happily, "I have never cast a line more perfectly than I have
to-day," it is almost indecent to peek into his creel. It is like
rating Colonel Newcome by his bank account.

But the worm-fisherman is no such proud and isolated soul. He is a "low
man" rather than a high one; he honestly cares what his friends will
think when they look into his basket to see what he has to show for his
day's sport. He watches the Foe of Compromise men go stumbling forward
and superbly falling, while he, with less inflexible courage, manages
to keep his feet. He wants to score, and not merely to give a pretty
exhibition of base-running. At the Harvard-Yale football game of 1903
the Harvard team showed superior strength in rushing the ball; they
carried it almost to the Yale goal line repeatedly, but they could not,
for some reason, take it over. In the instant of absolute need, the
Yale line held, and when the Yale team had to score in order to win,
they scored. As the crowd streamed out of the Stadium, a veteran
Harvard alumnus said: "This news will cause great sorrow in one home I
know of, until they learn by to-morrow's papers that the Harvard team
_acquitted itself creditably_." Exactly. Given one team bent upon
acquitting itself creditably, and another team determined to win, which
will be victorious? The stay-at-homes on the Yale campus that day were
not curious to know whether their team was acquitting itself
creditably, but whether it was winning the game. Every other question
than that was to those young Philistines merely a fine-spun
irrelevance. They took the Cash and let the Credit go.

There is much to be said, no doubt, for the Harvard veteran's point of
view. The proper kind of credit may be a better asset for eleven boys
than any championship; and to fish a bit of water consistently and
skillfully, with your best flies and in your best manner, is perhaps
achievement enough. So says the Foe of Compromise, at least. But the
Yale spirit will be prying into the basket in search of fish; it
prefers concrete results. If all men are by nature either Platonists or
Aristotelians, fly-fishermen or worm-fishermen, how difficult it is for
us to do one another justice! Differing in mind, in aim and method, how
shall we say infallibly that this man or that is wrong? To fail with
Plato for companion may be better than to succeed with Aristotle. But
one thing is perfectly clear: there is no warrant for Compromise but in
Success. Use a worm if you will, but you must have fish to show for it,
if you would escape the finger of scorn. If you find yourself camping
by an unknown brook, and are deputed to catch the necessary trout for
breakfast, it is wiser to choose the surest bait. The crackle of the
fish in the frying-pan will atone for any theoretical defect in your
method. But to choose the surest bait, and then to bring back no fish,
is unforgivable. Forsake Plato if you must,--but you may do so only at
the price of justifying yourself in the terms of Aristotelian
arithmetic. The college president who abandoned his college in order to
run a cotton mill was free to make his own choice of a calling; but he
was never pardoned for bankrupting the mill. If one is bound to be a
low man rather than an impractical idealist, he should at least make
sure of his vulgar success.

Is all this but a disguised defense of pot-hunting? No. There is no
possible defense of pot-hunting, whether it be upon a trout brook or in
the stock market. Against fish or men, one should play the game fairly.
Yet for that matter some of the most skillful fly-fishermen I have
known were pot-hunters at heart, and some of the most prosaic-looking
merchants were idealists compared to whom Shelley was but a dreaming
boy. All depends upon the spirit with which one makes his venture. I
recall a boy of five who gravely watched his father tramp off after
rabbits,--gun on shoulder and beagle in leash. Thereupon he shouldered
a wooden sword, and dragging his reluctant black kitten by a string,
sallied forth upon the dusty Vermont road "to get a lion for
breakfast." That is the true sporting temper! Let there be but a fine
idealism in the quest, and the particular object is unessential. "A
true fisherman's happiness," says Mr. Cleveland, "is not dependent upon
his luck." It depends upon his heart.

No doubt all amateur fishing is but "play,"--as the psychologists
soberly term it: not a necessary, but a freely assumed activity, born
of surplusage of vitality. Nobody, not even a carpenter wearied of his
job, has to go fishing unless he wants to. He may indeed find himself
breakfast-less in camp, and obliged to betake himself to the
brook,--but then he need not have gone into the woods at all. Yet if
he does decide to fish, let him

  "Venture as warily, use the same skill,
   Do his best, ..."

whatever variety of tackle he may choose. He can be a whole-souled
sportsman with the poorest equipment, or a mean "trout-hog" with the
most elaborate.

Only, in the name of gentle Izaak himself, let him be a _complete_
angler; and let the man be a passionate amateur of all the arts of
life, despising none of them, and using all of them for his soul's good
and for the joy of his fellows. If he be, so to speak, but a
worm-fisherman,--a follower of humble occupations, and pledged to
unromantic duties,--let him still thrill with the pleasures of the true
sportsman. To make the most of dull hours, to make the best of dull
people, to like a poor jest better than none, to wear the threadbare
coat like a gentleman, to be outvoted with a smile, to hitch your wagon
to the old horse if no star is handy,--this is the wholesome philosophy
taught by fishing with a worm. The fun of it depends upon the heart.
There may be as much zest in saving as in spending, in working for
small wages as for great, in avoiding the snapshots of publicity as in
being invariably first "among those present." But a man should be
honest. If he catches most of his fish with a worm, secures the larger
portion of his success by commonplace industry, let him glory in it,
for this, too, is part of the great game. Yet he ought not in that case
to pose as a fly-fisherman only,--to carry himself as one aware of the
immortalizing camera,--to pretend that life is easy, if one but knows
how to drop a fly into the right ripple. For life is not easy, after
all is said. It is a long brook to fish, and it needs a stout heart and
a wise patience. All the flies there are in the book, and all the bait
that can be carried in the box, are likely to be needed ere the day is
over. But, like the Psalmist's "river of God," this brook is "full of
water," and there is plenty of good fishing to be had in it if one is
neither afraid nor ashamed of fishing sometimes with a worm.