PAGE 6
Leviathan
by
“Concealing!” broke in the advocate of the bait, “that is just the spirit of the whole art of fly-fishing. It’s all a deception. The slender rod is made of split cane that will bend double before it breaks; the gossamer leader is of drawn-gut carefully tested to stand a heavier strain than the rod can put upon it. The trout thinks he can smash your tackle, but you know he can’t, and you play with him half-an-hour to convince him that you are right. And after all, when you’ve landed him, he hasn’t had even a taste of anything good to eat to console him for being caught,–nothing but a little bunch of feathers which he never would look at if he knew what it was. Don’t you think that fly-fishing is something of a piscatorial immorality?”
“Not in the least,” answered Willibert, warming to his work, “it is a legitimate appeal, not to the trout’s lower instinct, his mere physical hunger, but to his curiosity, his sense of beauty, his desire for knowledge. He takes the fly, not because it looks like an edible insect, for nine times out of ten it doesn’t, but because it’s pretty and he wants to know what it is. When he has found out, you give him a fair run for his money and bring him to basket with nothing more than a pin-prick in his lip. But what does the bait-fisher do? He deceives the trout into thinking that a certain worm or grub or minnow is wholesome, nourishing, digestible, fit to be swallowed. In that deceptive bait he has hidden a big, heavy hook which sticks deep in the trout’s gullet and by means of which the disappointed fish is forcibly and brutally dragged to land. It lacks refinement. It is primitive, violent, barbaric, and so simple that any unskilled village lad can do it as well as you can.”
“I think not,” said Cotton Mather, now on the defensive, “just let the village-lad try it. Why, the beauty of real bait-fishing is that it requires more skill than any other kind of angling. To present your bait to the wary old trout without frightening him; to make it move in the water so that it shall seem alive and free”; (“deception,” murmured Willibert), “to judge the proper moment after he has taken it when you should strike, and how hard; to draw him safely away from the weeds and roots among which he has been lying; all this takes quite a little practice and some skill,–a good deal more, I reckon, than hooking and playing a trout on the clear surface of the water when you can see every motion.”
“Ah, there you are,” cried Willibert, “that’s the charm of fly-fishing! It’s all open and above-board. The long, light cast of the fly, ‘fine and far off,’ the delicate drop of the feathers upon the water, the quick rise of the trout and the sudden gleam of his golden side as he turns, the electric motion of the wrist by which you hook him,–that is the magic of sport.”
“Yes,” replied the other, “I’ll admit there’s something in it, but bait-fishing is superior. You take a long pool, late in the season; water low and clear; fish lying in the middle; you can’t get near them. You go to the head of the pool in the rapids and stir up the bottom so as to discolour the water a little—-“
“Deceptive,” interrupted Willibert, “and decidedly immoral!”
“Only a little,” continued Cotton Mather, “a very little! Then you go down to the bottom of the pool with a hand-line—-“
“A hand-line!” murmured the listener, half-shuddering in feigned horror.
“Yes, a hand-line,” the speaker went on firmly, “a long, light hand-line, without a sinker, baited with a single, clean angle-worm, and loosely coiled in your left hand. You cast the hook with your right hand, and it falls lightly without a splash, a hundred feet up stream. Then you pull the line in very gently, just fast enough to keep it from sinking to the bottom. When the trout bites, you strike him and land him by hand, without the help of rod or landing-net or any other mechanical device. Try this once, and you will see whether it is easier than throwing the fly. I reckon this was the way the Apostle Peter fished when he was told to ‘go to the sea, and cast a hook, and take up the fish that first cometh up.’ It is the only true Apostolic method of fishing.”