PAGE 5
His Other Engagement
by
The difficulties seemed to vanish before his masterful air, and everybody fell into line with sudden enthusiasm. Ethel smiled discreetly and moved along her pathway of inflexible originality with gentle triumph. The voyage down the river was delightful. The arrangements at the big white wooden hotel on the curving bay were rather primitive but quite comfortable; and three of the five days which were to pass before the ringing of the antique wedding-bell slipped away as if by magic.
On the fourth day, June twenty-ninth, Chichester having been assured by telegraph that all the things from Quebec had been safely shipped on the Ste. Irenee, was spending a morning hour with Ethel in the pavilion of the Government Fish Station at Anse a l’Eau, watching the great herd of captive salmon, circling round and round in restless imprisonment in their warm shallow pool. The splendid fish were growing a little dull and languid in their confined quarters, freshened only by the inflowing of a small brook, and exposed to the full glare of the sun. Many of them bore the scars of the nets in which they had been captured. Others had red wounds on the ends of their noses where they had butted against the rocks or the timbers of the dam. There were some hundreds of the fish, and every now and then a huge thirty-pounder would wallow on top of the water, or a small, lively one would spring high into the air and fall back with a sounding splash on his side. Here they must wait through the summer, the pool becoming daily hotter, more crowded, more uncomfortable, until the time came when the hatchery men would strip them of their spawn. To an angler the sight was somewhat disquieting, though he might admit the strength of the arguments for the artificial propagation of fish. But to Ethel it seemed a pretty spectacle and a striking contrast to the cruelty of angling.
“Look at them,” she said, “how happy they are, and how safe! No fly-fishermen to stick a hook in their mouths and make them suffer. How can you bear to do it?”
“Well,” said Chichester, “if it comes to suffering, I doubt whether the fish are conscious of any such thing, as we understand it. But even if they are, they suffer twice as much, and a thousand times as long, shut up in this hot, nasty pool, as they would in being caught in proper style.”
“But think of the hook!”
“Hurts about as much as a pin-prick.”
“But think of the fearful struggle, and the long, gasping agony on the shore.”
“There’s no fear in the struggle; it’s just a trial of strength and skill, like a game of football. A fish doesn’t know anything about death; so he has no fear of it. And there is no gasping on the shore; nothing but a quick rap on the head with a stick, and it’s all over.”
“But why should he be killed at all?”
“Well,” said he, smiling, “there are reasons of taste. You eat salmon, don’t you?”
“Ye-e-es,” she answered a little doubtfully–then with more assurance, “but remember what Wilbur Short says in that lovely chapter on ‘Communion with the Catfish’: I want them brought to the table in the simplest and most painless way.”
“And that is angling with the fly,” said he, still more decidedly. “The fly is not swallowed like a bait. It sticks in the skin of the lip where there is least feeling. There is no torture in the play of a salmon. It’s just a fair fight with an unknown opponent. Compare it with the other ways of bringing a fish to the table. If he’s caught in a net he hangs there for hours, slowly strangled. If he’s speared, half the time the spear slips and he struggles off badly wounded; and if the spear goes through him, he is flung out on the bank to bleed to death. Even if he escapes, he is sure to come to a pitiful end some day–perish by starvation when he gets too old to catch his food–or be torn to pieces by a seal, an otter, or a fish-hawk. Fly-fishing really offers him—-“