Fishing with a Worm | Page 2

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