“I’m going to get that jig,” Ted Henley said, and he picked up a stone and crept toward the bird. When he got close he threw the rock. It missed, but the gull took flight with a scream and the plug shook free and Ted recovered it.
The tide was changing and bluefish were breaking water in the rollers out beyond the reach of the beach casters. Now one of them hooked into a fish and a man beside him shouted, pointing, and all the yarn-spinners snatched up their rods and rushed to the water’s edge and began casting relentlessly. Nobody got anything, except the one man who had brought in a bluefish.
As evening came on, more cars rolled down to the beach and more fishermen went to work. When the setting sun broke through clouds on the horizon there were about twenty-five anglers strung along the beach casting earnestly. Some of them would keep at it all night.
Al Brickman’s party stowed tackle and started for home. General Ryder was telling about bass-fishing in the spring in Menemsha Pond during the spawning run of herring. The herring, he said, come through a cut from the ocean and go into the pond to spawn and the stripers follow them in.
“You net some herring,,, he said, “and put one on your line for bait, hooking it through the fleshy part of the back. Then you toss him out and teach him to swim. A bass comes along and slaps the herring, stunning him. You wait, because the bass will then go around and try to eat him head on. When the bass takes the herring in his mouth and starts swimming away, you tighten your reel and you have him.
“The gulls, though, they come in with the bass and they hang up there waiting. When a bass stuns a herring, the gull dives and grabs the stunned bait. Then you’ve got a gull in the air on the end of your line, and that’s something.”
“Did you see cormorant fishing in the Orient?” the general was asked.
“You mean where they have a cormorant with a ring around his neck so he can’t swallow the fish, and they send the bird out fishing and he grabs the fish and they take it away from him? Yes,” the general said, “I saw it and the cormorants love it. They get to eat the little fish, which slip down their throats.
“I have also,” the general said, “netted ducks in the private preserves of the Emperor of Japan. You use a long-handled net and catch the ducks on the wing. That’s quite a sport too.”
That’s what a bass derby is like. No bass, but much education.
JUNIOR EAGLE
GREENOUGH, MONTANA, 1964
A golden eagle soared in lazy circles, gazing down with ill-concealed contempt at the fishermen who wallowed up to their navels in the Blackfoot River. Chances are he had never seen anything sillier than grown men threatening the indifferent trout with those long, skinny sticks when anybody knew the way to get fish for dinner was to plummet out of the sky and sink your talons into one.
“That reminds me,” Skipper Lofting said, dropping his dry fly at the head of a riffle, “you must meet Junior. Chances are you’ll want an interview with him.”
Junior is a baby bald eagle hatched this spring in the top of a huge ponderosa pine a couple of miles up the Clearwater River from the E-Bar-L Ranch. Perhaps someday he’ll grow up to pose as the majestic symbol of American might, with a quiver of arrows in one clutch of talons, an olive branch in the other, and a necktie reading E pluribus unum under his aquiline face. But right now he’s a loafer sponging off his folks.
“He’s not very bright,” Skipper said. “He’s been taking preflight training and his groundwork is awful. Can’t seem to get the hang of aerodynamics. He’ll climb up on the edge of the nest and spread his wings till an updraft lifts him about eighteen inches. Then plotch, down in the nest, and he’s all tuckered out. Lies down like a dog, stretched out on his side.”
A fellow didn’t like to say it, but Junior is a lousy name for an eagle. He could have been called Sonny, after the Eagles’ quarterback, or at least Young Bednarik. But Skipper found him and named him Junior, and that’s that.
Mellow evening sunshine was like honey on the green valley of the Clearwater as Skipper drove up the bumpy, meandering trail. Long shadows mottled the lovely landscape. Skipper led a party of six, including Shammy, a genteel Labrador retriever the color of a vicuna coat.
“There,” he said, pulling up at the base of a tall cone-shaped hill, “in that telephone booth.” He pointed to a great, untidy tangle of sticks and debris about halfway up the hill in the scraggly top of a ponderosa. It looked like a poorly constructed outhouse and it was deserted. Suddenly from farther up came the sound of a rusty hinge on a swinging door.
“That’s Mama,” Skipper said, though this was plainly ridiculous. That discordant screeching bore no resemblance to the distress call of Eagle Patrol, Troop Five, Boy Scouts of America, Green Bay, Wisconsin, which was a clear, prolonged cry of “Kreee!”
“Mama never read the Scout Manual,” Skipper said apologetically, “so she doesn’t know how an eagle’s supposed to scream. Come on.”
Now he was no longer Colin M. Lofting, steeplechase jockey, author, artist, cowboy, bucking horse rider, guitar player, angler and dove shooter. He was Sir Edmund Hillary leading his Sherpas in an assault on Everest.
“Here’s Junior,” he called from the crest. “Do you want that interview, or don’t you?”
The answer from below was a labored gasp. “Sure (puff), but he’ll (puff, puff) have to ask the (puff) questions.”
Junior was a disheveled glob of feathers in the topmost branches of another ponderosa. His perch was level with the summit, enabling the climber to look him square in the eye at a forty-foot range. Obviously he had soloed to this point from the nest and he wasn’t about to trust himself any further to the insubstantial air.
Shrieking imprecations, Mama wheeled great loops, her head and fantail gleaming white. Someday, no doubt, Junior would be an equally dressy bird, but now he was a shabby dark brindle from crown to ankle. He was a hell-of-a-baby, as big as Bobby Ussery, with a Durante nose. How he was ever packed into an egg is one of nature’s mysteries.
“Wonder where the old man is,” Skipper said.
“Probably this is his night to go bowling.”
“I don’t think so,” Skipper said. “Mom and Pop are hardworking peasant stock. Scrimp and save, and nothing too good for their son. First time I saw ‘em, I was fishing the pool down there and one of ‘em came in about six feet over me. It was like a storm shutter sailing over my head. Grabbed a squawfish and flew off and was back in a matter of seconds, just working and slaving to feed this moocher.”
“What does he need with fish?” somebody asked, slapping. “These mosquitoes are big enough to make a full meal.”
“You going to interview him or not?” Skipper said.
“Okay. Junior, what do you think of the Wright brothers? Think they’ll ever get it off the ground?”
Junior shook his head. It was the considered opinion that if the Creator meant eagles to fly, he’d equip them with Pratt-Whitney motors.
CANNON FODDER
1946
Mr. Jimmy Cannon, a Florida tourist who dislikes bloodshed, came upon the cadaver of a small fish “untimely ripp’d” from Tampa Bay the other day and the sight moved him to such a paroxysm of compassion that he devoted his entire column in the New York Post to a cry for vengeance upon all fishermen.
“Cruelty disguised as a sport!” Mr. Cannon raged in type that quivered on the page. “Fishing is the vice of the shirker and the rummy. No-works, ashamed of their laziness, cover it up by doing their loafing with a fishing line in their hands, while the honest man who spends his time on the couch, the porch or the street corner, is insulted for his indolence. Fishing is also used as an alibi by a lot of cowardly rum-bags. . . .”
For reasons that must be obvious to the regular reader, this agent—who, by the way, never has been insulted on a couch—should be the last guy in the world to complain about anyone else popping off without knowing what he’s talking about. Therefore, not one hint shall appear here to suggest that Mr. Cannon is a habitue o
f the kippered-herring belt who wouldn’t know a gudgeon from a parr if he ever had to rub fins with a live fish.
Furthermore, it is a scientific fact that all of us fishermen are gentle, patient, cheerful, devout, and virtuous. As the milkmaid’s mother told Mr. I. Walton, “My Maudlin shall sing you one of her best ballads; for she and I both love all anglers, they be honest, civil, quiet men.” We can take a sneak punch without yelling that the guy who threw it is a cad and a bounder who has libeled the noblest body of men outside a seminary.
Mr. Cannon, however, needn’t think he can get away with putting the slug on rummies. There is altogether too much loose talk against lushes, who are, as a group, full of sunny generosity and good works, as Salvation Nell would testify after any night’s tour of the gin mills with her tambourine. Mr. Cannon himself is off the juice, and it is well known there are none so intolerant as the dehydrated bibber who goes around with his tongue cleaving to the dry roof of his mouth unable to make any sound except “Tch, tch.”
The belief that fishermen never go fishing without medication is erroneous. Before the war three of us were up in the Laurentian Mountains. Coming back to camp parched and weary after the first tough day of beating off voracious trout with a large, knobby club, we made a sudden and scarifying discovery.
“Hélas!” said M’sieu Roy, manager of the camp. “Nom du chien du cochon! Sacré bleu! Often have I seen the gentlemen, les pêcheurs, to come and forget the rods, forget the lines, forget the flies and forget the reels. But parbleu! Never have I seen them to forget the whiskey!”
He was aghast and so was the provincial government of Quebec, which, notified by telephone, sent a courier with a couple of imperial quarts pell-mell through the wilderness as though he were rushing serum to Nome. Which proves that well never go to war against Canada.
Thereafter we were equipped to while away evenings in the traditional manner of anglers as described by St. Izaak: “To tell tales, or sing ballads, or make a catch or find some harmless sport to content us, and pass away a little time without offense to God or man.”
In his diatribe, Mr. Cannon exempts “the guys who go after marlin and barracuda and other big fish that have a gambling chance to jerk him overboard.” Which proves that all Mr. Cannon knows about deep-sea fishing is what he reads in Zane Grey. The deep-sea fisherman takes his sport on a padded deck chair on a powerboat and wrenches his prey out of water by means of a block-and-tackle rigging supported by a sort of derrick built onto the craft. It is strictly no-contest, the whole purpose of this mechanized slaughter being to round out the cast for a snapshot which the angler will mail home with the inscription, “That’s me on the left.”
The true sportsman among anglers is the trout fisherman, who wades right into the fish’s territory and battles it out hand to hand, taking an honest man’s chance of being swept down the rapids and bashed against the rocks.
“I have,” says Mr. Cannon, “done a little research with waitresses, bellhops, and bartenders. The waitresses say fishermen abuse them most and tip with a miser’s caution.”
Well, if Mr. Cannon says he has done research with waitresses, nobody has the right to dispute him. But if he talked fishing with ‘em, it was the biggest form reversal since Jim Dandy won the Travers.
This is all we have to say in the matter, except to recall that Mr. Walton mentioned a Sir George Hastings, “an excellent angler, and now with God.” This is documentary evidence of what happens to fishermen when they die. Does Mr. Cannon hope to do better?
FISH IN HER PANTIES
STURGEON BAY, WISCONSIN, 1974
Early in the morning the commercial fishermen put out from the east shore of Door County to visit their pond nets. Door County, sometimes called Swinging Door County, is a jagged spear of limestone that divides the waters of Lake Michigan on the east from those of Green Bay on the west. This was the doorway to New France almost two-and-a-half centuries ago for men like Jean Nicolet and Jacques Marquette, who came by canoe up the St. Lawrence and through the Great Lakes to dicker for the skins of beavers and the souls of Indians. Today the area is visited mostly by sportsmen bent on piscicide, for the coves and bays that notch both sides of the peninsula provide smallmouth bass fishing that is sometimes spectacular.
Twenty years ago commercial fishing here was dead and partly decomposed. The lamprey eel had wiped out Lake Michigan’s whitefish and lake trout. When, at last, these predators were controlled, alewives became a plague, so coho salmon were introduced to eat them. Coho throve mightily, Chinook salmon and steelhead have been added to the fishery, and the trout and whitefish have made a great comeback.
Making the rounds of their pond nets, the commercial men clean their catch as they go, attracting a cloud of screaming gulls. Each day at almost the same hour, an osprey takes flight from his nest above a bluff on the Lake Michigan shore and bears down on the boat.
His target is not the craft itself, but the gulls in its wake. Invariably in his swift flight he picks out one bird that is making off with a kingsized serving of fish. Finding himself under attack, that sca-vanger accelerates in frantic flight but in a race the fishhawk can give a herring gull twenty pounds and catch him at any pole.
The gull keeps trying, though, until the last few seconds. Then with a scream of terror he drops his blue-plate special and flees. The osprey dives, scoops up his breakfast, and makes his leisurely way back to the table.
This green thumb of Wisconsin is the pleasantest part of the state, though it is not so widely known as the Chain of Lakes country around Eagle River and Rhinelander or Lac du Flambeau and the Brule River, where they used to keep big trout tethered so Calvin Coolidge, wearing a high starched collar and a bloodless expression as he fished, could pleasure himself on vacation from the White House.
For years before the arrival of the coho, Chinook and steelhead, the tenant in this literary flophouse came to Door County annually to commit piscicide. From Sturgeon Bay to Death’s Door, from Moonlight Bay to Mink River, he made war against smallmouth, barred yellow perch, and an occasional great northern pike.
This visit is a brief one, allowing no time for angling but plenty for reviving memories. It is a privilege to report that fifteen years have not disturbed the pure and sparkling peace of North Bay; that Peninsula State Park between Fish Creek and Ephraim has preserved its scenic purity in spite of a camper explosion; that the Strawberry Islands remain flawless emeralds on a background of blue satin; and that the remarkable seiche of Rowleys Bay still oscillates from flood to ebb tide to flood every twenty minutes.
These are not, of course, the only attractions of this region. If and when the Green Bay Packers reopen for business, their fans in Sturgeon Bay can get down to see them play in less time than a New Yorker needs to follow the Giants to New Haven. Nor is the drive to Milwaukee any hardship for the baseball fan who wants to catch Reggie Jackson’s or Gaylord Perry’s act.
At a dozen or more points between here and Green Bay, Highway 57 crosses brooks that are dry now in mid-summer, but carry a fair flow in late winter and early spring. A motorist traveling the road after dark in that season is puzzled now and then to see dozens of cars parked on both shoulders of the highway, as though the whole population of Dyckesville or Brussels or both were gathered for a country wedding or a fish boil or maybe a chicken booyah. The puzzling thing is that there will be no light showing anywhere, no house or saloon where a party could be going on.
It may take the newcomer a night or so to realize that the spawning run of smelt is on and these little streams that empty into the bay are jelly-thick with tens of thousands of small, delicious fish working up the creeks to make love. That explains the parked cars; their owners are lined up along the banks scooping smelt into buckets.
In some years during a good run it is possible to back a truck down to the water and shovel it full of fish. Twenty miles across the bay from here, the Menominee River marks the border of Wisconsin and the northern peninsula of Michigan. Near its mouth
a bridge connects Marinette, Wisconsin, with Menominee, Michigan.
One spring there was frenzied activity on and near the bridge. Smelt were coming upstream by the millions and gourmets were scooping them up with any equipment they could lay hands on. One caught everyone’s attention, partly because of her ample dimensions and partly because of her ebullience but mostly because of her imaginative fishing tackle:
Rigged on a hoop attached to a stout cord, she had a pair of lady’s bloomers, weighted and tied shut at the knees. From her perch on the bridge she lowered her lingerie into the river, let it sink and then, whooping with triumphant laughter, hauled up panties wriggling with smelt.
YOUNG MAN WITH FLYROD
1951
Vacation was almost over when Mr. Sparse Gray Hackle called and said how about a weekend of matching wits with the trout that live in the Neversink River. Frankly, it looked like an overmatch from the beginning, but it had been the sort of vacation that cried aloud for relief.
A task force of three was made up swiftly. It included a young man of twelve, going on thirteen, who had never before attempted to mislead a trout with a tuft of feather and barb of steel. He had, however, shown an encouraging spirit several summers earlier when he was eight or nine and used to accompany his parent on forays against the smallmouth bass of Wisconsin. The pair would angle lazily through the mornings from a rowboat until th]e noonday sun drove them ashore. Then they’d seek out the nearest crossroads tavern, where each would satisfy his appetite according to his needs.
On one such day the young man stuffed his face with a ham sandwich, slaked down the mess with a Coke, and observed: “Gee, Dad, this is the life, ain’t it? Fishing and eating in saloons.”
There was to be no eating in saloons on the Neversink expedition. Mr. Hackle had arranged for accommodations with Mrs. George Stalling, a patient and gracious lady whose farmhouse near Claryville offers immaculate lodging and prodigious fodder and commands a tempting stretch of river. Adroitly dodging thunderbolts that came crashing down out of the Catskills, the car crept through the rainy darkness and made bivouac there.
The Red Smith Reader Page 29