A Sentimental Story.
by E. Lennox Peel.
Originally published in Longman's Magazine (Longmans, Green & Co.) vol.1 #10 (Aug 1883).
We knew him very well. Year after year, as winter gave place to kindly spring, he used to come back to his old haunt under the culvert that ran over the Middleton brook, beside the mill plantation. And there, on a fine warm evening, we could generally see him if we peeped cautiously over, lazily sucking in what flies the eddies carried right into his mouth; for he would barely stir a yard to gobble up the finest 'green drake' that ever got into limbo by dallying with the treacherously smiling water's edge. No, he was not a greedy fish, but took what good things Fortune sent him, without troubling himself about the flotsam and jetsam that passed him by on the right hand and on the left. But probably his lazy, easy temperament kept him in high condition, for he was a lusty trout, with a girth and sides that would have done credit to our London aldermen. To see him was to admire and long after him. For, as near as we could guess from so long an acquaintance with his lordship of the brook, he would be three and a half pounds' weight, or even a little over. And how we did long to have him on dry land, that the accuracy of good British standard weights might decide to a nicety whether our judgment was discriminating or at fault! But the difficulty was to inveigle the monster. And that perhaps lent him his greatest charm. He was so far from curious, go little inclined to be hasty in his action, that minnow and worm and fly, if hooks were part of their appendage, could never extract from him the faintest semblance of 'a glorious nibble.' No matter, either, whether the water was thick and brown with a thunder shower, or clear with summer drought, he let our lures alone. As a family friend, we all used to drop him a line in turn, while our opinions differed as to the best method for enticing him into a correspondence. My father, whose views were of the severely honest order, would never attempt anything but the straightforward if artificial fly, and the times that he has wriggled at full length up the bank, cowering behind some opportune tussocks of reeds and grass, only to be disappointed of a rise, would make all sympathetic and right-feeling angels weep.
One frequent visitor of ours, a Mr. Clifford, was desperately enamoured of this retiring trout, and there were no stratagems that he held too base to employ for his capture. He generally waited till the brook was in flood, and then dropped in large lobworms at the top end of the culvert, letting the stream carry them nicely in the direction of the monster's jaws. Live minnows, too, with a hook very delicately inserted under the skin so as to leave them full scope for their most natural gambols in the water, were despatched in the same direction; but never a bite came but once. That once I shall never forget. I was sitting on the bridge, when all of a moment I saw my friend's eyes go round as saucers, and his fingers tighten convulsively upon the rod. 'I have him now,' he hissed between his teeth, as the line came taut and the rod bent double. For one instant there was a determined resistance, the next an audacious quarter-of-a-pounder was flying wildly through the air at the rate of forty miles an hour, over the head of the disgusted Mr. Clifford. He never heard the last of that; but it did not make him desist from his efforts at luring the coy beauty. Why the big trout was never caught napping when the water was coloured we could not make out. I had a theory (it may be romantic, but I gave that fish credit for all human sagacity) that when he saw one of these tempting lobworms or lively minnows bearing down upon him, he used to sail up stream till he got above the bait, and then drop down sideways in the current a few inches above it, to see if his portly form encountered the unseen resistance of a casting line.
To come to my own pet way of angling for him: I had a great idea of 'dibbing' or 'daping' with the natural fly, bluebottle, grasshopper, or what not, impaled upon a tiny hook. As my feeling was that this suspicious customer was always looking out for casting lines, my notion was, Don't let him have any of those troublesome things in the water to bother him and get in his way. 'Dibbing' is the very thing for him: you keep a big bumblebee flopping up and down on the top of the water, and if you only make it look lifelike enough, you'll get him one of these days. But the day was long in coming. I shall never forget peeping cautiously through the reeds and seeing the sardonic look upon his lordship's face as I kept agitating the rod point and keeping a large mayfly dancing wildly about two feet from his stately nose. He never showed the slightest desire to possess himself of the dainty, and only acknowledged the delicate attention at last by sheering a foot further off. This want of confidence hurt me very much.
The keeper's idea was that a fish like that was better out of the brook than in—'always a-eating of the small fry,' as he elegantly condescended to explain. So Velveteens was allowed to have a grand field-day, when he summoned two or three other choice spirits, and, after mature deliberation, they agreed to block up both ends of the culvert with nets and then frighten him into one of them. So the geniuses set to work with their apparatus, and refreshment in the shape of a large stone jar of heady ale. And first they blocked up one end, watching to see he didn't bolt, and then they closed up the other. Now they were sure they had got him, and they sent word up to the house for the gentlemen to come and see the big trout caught. But we didn't quite like the idea of a game fish being done to death in that fashion, so none of us went down—fortunately, as it happened, for in the event there was very little to see. When they had got their nets down, one intrepid spirit volunteered to go in under the culvert with a stick, to 'prod' him out. In he went, and splashed under the culvert, in a very cramped and uncomfortable position, I should rather fancy; but after 'prodding' away for a quarter of an hour without bolting the big fish, he came out again looking rather in want of fresh air, and said two or three big 'snags' had drifted in with the stream under the culvert, and the trout must be trotting up and down under these, for he never could even feel him with all his 'prodding.'
After some bad language, and finishing the contents of the stone jar, Velveteens then disbanded his talented coterie, and sent up to the house to know if he might shoot him next time he might ''appen upon 'im houtside the culvert.' But this roused the finer feelings of our very imperfect nature, for so far we had been consenting unto his untimely end by nets and 'prodding.' But now we felt that his escape was providential, and we unanimously declared that so fine a fish should never come to his end save by fair and lawful methods.
Alas for such a goodly resolution! Only the very next week we had two troublesome schoolboy cousins to stay with us, and we were sorely put to it to provide them with entertainment. Fortunately they were, considering their age and inexperience, determined anglers; and as the contemplative sport took up much of their time and very little of ours, we always encouraged their disposition towards it to the fullest extent. We even went so far as to tell them all about our pet trout, laughing in our sleeve the while to think what a pretty dance he would lead them if they once fairly became engrossed in endeavours for his capture. We really turned an apoplectic purple with inward laughter when giving them full instructions how to approach the culvert without being observed by the ever-watchful fish. But we laughed too soon.
It was only one short hour afterwards, that two members of our party, as they were leisurely pacing up and down the terrace walk, heard howls of delight proceeding from the vicinity of the Mill plantation culvert, howls so inexpressibly dreadful, that their first thought was that one of these unruly schoolboys was murdering the other, and that this devoted other was strenuously resisting his own untimely demise. Full of this idea, they fled wildly in the direction of the culvert, and were rewarded on arrival at the brook by seeing these two pleasant boys squatting like Red Indians upon their hams, yelling with an irrepressible emotion, and in the midst of them, flopping vainly on the grass, was a 4 lbs. trout!
The rest of this sad story is soon told. Our instructions how to approach unseen had been all too perfect. With an ingenuity that was positively fiendish, they had first made a cross-line out of a ball of string we had unwittingly lent them to fly their kites with, and had attached to the middle of this line a yard of strong salmon gut, and to that, again, three powerful hooks tied back to back as in pike-fishing, with livebait. This done, like some crafty Ojibbeway upon the war-path, one wily schoolboy had squirmed along, ventre à terre, and across the culvert till he was safe on the further bank, and exactly opposite the unconscious fish, taking one end of the cross-line with him. With Macchiavellian cunning had they then approached the water down either bank, till they could both just get a peep of the monster through the rushes, and could drop the hooks softly down into the water not far from his noble tail. He had no suspicion of his danger, but lay, they said, without ever moving, till they worked the hooks stealthily along, using fair 'give and take' with the cross-line, right under his belly fins; and then—horresco referens!—they regularly 'snatched' him. One good upward jerk from two powerful schoolboy arms, acting in harmonious accord, fixed the hooks firmly into the under part of his body, and then his 'play' (or so they called it, for what was death to him was sport to his inhuman assailants) was brief but tremendous.
Alas for that trout! he was goodly and pleasant in his life, yet the Philistines got him instead of some more high-minded and right-thinking sportsman.