by M.G. Watkins.
Originally published in Longman's Magazine (Longmans, Green & Co.) vol.1 #8 (Jun 1883).
Delightful as the first warm showery day of spring is to the trout-fisher, his golden days lie yet far before him. Halcyon times indeed are those few days towards the end of May (or more frequently the beginning of June), when 'the insect bloom is on the wing,'—that bloom and completeness of insect life being in his eyes the May-fly. This week is to him an epoch answering to the 12th of August in the grouse-shooter's estimation. All manner of business and engagements must yield to its absorbing interest. Should the trout-fisher happen to be in Parliament, it must be a very pressing question which keeps him then in town. The fly-fisher of country house and rectory is for that week lost to wife and family. His friends know of old that it is useless to expect him during its continuance to be ever found at home. He is a lunatic let loose from Colney Hatch for the nonce. Fœnum habet in cornu—he then wears his straw wig, and must ramble and be left alone: 'Johnson has come, dear, to consult you about taking the Moor Farm,' says his wife to such a devoted fly-fisher, and is told abruptly, 'He must come again; I am busy.' The white-haired clerk calls after breakfast upon the rector with the message, 'John Bastyn wants you to marry him, sir, at eleven o'clock to-morrow;' and is at once begged to carry his master's compliments to Mr. Rowe at Upland Monachorum, who is no fisherman, and ask him to take the marriage. Even when the morrow comes, the eager parson cannot leave home for the river by the little garden wicket without being stopped by his factotum. 'Please, sir, it hev been ordained to hev onions here and cabbages there, but what shall us do about the late carrots?' &c. &c. Many foes, beside that supreme one, the postman, are in league to stop the fly-fisher when the winter's dream is at length within his grasp—when the under-keeper has called before breakfast to tell him that 'the May-fly be up horful strong in Veal's meadow.'
Entrancing though the charms of May-fly fishing be, the insect is almost unknown on many of the Devon and Cornwall rivers. There a kind of small cockchafer called locally the 'fernweb' supplies its place in a feeble fashion. On many of the Midland streams the May-fly is only seen sporadically. One year it will abound, and be almost wholly absent for several more. It will be numerous on one stream, and next year be unknown on it. On other waters, after many years of regular appearance, it suddenly seems almost to die out. A curious theory accounts for this by ascribing great ravages to the swallow, which, thanks to the Bird Bill, has now greatly increased in numbers. Last year we found one solitary specimen of the true May-fly in the south of Devon long after it had died out in every other locality in the kingdom. Doubtless great floods destroy numberless pupæ of the fly, and it stands to reason that the various insectivorous birds, especially the swallows, must considerably thin the ranks of May-flies; but on most rivers, in spite of these birds, a fair stock remains, if not so large as in past years. The fly generally wakes up to life and activity when damp weather has ushered in a warm sunny noon in June. May-fly, indeed, is most frequently a misnomer. Taking three years at random on our stream, 1873, 1875, 1879, it appeared in those years respectively on June 4 and 17 in the two latter cases. In 1877 it lingered till July 19. Cold weather speedily 'puts down' the rise. Even a cloud passing over the sun causes a marked diminution in the activity of the perfect insects, which flit and hover and sail over a stream like diurnal Jack o' Lanterns, while the trout leap ceaselessly at them, and grow fatter and more sleek daily with the abundance of food on which they gorge themselves. Frequently the flies may be seen dancing aloft on a June evening:
When day declining sheds a silver gleam,
What time the May-fly haunts the pool or stream,
When the still owl skims round the grassy mead.
(Gilbert White.)
Then trout-fishing is at its best. Indeed, at Hungerford, on the Kennet, it does not begin until May, when there is some expectation of the May-fly.
Although the May-fly is so universal a favourite both with fish and fisherman, it is frequently confused with the different stone flies (phryganidœ) of the angler; very few persons know its life history, and several points in this are as yet entirely unknown. Its appearance, as has been said, is periodic, following in this a well-known entomological analogy. Walton's statement that pike grow from the pickerel weed is not more absurd than some of the theories which have been held on the pretty gauze-winged May-fly, that it emerges from the caddis-worm, and the like. The egg is dropped one season into the water and gradually hatches into a larva, very ugly and very savage, semitransparent, active, and six-legged, with no gills, and therefore respiring through the general surface of the body. It lives under stones and changes its skin every few days. Gradually, seven pairs of branchiæ, or gills, are developed. At length, rising to the surface, it splits open the case and rises as the perfect insect to dance away its little life and reproduce its kind, or fall into the water and form a dainty morsel for a trout. It is wonderful how rapidly this transformation takes place. Sir J. Lubbock watched it several times, and 'from the moment when the skin first cracks, not ten seconds are over before the insect has flown away.'[1] Still its metamorphoses are said not to be concluded; after a day or two the green drake (or May-fly) which has thus emerged loses another coat, and changes either into a grey or a black drake, the one being the female, the other the male, of the perfect insect. Every angler knows it in this form, flitting up and down with its own peculiar motion in the sunshine, or sitting disconsolate, with damp folded wings, should it be cold, on grass and sedges near the river's brink. Dear as it is to the angler, we cannot find that his gratitude has spent itself in honouring the May-fly with a song. Not even Kingsley has sufficiently praised it in prose. That fine angler's appreciation of the alder-fly is so eloquent that we could have safely trusted the cause of the gauzy, flitting, nymph-like ephemera to his hands: 'O thou beloved member of the brute creation! ugly thou art in the eyes of the uninitiated vulgar; a little stumpy old maid, toddling about the world in a black bonnet and a brown cloak, laughed at by naughty boys, but doing good wherever thou comest, and leaving sweet memories behind thee; so sweet that the trout will rise at the ghost or sham of thee, for pure love of thy past kindnesses to them, months after thou hast departed from this sublunary sphere. What hours of bliss do I not owe to thee!'[2] In elegance of shape and attire, the May-fly is far superior to this fatal fly. Notice the delicate yellowish shade of its body, its transparent spotted wings, its aërial dance, its apparently aimless flight as busy swallows and mighty swifts plunge through the flitting tribe, like lancers and dragoons riding through a broken foe, and then re-forming, and again performing the same tactics—above all, notice the exquisite harmony of its colouring and its fidelity to its native stream, and then as you put up your rod and prepare to fasten on an imitation fly, compare its heavy unnatural appearance, though tied by the best maker, with the natural insect. Then you will see the boon which both to fish and fishermen is the May-fly.
How to make even a passable imitation of it is a difficulty. The best we ever saw were tied by old John Hammond at Winchester. As a rule May-flies are tied too large. We lately saw some made by a famous West of England fly-tier, in which the wings were formed of two large yellowish-green feathers. This would only kill on a very windy day. On the other hand, too slim and small a May-fly is a great mistake. When wet, it becomes like the ghost of such a fly, and is never taken unless mistaken by a trout in this drenched, bedraggled state, for some other fly. A year or two ago cunning imitations of the May-fly were sent us by a maker to be tested. Not a fish would look at them; they were meant to float, but had with that view been dressed so coarsely that they terrified the trout. Kingsley recommends a pale straw-coloured body ribbed through the whole length with red hackle, and asserts that he has known it beat a bare-bodied fly in the ratio of three fish to one. Ephemera gives several dressings in his excellent Manual. Whether the three tails of the fly be made of rabbits' whiskers or three hairs from a black bear (both of which he recommends), our own belief is that the artificial fly must be large and yet not cumbrous, more greenish than yellowy, and the wings, without being abnormal, must yet be fuller than those of the real insect.
Our first experience of catching a large trout on such a fly is still fresh, though it happened many years ago, With much care the fly was artistically cast into an eddy where three or four trout were feeding, and was at once seized by a goodly fish. Having strong tackle, there was no need to 'play' long with it, and in a short time it was half drawn, and of its own accord half rushed up a sloping bank, where it remained quiet a moment or two, having got rid of the hook, and eyed us as we, amazed at its size, gazed for a precious second or two at it. Such a scene could not last long, and as we rushed at it with the landing-net, it leapt up, and at once fell backward into its native brook. But the next fish did not escape in like manner, nor the next again: angling being one of the sciences in which a man grows old learning.
But it is time to try this 'matadore of trout and grayling,' as Walton quaintly calls the May-fly. The dew yet lies on the grass, and the tree-pipit is circling as it warbles over the tall hedge spangled with roses this morning late in May as we draw near the water-mill. Its sleepy murmur is graceful, for there is much promise of heat, although heavy grey clouds are drifting over the sun. The little river has run from the scanty remains of Sherwood Forest, and the trout which below the deep pool into which rushes the overflow from the wheel, are dimpling the streams, are fat and full-flavoured as befits the locality. A lad rises from a nap under the hedge, and comes forward with a bottle full of May-flies, which have given him some trouble to catch, for they are not rising from the water in any great number, as the day is yet young. The rod is speedily put up, and two of the flies are placed on the hook after a time-honoured fashion which is described in the 'Compleat Angler.' Stealthily proceeding down the bank, a good fish is noticed rising every halfminute with that peculiar sucking sound which betokens a heavy trout. The flies are dropped deftly in above it and suffered to float down. A moment more, and the fish has seized them, and is immediately rushing up and down the stream, with here and there a leap out of the water, and now a dash for a huge mass of floating weed. At length it half gives in from sheer exhaustion, and is landed triumphantly by the boy, or it may be, by the fisherman's carelessness, having gained the roots of the big willow, at once breaks off. These incidents, many times repeated, make up a day's fishing with the natural insect; 'dibbing,' as some call it. On the Irish lakes and elsewhere, a line of floss silk is sometimes used. The wind carries out this without the danger of losing flies which would be imminent were the angler to make a throw. This mode of fishing seems to us poor sport at the best of times, only to be justified by urgent want of a dish of trout. For years we have given it up as cruel to the pretty gauze-winged insects, and too fatal to trout to call forth skill and bring with it the charm of uncertainty. As a stiff rod and strong line is used, the trout has little chance of escape, and the merest tiro can drop the natural bait in and hide behind a tree. For these reasons this style of angling does not find favour with many humane or philosophic anglers.
How different is a day's fishing with the artificial May-fly! In this case, no insect is tortured; no boy required, who is always out of the way when most wanted, bird-nesting and throwing stones at water-rats. A man may wander and dream undisturbed through the heart of an English spring. With the variety of the scenery and the different songs of the birds, the charming tints of the wild flowers, the wafts of cool wind enhancing the glow of sunshine—with all this, he need not envy even the splendid profusion of tropical life. He is at once put on his mettle to produce, either by his own skill in fly-tying, or from the stores of his pocket-book, the neatest imitation of the Green Drakes[3] which joyously flit over the stream. Now for a cast. Thirty feet away on the opposite side of the stream is a willow, most graceful of English trees, with its glaucous leaves ruffling in the gentle breeze. It is not its beauty, however, which at present attracts us, but the fact that a trout-fisher's keen eye discerned a slight splash in the sunlit eddies rushing under it. The problem is how to cast the fly safely above the fish which made that splash without entangling it in the boughs. The first cast is too short; the second—ah! an envious naiad blew it gently aside on the tree's foliage. What is to be done? It is fast. As mild attempts are useless, a sharp twitch leaves most of the leash dangling from the bough. A fresh one is speedily put on, and the third throw with it drops the fly neatly under the branches and above the fish. It is swept on, and in less time than we can write, has been seized by the fish feeding there; a quick turn of the wrist has hooked it, and we are following the trout in its headlong rush down the bank, doing our best to steer it out of the weeds. Now it leaps out of the water near the bank, and all but hangs itself in a trailing briar depending from above. Now it darts back and makes for a post or the roots of the willow. Safely guiding it past these dangers, in two minutes more we have slid down the bank into a shoal of treacherous mud, but there was no time to think about that, and a dexterous use of the landing-net is followed by net and fish being thrown behind us on the cowslips. Then there is time to wipe the forehead and wade across with no more ado to recover the lost leash. In this style of fishing, every trout has to be stalked, as it were; the fisher has to trust to his own address and experience, and many are the casualties and chances of his sport. But as he returns home through the damp hay-meadows, his basket will generally be heavy enough, and his heart equally light, cares and the petty annoyances of life having floated down the glancing eddies to the sea.
There are not many intruders on our angler's solitude. At one corner, on emerging from a thicket of willow herbs and osiers, he has suddenly started at coming across a 'flaycrake'[4] among the young wheat. At length he meets a friendly Oxford man, a typical product of the education at present given in that seat of learning. Young Noall has many decided opinions on law, politics, and art. He has long discarded Mill's logic, and Sir W. Hamilton is trembling on his throne before a new master in metaphysic. As for the depths of predestination, political morality, personal responsibility, eternal punishment, the proper mode of governing India, and the true theory of bimetallism—he has sounded them all. Pater is his æsthetical prophet, Browning and Rossetti his masters in poesy and painting. It is pleasant, he thinks, on the ordinary mooted points of religion and morals, to possess a large stock of views; but there is no cogent need at present for our Græculus esuriens to make his decision between many rival superstitions. As for trout-fishing, he has often fished when a boy, and supposes there will not be much difficulty for him to capture trout, especially as the May-fly is so well out. Let us watch his procedure. He discards Stewart's theory of fishing up-stream (a method which should be adopted whenever practicable), and consequently frightens away or misses two out of every three trout, a bitter reflection when the few spring days of our climate are taken into consideration. Then he persists in fishing with a fly much too large and much too gaudy; the 'Golden Firetail' of the advertisements. Over and over again he 'puts down' a fish by throwing this grotesque caricature of a May-fly over it. At length he is persuaded to try another of a smaller pattern. In the damp meadow, near the decrepit willows, let us note his progress. A good trout seizes the lure, and forthwith proceeds to make an example of our over-confident friend. It is with some difficulty that he succeeds in passing the willows as the fish darts down the sluggish stream. But the river soon narrows and the banks are higher, until at a thicket of briars and tangled honeysuckle just below him, the fish stops and darts in. There is nothing for it but to leap down into this and endeavour by using his landing-net to capture the fish, despite of its struggles among the submerged briars. Through them slips the fisherman, up to his knees in water, his face is flushed with the exertion and torn with a briar, his hat falls off and floats away, his net catches in a concealed stump, his line is irretrievably tangled round sticks and thorns, and at length, breaking away with the fly in its mouth, the trout escapes and leaves the Oxford scholar in a sad plight. A little practical knowledge of fishing with the May-fly would have stood him in better stead than the dogmatic temper bred by constantly balancing subtle theories of religion and morals, and confidently deeming his own intellect the pivot of the universe. Young Noall can split metaphysical hairs in abundance, but he cannot artistically catch a trout. Coming home by the fragrant lanes, and stopping a moment here and there to listen to a nightingale in a neighbouring coppice, or catch the gleam of the owl's wing as it skims over the tall hedge into the hay-field with its darkling hawthorns every here and there, we reflect that few poets have done justice to the May-fly. It is a thing of delicate beauty itself, and haunts the most beautiful of rural scenery. It deserves, but, alas! has not obtained, the tenderest of verses. Thomson depicted it faithfully—
To sunny waters some
By fatal instinct fly; where o'er the pool
They sportive wheel; or, sailing down the stream,
Are snatched immediate by the quick-eyed trout.
(Summer)
And Tennyson points with it a hard moral; how—
Nature is one with rapine, a harm no preacher can heal;
The May-fly is torn by the swallow, the sparrow spear'd by the shrike.
But our ephemera has not been sufficiently utilised as the symbol of all that is most brief and beautiful in life, yet a 'vanity of vanities;' the delight it gives the angler has not been sung, nor the bountiful food which it furnishes to fish, so that it resembles its American analogues, the shad-flies, which fill the air on a certain evening once a year, and which are 'snapped at by the fishes so ravenously that many of them die of repletion.' The May-fly, however, has been honoured with a notice by Aristotle. It bursts, he says, from little bags like grape-skins, which float down the river Hypanis during summer; flies till evening, fades as the sun sets, and dies as it disappears, having lived but one day.
1. Origin and Transformation of Insects, p. 21 (Macmillan, 1874).
2. Kingsley, Chalk Stream Studies in Prose Idylls (Macmillan, 1873, p. 65).
3. The May-fly's 'tail turns up towards his back like a mallard, from whence, questionless, he has his name of the Green Drake' (Compleat Angler, pt. 2, ch. vii.).
4. The term in Holderness for a scarecrow (as 'maukin' is in Lincolnshire); from 'flay,' to scare away, and 'kráka,' O.N. a crow.