Brothers of the angle

COREY FORD

In which a conscientious fisherman offers a few further suggestions for compleating ye angler

"O' my word, the Trout is perfect in season. Come, I thank you and here is a hearty draught to you, and to all the Brothers of the Angle, wheresoever they be. . .

—Izaak Walton

■ They are a race apart: the dry-fly fishermen. Sometimes they have been bopped upon the forehead by a divine madness. Their eyes have witnessed the apocalyptic vision of a leaping trout; they have seen a rod of split-bamboo come alive in their hands, their ears have heard the singing of a taut line against the current, and the dervish shriek of an inspired reel; they have felt at dusk the benediction of a loaded creel. Upon them has descended the mantle of immortality. They will never be quite the same again.

Over the winter, to be sure, they would seem to be sane enough. To all appearances they are merely normal members of society, doctors and lawyers, writers and merchants; there is nothing fanatic in their behaviour; they can discuss business, or motors, or even golf, and act as though their hearts were in it. "Nice fella, Binks," observe their friends, "lot of varied interests." "I'm so glad John can think of something besides fish, fish, fish," murmurs their wife. It is at night that the subtle change steals over them; they finger an old sporting-magazine restlessly; at last they rise with a mumbled excuse and putter upstairs to the attic alone. And there, by the dim religious light of a single candle, they pore in silence over their holy relics— the box of tangled leaders, the empty mucelin bottle, the patched waders, the stained felthat sprouting with bright-colored flies—and now and then glance devoutly at the calendar on the wall, where a bright red circle surrounds the date of April 5th like a halo.

You see it more clearly in their faces as spring draws near. Now they tell over last year's flies like a rosary, feverishly sorting and resorting them into mysterious aluminum boxes, examining the barbs, rewinding a loose hackle or a strand of .quill. With the first warm wind, and the mud burbling up between the flagstones, a new wild light comes into their eyes. Overnight their bedroom floor is suddenly draped with freshly-oiled line, bright varnished sections of rods dangle along the walls, and the scream of winding reels echoes far into the small hours. You see them in their offices, work forgotten, staring vaguely at the horizon with a curious distracted air, turning the pencil-sharpener dreamily as they wind a distant reel. You see them plodding slowly along Madison Avenue of an afternoon, as though they were wading upstream against the current, playing their walking-sticks in the air with a deft flick of the wrist as they drop an imaginary fly onto a choice eddy in the stream of traffic. You see them halt before Abercrombie's window like a shrine, or mount devoutly to the seventh floor, there to study the contents of the camphor-soaked trays, test a dozen expensive rods that they have no intention of buying, argue with each other in heated monotone, and examine the latest bulletins from the front: "Hear the water's still pretty high in the Aesopus." "The Beaverkill should be right next week." "Ice is just out in Lac Edouard. ..."

* And they are an exclusive order. Their initiation is a long and arduous one; ho worm fishermen, women fishermen, or fish hogs need apply. They have their own code, their own signals, their own secret language. Never, for example, call a fisherman's line a "string", never his. reel a "pulley" nor his creel a "basket", never, under pain of instant ostracism, his rod a "pole". Never, never remark complacently to a dry-fly angler that you used to be quite a fisherman yourself: "Used to like to go out in a rowboat when I was a kid and catch flounders. I'd just drop a hunk of claim over the side and let it sink...." There is no more similarity between your form of fishing and the art of dry-fly angling than there is between trapping and hunting. Do not urge the advantages of baitfishing, if you happen to be a golfer, and point out that it seems silly for him to expend so much effort floating a feathered barb when he could get more fish with a worm; for the goaded angler is apt to turn upon you and demand, in all fairness, why you spend so much effort hitting a golf-ball with a metaltipped club when you could drop it into the hole so much more easily with your fingers. No; if you are not an angler, if you have not felt the divine effulgence, if May and June are just two more months to you, if you can drive over a rumbling bridge without a swift speculative glance at the pools and eddies in the stream below, or pass the window of a tackle store in the spring without that sharp, sudden stab of longing—then there is no good arguing with you, for you would not understand. Get back to your own planet. You do not belong on ours.

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The haunts of the dry-fly anglers are guarded as jealously as the tribal meeting-house in a village of New Guinea cannibals. They exist on all the trout-streams; comfortable, unpretentious inns where the patient hosts cater to the strange whims of anglers who track their floors with muddy waders, who must be up at five a. m. in time for the hatch on the river, who gear their entire existence to the varied moods of the trout. On the Beaverkill River, for example, Ferdon's excellent Riverview Inn in Roscoe—a hostelry that has never failed to provide every comfort and hospitality to anglers—assumes in May and June the general air of a mobilization camp: rods and waders are stacked on the back porch, the ice-box in the kitchen is loaded with individual pans of fish in which the anglers keep their daily catch, and in the dining-room grizzled campaigners in mufti knock out their pipes on their empty dessert-plates and argue together after supper for hours on the merits of the bi-visible hackle, the particular problems of Barnhart's Pool, the wisdom of sinking your leader, or the size of that big one they turned over that afternoon: "I just saw a glimpse of the tail, but, say—"

Here in Roscoe, moreover, is located the workshop of that superlative craftsman, Walter Dette, whose nimble fingers can fashion a better artificial fly and a more durable one than any English lure I have ever used. Orders for flies pile on his work-table from all parts of the country; and with his partner, Harry Darby, he works feverishly during trout-season, winding hackles, stripping peacock hurl, binding smaller feathers for wings, copying the usual patterns or following the specific instructions of some effete angler who has just evolved a new fly with heliotrope wings, two cowbells, and a small electric light in its eye. And as he works, wide-eyed anglers stagger into his shop, clutching in their trembling fingers a small insect they have just scooped off the water. "Lookit him, Walt—that's what they're taking today—looks like a Cahill with green body. Tie me a couple on number fourteens with some of that grizzled hackle—quick—" Sometimes in their eagerness the anglers venture further afield: Wyoming, or New Zealand, or Oregon, or Canada. Along the route of the Canadian National, for example, lurk many unexplored areas where the fisherman who has grown used to one and two pound trout in local streams may jog his jaded ganglions with a five or six pound catch. North of Quebec lies the exquisite Laurentides Park district; and here is some of the finest fishing water in the entire East. At Camp Taschereau, we arrived recently, to stare slightly goggle-eyed at the camp visitor's book, in which a departing guest, one Mr. Rex Beach, had just scrawled with a pardonable flourish: "Largest catch today only six and a half pounds, but this was probably due to the low water. Ray Long caught three in an hour in the pool below the dam—four, five and six pounds respectively. .. ." Before such testimony as this, an angler can only sit down and burst into tears. He has reached the stars.