An Angler at Large/Chapter 35
I am in the third day of a snuffling cold.
It is raining. It always has been raining. It will always rain. Out on the road a child (a Bunting grandchild or great-grandchild, I think) runs backwards and forwards, making a noise like the baby of a locomotive.
I stand in need of a shave. I am a failure. I have no friends. I do not want to go out and fish and my wife will not let me. I cannot taste the tobacco I am smoking. Perhaps I should say that I can taste it and that it is very nauseous. I have to force myself to smoke it.
I will write about graylings.
I will most venomously abuse them.
There are two kinds of grayling, big graylings, and little graylings. And first, of the big kind.
The big graylings, then, rise best during those months when it is unlawful to kill them. In June you will catch many big graylings on the May-fly you throw for trout. When you have hooked them they take an enormous time to tire out and land. Landed, they take an eternity to unhook.
Some liar once said that the grayling has a tender mouth. Everyone who has since treated of this fish has repeated the lie. I shall not. The grayling has a mouth like an umbrella ring. Once your hook is embedded there it is almost impossible to get it out. By the time you have got it out the grayling is practically dead. But not absolutely. If she were, there would be comparatively little to worry you. You would only have a grayling on your conscience.
But it is June.
It becomes necessary to restore your grayling to life.
Therefore, while the great trouts rise all about you, gulping down the May-flies, you grovel on your belly, and nurse your capture back to consciousness.
You hold her head up stream and you wave her about in the water for several minutes, while she moves her mouth and her gills slowly, deliberately. Then you let her go. Instantly she turns upside down and begins to float away. Her eye meets yours glassily, reproachfully. Her martyred air distracts you. You scoop her out with the net and repeat the performance.
The trouts go on rising busily.
Very likely the grayling weighs three or four pounds—for only at this season do the very largest feed. She is a glorious fish. To exhibit such a fish at the end of the day would, in September, make your name. In June, however, it would cover you with infamy. Of this the grayling is perfectly well aware.
She is quite comfortable. She knows herself safe. She is in no hurry. You cannot leave her. She prolongs the experience, slowly moving her mouth, slowly opening and closing her gills.
If you were not a fool and a sportsman you would beat her on the skull and throw her in a bed of nettles. If you were Blennerhassett you would call her an out-of-condition trout.
But you prop her up between two reeds.
Deliberately she turns over.
The trout go on rising.
At last she finds the fun begin to pall, and with a sluggish movement slips from between your hands and sinks to the gravel sulkily. You are free of her.
You now find that the rise of May-fly is over.
The last insect is coming down stream. A large fish takes it. You throw to it. It takes your fly.
It is another grayling.
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You may kill graylings from July till February. That sounds very good. Eight months of it. Here, you say, is a fish that should be cultivated. Let us examine this matter.
In July the large graylings disappear. They are not. In August the trout copy their pernicious example. Only the little graylings remain. (I shall deal with them in a moment.)
In September the big graylings emerge from their hiding-places and provide admirable sport. I have nothing but praise for them in September. This is my one good word for the grayling log.
In October my hands become lifeless after they have once been wetted. In November I die if I stand for more than half an hour by a river. In December I stay in London. In January I stay indoors. In February I stay in bed.
A fish which causes me so much annoyance cannot win my pardon by offering me eight months' fishing on these terms. Therefore I object to big graylings, except in September. And this is not September.
And now of little graylings.
The little graylings feed for ever. Yet they never grow up. There are little Peter Pan graylings in this river which have haunted certain spots for eight years. They were in those spots when first I threw a fly on Clere. They will be in those spots when I am dead. I think they will be the cause of my death, for they irritate me excessively, and nothing shortens a man's life like constant worry.
The little graylings (as deficient in bowels of compassion as they are in the thyroid department) will not care. They will go on rising and feeding and fooling about, pretending to be large fishes, just as happily, just as stupidly, though I am not there to be maddened by them. They will never give me a thought in my cold grave, where they will have placed me. They have no thoughts.
There is a pool on this river. We call it the Island Pool. It is very deep and I have been frightened by the fishes that I have seen in it. The little graylings are not frightened by them. They have not brains enough to be frightened by anything. Not even by me. They rise eternally in this pool. The water and trees are so arranged that it is impossible to tell from below what manner of fish has caused any given break in the surface. The little graylings know this. They have lived so long in this pool that they have managed to acquire this one piece of knowledge. It moulds their whole existence. Morning, afternoon, and evening (and at night for all I know) they rise and rise in the hope that I shall see them and cast to them. They rise at nothing at all. This they do that I may imagine the beginnings of a hatch. They are malicious little things.
When I see them I cast to them, because I do not know for certain that they are not large trouts. Then they are delighted, and dash off giggling to tell the big fish about me.
I hate them.
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It is impossible to teach little graylings wisdom. There is one that I am always catching. I caught her six times the week before last. On the Monday and Tuesday once, on the Thursday twice, and on the Friday three times. I find that this makes seven occasions on which, in that one week, I dragged this same miserable little fish out on to the bank. It doesn't matter. It would be all the same to that little grayling if I had snared her seventeen times, yes, or seventy. Last week I killed her eight times, but without any effect upon her. She is still there.
If I could see the creature, perhaps I might avoid her. But she is invisible. A little grayling in fast water is as inconspicuous as a Marconigram as it throbs across the ether. Even could I locate this fish I doubt if I should be able to elude her, because she moves with intense rapidity.
In the run which she infests there is a tremendous trout. He is always there. I cannot drive him away. He is that kind of trout. Now and then he takes a fly. He never takes mine. That is the sort of trout he is. He amuses himself at my expense.
Very well.
I arrive within casting distance of this humorist. I cast. The little grayling hurls herself upon my fly. She is without reverence or fear. The great trout cannot inspire her with awe. The smack of my fly upon the water cannot alarm her. Because I am half blind and hope that the trout has risen, I strike, and the little grayling is somewhere in the meadow. I detach her from my hook with infinite trouble, place her in the water and cast again. The little grayling is already waiting to receive my fly.
I fancy that she is subsidised by the trout to annoy me.
You have no conception of the irritation that this little grayling causes me.
To-morrow I shall torture her.
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Generally, then, of these little graylings, I will say this. They are the most contemptible of fishes. They are deceivers, raisers of false hopes, liars. They are nincompoops and popinjays and niddings. They are all levity and sham, masqueraders, infirm of purpose, gluttonous, heart-breaking, effervescent, undesired, conspiring, omnipresent, ignorant, unspeakable.
And I will say this…
No, I will say this.
They make good fishing an irritation and they make bad fishing unbearable. When three fishes, not to be seen, are rising at the same time and you cast to one of them, the other two are good trout. That which you hook is a little grayling —which has just enough strength to dart about sufficiently to scare the two trout. When at last you come to Crab Hatch and throw to the fat fish that shows you his head and his tail once a minute on the glide, it is a little grayling that you pull out. When you step cautiously into some shallow backwater, by which manœuvre alone you shall approach three or four of the largest trout that you have ever seen, it is a little grayling which streaks upstream from between your waders and gives the office (as is said) to his betters.
For the little grayling is by nature a darter-about, an uneasy, tattling, common informer, a comer between a man and his amusements, a kill-joy, a spoil-sport, a breeder of mistrust, a bell-man, a scare-monger, a yellow-journalist, a moor-hen. She is a small-minded fish, a riser-at-nothing, a mere breaker of surfaces, a ring-producer, a maker of deceptive sounds, a frog. A jelly-fish is a better fish. I had rather see a dog fetching sticks than a little grayling at play on a good gravel. She is as distressing to me as a Candidate's child that lisps the praises of his dada to a mass meeting. Politics is a man's job. Rising is the business of large earnest fishes. If the little grayling came up in search of food I might have more respect for her. But she doesn't. The less there is on the water the more eagerly does she rise, which is absurd.
The anguish of a blank day is considerable, but it is tenfold keener if at every odd moment one has been tricked into supposing that the fly was coming on. That is the little grayling's idea of giving one a pleasant time.
It is one which she shares with the daces alone. With the daces!
No other fishes do this. Salmon do not; pike do not. Who has ever seen crayfishes messing about after nothing at all, on top of all the best glides? Do carps do it? No. Perches? No. Roaches? I don't know. Perhaps. Add them, if you will, to the others. A precious trinity. Barbels? Do they do it? No. They live on barbel baits, which they suck from anglers' hooks far down in the water. Do chubs? No. Not even chubs do this thing. What chubs despise the little graylings do.
I can say nothing worse about the little graylings.
Where is the eucalyptus?