Part 11 (1/2)

The salmon was incessant in short, sharp rushes, but, in course of time, we were out of the stream into easy water, although the fish had returned half a dozen times before he relinquished the advantage of the current. He became convinced, however, that resistance was vain, and stubbornly allowed himself to be towed on and on to land. Ole, eagerly waiting in the cove, gaff in hand, was now determined to mend his damaged reputation, and listened with humble attention to my injunction to take it easy, and not to hit till he was quite sure. He was standing on a small slab of rock that protruded into the water, and, unfortunately, there was nothing but lofty rocks behind us. What one likes is a nice beach or field upon which one can step backwards, conducting the salmon safely and easily into the net. There was no possibility of this now; indeed, we were forced to change our tactics in a hurry. The salmon at the finish came in more quickly than I wished, and was virtually under the point of the rod. With a couple of inexperienced men I feared a smash if I attempted to land at such a place. Salmon at close quarters often prove troublesome. This one was several times brought near enough for a skilled gaffer to strike him as he swam slowly along parallel with the boat, but this would have been too much to expect from a learner. I had, therefore, to keep to the boat, and not only to bring the fish in, but to guide it past me to the ledge below. The fish, however, as I knew, was firmly hooked; it was merely a question of time, and, as a fact, Ole very cleverly gaffed a clean-run salmon of 13 lb. That day, besides the salmon caught and another lost, I had grilse of 5 1/4 lb., 3 1/4 lb., 4 1/2 lb., and 3 lb.

It was my good fortune to have Pot Pool again for the evening. Again it was dull, with an incipient drizzle as we started out at six o'clock. The fish were now rising, at any rate, in my pool. At the very entrance to it, which was, in fact, the connecting run from The Rocks, I killed, after a fussy tussle and plenty of leaping out of the water, a grilse of 4 lb.; and we had barely rowed out into the stream when a fish of 6 lb. or 7 lb. leaped head and tail out of the water at my fly without touching it. The overcast character of the evening suggested to me the use of a Bulldog, and we were now enabled to practise the formulas at which Ole and Knut at first appeared so much amused. On hooking a fish I keep my seat, and direct the course of the boat to a suitable landing place. The craft must be pulled partly ash.o.r.e, if feasible, before I attempt to move. Then I rise and back gently to the bow of the boat, where Ole is in readiness to lend me a hand as I step out, sometimes no easy thing to do if I have to land on a high, slippery rock. Delightful it is to have the fish fighting all the time as only a grilse will. Your salmon often moves sullenly, and will cruise slowly about with a dull, heavy strain that is most comforting to an experienced man, who feels certain that the fish is well hooked; but this is not wildly exciting.

Your grilse is here, there, and everywhere. There is no slackening for him. He is a das.h.i.+ng light dragoon ever at the charge, determined to do the thing with spirit if it is to be done at all. At first I have no doubt I lost more grilse by giving them too much law. The longer the fish is on, the looser becomes the hold, and I have always found it better with fish of 5 lb. or 6 lb. to play them to the top of the water, and then run them in without another check. Occasionally you may lose a fish this way, but in the long run you gain, and after a little practice you will get into the trick of bringing the grilse on his side submissively into the net. The b.u.t.t, however, must be applied at the proper moment, and when the proper stage of exhaustion is reached can be told only by experience. To return, however, to the formulas. The fish, being in the net and landed, is handled by myself only; the eager, sportsmanlike instinct of your man will have to be repressed, his first idea being to seize it and knock it on the head with a stone. I have sufficient respect for either salmon or grilse to finish them with the orthodox priest, and that also is a function I like to perform myself. Then comes the extraction of the hook, always an interesting, because instructive, formula for the angler. Next follows the satisfaction of weighing the game with a spring balance, and then seeing that it is deposited in the boat with a covering of ling or alder leaves as a protection against flies or sun.

Returning now to my evening, I may explain that Ole was absent on leave, and that Knut, who was a most intelligent young fellow and the schoolmaster of the village, was anxious to use the gaff or net as the case may be. Having caught a 3 1/2-lb. grilse on a small Butcher, I fished down Pot Pool very leisurely without a touch. After a fair interval I removed the small fly and elected to take my chance thereafter with a Jock Scott of larger size. It was now about eight o'clock, and we went down the pool again, having a brief run with probably a grilse, which held fast only a moment or two; then I was becoming conscious again of the monotony of fruitless casting when there was a splendid spin of the winch. This, I confess, was of such a nature that I rose at once and determined to take my reward or punishment, as it might happen, standing. It was an undoubted salmon, for fifty yards down out of the water he came, the winch, curiously enough, screaming all the time, and never ceasing when he fell in with a loud splash and resumed his run. I had about 115 yards of line on my winch, and I noticed, just as the fish moderated his express speed, that there could not have been ten yards left.

He was fighting all the time. Knut, fortunately, understood my directions to follow him down instead of pulling up-stream and a little across, as he usually did, and I was able at least to winch in three-parts of the line before the next rush, which was equally formidable, but not so long. I think I never had a salmon fight as this one did. He, at any rate, was not one of the sulky kind, and it was quite on the cards that I had one of the twenty or thirty pounders for which the angler is always longing. By and by we landed on a rock--or rather two rocks--Knut on a flat bit of crag and I on the round head of a small boulder. The fish had so tired himself in his shoots and fights out in the stream that he gave little trouble in the slack water, but refused for a long time to be brought up anywhere near the surface. When he did yield he came in the most lamb-like way, and Knut had the pleasure of using the gaff for the first time. He hit the fish fair and well, and, marvel of marvels, it was to an ounce the weight of the fish killed in the same pool in the previous evening, viz. 13 lb.

Having now a good salmon, for this water, in the boat, and a grilse or two, and it being nine o'clock, overcast, and with a dark bit of the forest to walk through to the road, I signified my intention of going home; but Knut's blue eyes opened wide in surprise and pleading, and he besought me to have one more trial. As the young fellow had been working hard for three hours, and this was uncommonly good of him, I consented, and, keeping on the same fly, we began half-way up the pool, my intention being only to fish the tail end. At the fifth cast, and on a portion of the stream which I had fished over without disturbance twice the same evening, up came another salmon, which fastened and went off at the same fierce pace as the other. He stripped off the line several times, gave me a splendid quarter of an hour's sport, and there we were, the dangers of the stream left behind, the fish quietly circling in easy courses in the slack water, Knut ready with his gaff on his little platform, and I, c.o.c.ksure of the fish, standing on the round rock. To the left was water that in the dusk seemed to be deep and black, and as all along this side the water was deep close in, I concluded that all was safe. The fish was coming quietly in, and was not two yards from the gaff, when it made a sudden dart to the left into this dark water close to the rocks, and in a very short time I realised that he had hung himself up.

Getting as quickly as possible into the boat again, we moved slowly out to the impediment, in the hope of its being nothing more than a rock which could be cleared; but on looking down I saw that the bottom had been a regular trap for sunken logs, and as I looked down into the water I saw the fish, a silvery, clean-run fellow of about 8 lb., fighting his hardest at the end of the line, which sawed and sawed until it parted. I recovered most of the cast, but the fish had got away with my bonny Jock Scott and the last strand. This was very sickening, for we might have had a nice bag to take home; but it was not to be, and in somewhat subdued spirits we fastened up the boat, got our baggage together, and walked homeward. Still, it was a typical experience of casting from a boat, and Knut and myself had the pleasure of carrying home in the net, I holding the handle and he the rim, a salmon of 13 lb., and grilse of 4 lb., 3 1/2 lb., and 3 lb.

This, I may say, was the day when I hooked and played fifteen fish, of which only five were caught. I dreamed about that fraudulent dark water and its hidden logs, and in the searching sunlight of the next day went over to examine. It was most artful of the salmon to take the course he did, for I found that he had run under what was virtually a spar of about 10 ft. long, with each end resting on a rock; below it was a nice little interval of 18 in. of water, under which a salmon could run.

CHAPTER XVI

SOME CONTRARIES OF WEATHER AND SPORT

At my first visit to Norway in 1899 I was greeted with days of roasting heat, with roaming thunder growling incessantly in the mountains. The angler fresh from England, out of training with his salmon rod, and with the precarious rocks and boulders for foothold, gradually discards his clothing; the coat is shed first, then probably the collar and scarf, then the waistcoat. Some underclothing goes next. In two days the heat sufficed to stick together in hopeless amalgamation all the postage stamps in my purse, and I have at last discovered that the haberdashery goods warranted fast colours, and paid for as such, leave confused rainbow hues upon every vestige of attire after a good Norwegian sweat.

All this will signify to the initiated that fis.h.i.+ng during the six middle hours of the day is out of the question. It is not the case that salmon will never take in glaring suns.h.i.+ne, but it is the exception rather than the rule, and the game is decidedly not worth the frizzle. It means, moreover, that the rivers are low, and it may be stated that they have been so all the season so far, and that there can be no really good sport until there is a change. To be sure, even a single thunderstorm does help a little, but in my case it has wrought harm; the rolling of thunder in the hills day after day, and the surcharged atmosphere have had an undoubted influence in sulkifying the fish, and there is a worse thing than that.

This worse thing is the modest pine log of commerce. Driving, last Sunday, from Christiansand over the hills and down into the Mandal Valley, a distance of twenty-eight miles through most beautifully typical South Norway scenery, in which, with the towering mountains of rock timbered with dark sentinels to the very skyline, alternate verdant, peaceful, prosperous, valleys glowing with wild flowers, in which the bonny harebell is more a.s.sertive by the waysides, I was much interested in the cut timber strewing the half-dried river bed whose course we followed. The logs are of no great size, mere sticks of pine, averaging a foot diameter and in lengths varying between twelve and forty feet. It was obvious that these spars, like the anglers, were waiting for a spate. How nice it would be for the hardy, honest natives engaged in this all-important lumber industry if these prepared sticks, each well ear-marked for recognition leagues perchance down-stream, were swept offhand to market.

My sentiments changed somewhat yesterday and the two previous days. I may explain that there was a violent thunderstorm on Monday night, and the Mandal river, a n.o.ble type of the rocky Norwegian salmon stream, rose, perhaps, a couple of feet in the wider portions, and considerably more where the bed contracted. Even such an addition to the volume of water gave these logs a friendly lift, and brought them tumbling and grinding along in hundreds without the aid of man; but on Thursday they appeared in endless battalions, for by this time the timbermen had been ordered out in force to give a friendly shove to the ma.s.ses that had jammed in some eddy or rocky corner. It is astonis.h.i.+ng what a mere touch will effect. With my pocket gaff last evening I lightly nudged a floating spar in the ribs, and he set off right heartily, very gently, yet firmly, cannoned without temper against a neighbour, and in less than five minutes a block of perhaps 150 logs had started off, scattering irregularly over the stream, and making a noise like distant thunder as they charged over the boulders of the rapids below.

There are circ.u.mstances, I have been told, under which salmon will rise as well as at other times while logs are drifting, but our best pools here are even-flowing and stately, reminding one often of the Tweed between Kelso and Coldstream. The logs in such water are bad for fish.

The testimony of the local men is that the pools, from the piscatorial point of view, are always unsettled while the logs are descending in quant.i.ties, and that it is a rare thing at such times to induce a salmon to take a fly. Moreover, with a thunderstorm spate of this nature, and the operations of gangs of lumbermen hastening to set the stranded stock on its way to port, the water is rendered very dirty; in a word, until the muck has pa.s.sed, and the river settled, the angler's chances are poor indeed.

The danger to the angler's gear, and any fish he hooks, when he finds himself amongst the logs, is well known. The tenant of the beat above ours lost two or three good salmon in one day by collisions of this nature. Down at Lovdal we fish mostly from one of the somewhat crank boats of the country, and my first salmon was hooked from the stern of one of them, at the moment when a score of logs that had been gyrating in an aimless sort of way in a great dark backwater must needs hustle one another in company into a corner where they were suddenly caught by a strong undercurrent, and almost hauled out into the current, unnoticed by my boatman. For myself I was engaged with a hooked fish, and fortunately for me he was not large. The man had all he could do to fend off the spars with his oars, and at that critical moment, when the fish is either turned or allowed a new lease of life, we had the honour of notice to quit from a spar on either side. Mr. Salmon, without a fin-flick of apology, taking a mean advantage, darted under the stick to the right, and at express speed made across stream. One does not, however, use Hercules gut for nothing; the log was travelling swiftly, and I ventured to clap my rod-top down to and under the surface, thus saving my tackle, and being presently able to land and gaff my 10-lb. fresh-run salmon without risk or hurry. This fish, I may add, rose in the fiercest of suns.h.i.+ne in the forenoon, and some logs were coming down, but only one here and there.

The river in fact had only then begun to rise briskly, and on Wednesday, when the lumbermen were hard at work above, three salmon, one of them a certain twenty pounder, fluttered up at the fly. They did not mean business though. That pool I fished, with change of pattern and abundant intervals, until I was not merely fit but ready to drop, and rose two of the fish a second time. On Thursday the river was so out of order that I left the salmon rod in its rack in the barn and drove up to Manflo lake, arriving there in time to see the effects of an apparently innocent occurrence of thunder and lightning. There was no storm or overcasting of the heavens, only a single discharge from one wandering cloud, yet it fired the forests in two places, and we saw the columns of white smoke of the conflagration. With thunder all around the hills it did not seem promising for the trout; still we had driven eight miles to try them, and were there for the purpose, so we unmoored the boat and began. The trout were small and of two varieties--a dark, heavily-blotched, lanky fish, with coa.r.s.e head, and a shapely golden fellow, thickly studded in every part with small black spots. I used merely one cast--Zulu, red and teal, March brown with silver ribbing--and in two hours I had caught forty-one trout weighing 13 lb. In salmon fis.h.i.+ng here one catches brown trout every day; your salmon fly may be large, medium, or small, it is all the same to these voracious fario, which never appear to be more than half a pound. One has the consolation always in Norway of knowing that what one catches need never be wasted. There is something quite touching in the grat.i.tude which the poor villager evinces in return for a present of two little trout.

An instance may be mentioned of apparent service to the salmon angler by the trout which, as a rule, are execrated as an intolerable nuisance. After you have succeeded in working your fly some thirty yards below, and can feel it swimming on an even keel at the end of a straightly-extended line, the supreme moment of expectation has arrived; to have the situation thus achieved by labour ruined by the impudence of a trout 9 in. or 10 in. long is warranty, if ever, for speaking out. My example is of such a nuisance to which I owe a grilse. At any rate, that is my theory. Two salmon and five grilse were at that time my total for odd hours of fis.h.i.+ng during part of the week, and I had fished with the Durham Ranger and Butcher (No. 4). One evening, putting off for another drift down the pool, I bethought me of a set of his favourite turkey wings specially dressed for this expedition by my friend Wright, of Annan, and resolved to fulfil my promise of giving them a trial without further delay. The name of the fly of my first choice is, I believe, the Border Fancy; the brown turkey wing showed well in the water, and the irregular mingling of lemon, red, and black of the pig's wool, relieved by a band of silver twist, made altogether a very attractive lure. The boat was crossing diagonally to our course, and I was leisurely getting out line, when a trout plucked at the fly. I saw him, as it were, knocked aside rudely, and shall always believe that it was intentionally done by the grilse, which immediately fastened to the fly, and was duly netted on sh.o.r.e.

Within twenty minutes the same fly rose and landed me a salmon. I rechristened this fly the Wullie, and determined after that evening's work was done to preserve it for copying. King log, however, interfered with my well-meant intentions. A stick of pine by and by feloniously shot round a corner of rock unawares, and ere I could recover the cast the fly was embedded in the b.u.t.t of it, and there was a quick smash. In what remote part of the earth will the Wullie be next found--or will it become the adornment of a permanent waterlog without leaving the river of its birthplace?

The fish which I have caught to this date, fis.h.i.+ng about twenty hours during the whole week (including Sunday night, when, after my sea journey and long carriage drive from Christiansand, I went out at eight o'clock, caught seven trout, and afterwards read a chapter of _Shandon Bells_ under an apple-tree at half-past ten at night in good daylight) have been curiously uniform in weights. The salmon were 10 1/2 lb., 10 1/4 lb., and 10 lb.; the grilse 3 1/2 lb., 3 1/4 lb., 3 lb., 3 1/2 lb., and 3 lb.

As a contrast to these hot days, let us arrive at the doings of a wet week, of which most travellers in the country get more or less experience.

When you read in your guide-book ”The climate of the west coast is usually mild, being influenced by the Atlantic and the Gulf Stream, which impinges upon it,” you will, having the ordinary experiences of this vale of tears, not omit the mackintoshes from your baggage. It may be, as is set forth a little farther down, that July and August are the best months for this part of Norway; but there is never any trusting that Atlantic and Gulf Stream. Yet here we are at the end of a solid week of rain, with every promise of more to follow. This morning the rus.h.i.+ng sound which greeted my waking moments was, nevertheless, different from that of previous mornings. It was merely the steady but strong flow of the river, not fifty yards from my bedroom window, speeding from the wooden bridge to the mouth at the fiord, half a mile below. Previously there had been variations upon this unceasing monotone, and they were caused by the rain pattering upon the leaves of an old ash outside, upon the shrubs and trees of the little orchard, and at times upon the veranda and even window panes.

There is no mistake about rain in Norway when it is in earnest, and a week of it is more than enough. It is true the nights have not this time been so wet as the days, but what consolation is that when the effect is to keep the river in perpetual flood? No; there is a vast difference between three and seven days, on a salmon river. The lesser infliction moves the fish and improves sport. In the days that are left you may find ample compensation in superior bags. Now there have been seven days' downpour, the river getting worse every day, and leaving a tolerable certainty of three days' additional patience for running down and clearing. But that is not the worst. I have said that there was a difference this morning when I got up and looked out.

The sandy paths were dry, showing that there had been no fresh rain in the night. Moreover, the hillsides were open to view, the silver rills that veined the rugged steeps were dwindling, there was a blue sky, and great ranges of wooded or desolate mountains were in clearly cut outline--the first time since the wet period set in. Over the shoulder of the huge pyramid to the east there was actual suns.h.i.+ne, and the fleecy clouds were high. So at last there was to be an end to our mourning; verily so, since the wind had at last veered from south to north-west. Yet at this very moment, and it is still an hour short of noon, a heavy storm is making uproar without, the rain is descending in torrents, and there is the added discomfort of a s.h.i.+ver-breeding atmosphere. At any rate, we are under cover, and need not issue forth unless we choose. This is better than what must have been the fate of poor S., who went to the fjelds just before the break of fine weather to shoot ryper. He has been literally up in the clouds, and the birds will have been lying so low as to give points to ”'Brer rabbit.”

Condemned to the solitude of a rude saeter, a hut in the most primitive sense of the term, he must have furnished a capital example of the English gentleman who forsakes the seductions of a London season and the luxuries of a Piccadilly club for the sake of sport.

To be sure, in our case, this reverse is only part of fisherman's luck, and we may be--and no doubt are--thankful that there was a fair fortnight, to begin with, placed on the right side of the account.

Sport was, for various reasons, not by any means up to par, but we can, on this miserable Sabbath day, in our comfortable hotel by the strong, highly coloured river, count up a total of a trifle over 500 lb. to our two rods in little more than a fortnight. These were mostly sea trout, but of a lower average weight than is usual at this period of the season, the run of heavy fish--anything from 6 lb. to 16 lb.--having apparently taken place in July instead of August. The rule on this river is first a run of big sea trout, then a run of smaller size, and, lastly, a small run of bull trout, with occasional salmon throughout.

H. has had the best of the bag, but a few salmon and grilse on another river gives me 244 lb. as my share.