Favorite Fish and Fishing

Part 1

Transcriber's note:

Italics is represented with underscore, small caps with ALL CAPS..

A list of corrections made can be found at the end of the text.

FAVORITE FISH AND FISHING

Frontispiece. (See page 43.)]

FAVORITE FISH AND FISHING

BY JAMES A. HENSHALL, M.D.

Author of "Book of the Black Bass," "Camping and Cruising in Florida," "Ye Gods and Little Fishes," "Bass, Pike, Perch and Others."

"And yf the angler take fysshe: surely thenne is there noo man merier than he is in his spyryte."

--Dame Juliana Berners.

NEW YORK THE OUTING PUBLISHING COMPANY MCMVIII

Copyright, 1908, by THE OUTING PUBLISHING COMPANY

Entered at Stationers' Hall, London, England All Rights Reserved

To THE MEMORY of JUDGE NICHOLAS LONGWORTH

My Friend and Companion On Many Outings by FLOOD AND FIELD

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book is based on articles originally published in The Outing Magazine, Country Life in America, Shooting and Fishing, London Fishing Gazette and The American Fishculturist. My thanks and acknowledgments are hereby tendered to the publishers of those journals for permission to embody the articles in book form. For this purpose they have been added to, amplified and extended. For the illustrations of fishes I am indebted to the United States Bureau of Fisheries, Mr. Sherman F. Denton and Dr. Frank M. Johnson.

JAMES ALEXANDER HENSHALL. BOZEMAN, Montana.

CONTENTS

PAGE

THE BLACK BASS: THE GAME-FISH OF THE PEOPLE 3 THE GRAYLING: THE FLOWER OF FISHES 43 THE TROUT: THE ANGLER'S PRIDE 65 HIS MAJESTY: THE SILVER KING 121 FLORIDA FISH AND FISHING 141

ILLUSTRATIONS

Grayling Fishing on West Fork of Madison River, Montana Frontispiece

FACING PAGE

Black Bass Returning to Water After Leaping 4 Large Mouth Black Bass 8 Small Mouth Black Bass 12 Black Bass Returning to Water After Leap 32 Michigan Grayling 46 Arctic Grayling 50 Montana Grayling 54 English Grayling 60 Brook Trout 66 Red Throat, or Cut-Throat Trout 72 Steelhead Trout 80 Rainbow Trout 88 Dolly Varden Trout 94 Brown Trout 100 Golden Trout of Volcano Creek 106 Sunapee Trout 114 Tarpon 128 Sheepshead 142 Cavalla 144 Sea Trout 146 Spanish Mackerel 148 Kingfish 150 Cero 150 Redfish; Channel Bass 154 Red Grouper 156 Mangrove Snapper 158 Ten Pounder 160 Ladyfish 160 Snook; Rovallia 164 Jewfish 166 Shark Sucker 168 Enlarged View of Sucking Disk 168 Florida Barracuda 172 Northern Barracuda 172 Manatee 176 Devil Fish 178

THE BLACK BASS: THE GAME FISH OF THE PEOPLE

Favorite Fish & Fishing

THE BLACK BASS: THE GAME FISH OF THE PEOPLE

Part 2

These be parlous times in angling. When William King, in the seventeenth century, with as much prophecy as humor, wrote:

"His hook he baited with a dragon's tail And sat upon a rock and bobbed for whale,"

he builded better than he knew. And if Job had lived in the twentieth century, the query: "Canst thou draw out Leviathan with an hook?" would be answered in the affirmative; also, it would be demonstrated that "He maketh the deep to boil like a pot," at Fort Myers and Catalina.

The shades of Walton and Cotton, of Sir Humphrey Davy and "Christopher North," and of our own Dr. Bethune and Thaddeus Norris, could they "revisit the glimpses of the moon," would view with wonder and silent sorrow the tendency of many anglers of the present day toward strenuosity, abandoning the verdure-clad stream, with its warbling birds and fragrant blossoms, for the hissing steam launch and vile-smelling motor boat in pursuit of leaping tuna and silver king. It goes without saying, however, that considered as a sport, fishing for these jumbos is highly exciting and capable of infusing unbounded enthusiasm, but it can hardly be called angling.

In the ethics of sport it may be questioned if there is not more real pleasure, and at the same time a manifestation of a higher plane of sportsmanship, in the pursuit of woodcock, snipe, quail or grouse with well-trained bird-dogs, than in still-hunting moose, elk or deer. In the former case the bird is flushed and given a chance for life, while in the latter case the quarry is killed "as an ox goeth to the slaughter."

So in fishing a like comparison is possible--fly-fishing for salmon, black bass, trout, or grayling as against fishing for tarpon and tuna, which are worthless when killed except as food for sharks. In the first case the angler's skill, and his knowledge of its habits, are pitted against the wiles of the fish, with but a weak and slender snell of silkworm fiber between its capture or escape, while in the case of the leviathans mentioned, they are handicapped by being hooked in the gullet, and by towing a boat in their struggle for freedom. But comparisons are always odious. While the choice between the "gentle" art and strenuous fishing is certainly a question of taste, it may depend somewhat on the length of one's purse.

Black-bass fishing! These are words to conjure with. What pleasurable emotions they call up! To the superannuated angler the words are fraught with retrospective reflections of the keenest enjoyment, while they cause the soul of the new hand to become obsessed with pleasures yet to come--pleasures rendered brighter by the rosy tint of anticipation.

With the first blossoms of spring the thoughts of many men, both old and young, turn lightly to love--the love of angling. And as the leaves unfold, and the birds begin their wooing, and the streams become clear, the premonitory symptoms of the affection are manifested in a rummaging of drawers and lockers for fly-books and tackle boxes, and the critical examination of rods and reels, and in the testing of lines and leaders. These preliminaries are the inevitable harbingers of the advent of the angling season, when black bass are leaping gayly from the waters after their enforced hibernation in the gloom and seclusion of the deep pools.

And when the encroachment of age or rheumatism forbids wading the stream, one can still sit in a boat on a quiet lake and enjoy to the full the delight and fascination of "bass fishing." What farmer's boy in the Middle West does not look forward to a Saturday when the ground is too wet to plow or plant, when he can repair to the creek or pond with his rude tackle and realize his fond dreams of fishing for black bass! And when such a day arrives, as it is sure to do, how he hurries through the chores, and with what sanguine hope he digs for angle-worms in the garden, or nets crawfish or minnows in the brook, each one good for at least one "sockdolager" of a bass. For it sometimes happens that a bass will take a wriggling earth-worm or a "soft craw" when it will not deign to notice the choicest minnow or the most cunningly devised artificial fly.

And the country lad always knows just where an old "whopper" of a bronze-back black bass has his lair beneath the roots of a big tree, or under the ledge of a moss-grown rock. To do future battle with such an one has engrossed his thoughts by day and his dreams by night, ever since the Christmas tree for him bore such fruit as a linen line, a red and green float and a dozen fishhooks.

The triumphal march of a Roman warrior, with captives chained to his chariot wheels, entering the gates of the Eternal City with a blare of trumpets and the applause of the multitude, was an event to fill his soul with just pride--but it descends to the level of vainglory and mediocrity when compared with the swelling heart of the lad as he enters the farmhouse kitchen with two or three old "lunkers" of black bass strung on a willow withe. Many times during his homeward march had he halted to admire the scale armor and spiny crests of his captive knights!

Large Mouth Black Bass. (Micropterus salmoides.)]

And then to an appreciative audience he relates, in a graphic manner, how this one seized a minnow, and that one a crawfish, and the other one a hellgramite--and how often each one leaped from the water, and how high it jumped--and how the "ellum" rod bent and twisted as the large one tried to regain the hole under the big rock--and how the good line cut the water in curving reaches and straight lines as another one forged toward the sunken roots of the old sycamore. And then came the climax, as, with pride and regret struggling for mastery, and "suiting the action to the word and the word to the action," he tells again the old, old story of how the biggest of all, a regular "snolligoster," shook out the hook and got away!

In the years to come, will that lad exult over the capture of a mighty tuna or giant tarpon with as much genuine joy and enthusiasm as over that string of bass? Well, hardly. And as the boy is father to the man, and as we are all but children of larger growth, the black-bass angler never outlives that love and enthusiasm of his younger days--younger only as reckoned by the lapse of years.

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