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    Gone Fishin'
    Gone Fishin'
    Gone Fishin'
    Ebook289 pages4 hours

    Gone Fishin'

    By Charles Elliott

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    Master story teller Charlie Elliott says it perfectly in this book for all fishermen: “Whether you are a fresh water Walton or the owner of a yacht, plowing the depths beyond the sight of land for a long-billed monster of the sea, you are seeking out the quiet aquatic spaces of the earth for a reason more compelling than to satisfy your stomach juices.
    “Whenever you assemble your tackler, there are latent questions in your mind. What adventure awaits you just beyond the river bend, or when you beach your boat where the forest marches down to meet the laek? What delightful memory will you bring home, or what bizarre hair graying thrill could encounter you unexpectedly where the water trails run out and stop?
    “Those are not the only reasons you fish, by any stretch of nylon thread. Whether you are out for salmon or for lunker bass, of grayling or bonefish, your premeditated design of the day calls for out-thinking, out- maneuvering and then out-battling some wary old mossback of the depths or shallows. But as an adjunct to this high ideal, you are also seeking many other things which add immeasurably more to your day than meant on your table. You’re looking for sunshine on the water, the refrigerated glades, the bonds of friendship between strong men. Your diversions of the day include a hundred adventures not listed in a fishing guide.”
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherStackpole Books
    Release dateSep 15, 2017
    ISBN9780811766425
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      Book preview

      Gone Fishin' - Charles Elliott

      Gone

      Fishin’

      Gone

      Fishin’

      Charles Elliott

      STACKPOLE

      BOOKS

      Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

      Published by Stackpole Books

      An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.

      4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706

      www.rowman.com

      Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB

      Distributed by NATIONAL BOOK NETWORK

      Copyright © 1953 by Charles Elliott

      First Stackpole Books paperback edition 2017

      All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

      British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

      The hardback edition of this book was previously cataloged by the Library of Congress as follows:

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      L.C. Catalog Card Number 53-5348

      LCCCN 53-5348

      ISBN 978-0-8117-3681-7 (paperback)

      ISBN 978-0-8117-6642-5 (electronic)

      The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials. ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

      Printed in the United States of America

      Dedicated to
      KAYTE

      Acknowledgements

      No man can write a book entirely on his own—any more than he can live alone. In the seclusion of his study, or his office or his den, he might carefully select suitable words and phrases as vehicles on which to wheel his thoughts, but the warmth, the color, the beauty—in a word, the soul of any book—stems from the author’s rich associations with people and places, and from the thorns and thistles he has gathered along the way.

      What I’m trying to say is that I refuse to accept all the responsibility for GONE FISHIN’. All along the dizzy course of my existence were foes who dared me and friends who encouraged me.

      There is, for instance, one devoted couple who saw me through my cane pole and bent pin days, whose wisdom grows in value each time I get a few more gray hairs of my own. From one of them—my dad—I first learned how much more important the fishing was than the fish, and that dead game was only a poor anti-climax to the hunt itself. From my mother I got my love of all living things, including life itself.

      There were such friends as Joe and Zelda Morris, my next door neighbors. Joe kept me pulling on the oar from the first white page I rolled into my typewriter, and Zelda copied many a page of manuscript that went into this book. In fact, they even delayed the publication of a college text book of their own to help me complete GONE FISHIN’. When my midnight filament grew dim and my spirit flagged, they revived me many a night with steaming cups of coffee. What man can ever claim he writes a book alone?

      I am especially indebted to America’s top outdoor Editors, which include Bill Rae, of Outdoor Life, Pete Barrett, of True, Hugh Grey, Field and Stream, Ted Kesting, of Sports Afield, and to other such outstanding Editors of general and specialized periodicals as Angus Perkerson, of the Journal-Constitution Magazine, Edward M. Weyer, Jr. of Natural History Magazine, Maxwell Hamilton of Blue Book, and Nort Baser of American Forests, not only for their encouragement and advice, but for permission to reprint material appearing in their magazines for the past quarter century, under my byline.

      Into the process of making this book have gone the mental sweat and eyestrain of such associates and friends as Lurton Blassingame, my agent, Charlie Fox, Stackpole’s Outdoor Editor, Raymond J. Brown, former Editor of Outdoor Life, Erle Kauffman, Editor of the Conservation Yearbook, and Jack Hogg, the American artist who has so effectively decorated GONE FISHIN’ with illustrations and chapter headings, and who masterpieced the jacket of this volume.

      The last and largest bouquet of all goes to the charming young lady who gave up new hats and shoes for typewriter paper, and who traded her social life for dish water and a broom, so I could devote those hours I would normally spend with her, to the creation of this book.

      Me? All I did was copy down the words which have been accumulating out of a treasure house of associations, experiences and fishing adventures for almost half a hundred years.

      Prelude———The Lure

      What does fishing mean to you?

      Don’t fool yourself, or try to disillusion any of your friends, that you wade a trout stream streaking through the wilderness merely because fish is a delectable viand on your table.

      Whether you are a fresh water Walton or the owner of a yacht, plowing the depths beyond the sight of land for a long-billed monster of the sea, you are seeking out the quiet, aquatic spaces of the earth for a reason more compelling than to satisfy your stomach juices.

      Whenever you assemble your tackle, there are latent questions in your mind. What adventure awaits you just beyond the river bend, or when you beach your boat where the forest marches down to meet the lake? What delightful memory will you bring home, or what bizarre, hair-graying thrill could encounter you unexpectedly where the water trails run out and stop?

      Those are not the only reasons you fish, by any stretch of a nylon thread. Whether you are out for salmon or lunker bass, or grayling or bonefish, your premeditated design of the day calls for out-thinking, out-maneuvering and then out-battling some wary old mossback of the depths or shallows. But as an adjunct to this high ideal, you are also seeking many other things which add immeasurably more to your day than meat on the table. You’re looking for the sunshine on the water, the refrigerated glades, the bonds of fellowship between strong men. Your diversions of the day include a hundred adventures not listed in a fishing guide.

      And if they don’t—you can get off here. You’ve got the wrong book in your hands.

      Table of Contents

      Symphonies of the Wild

      1• The woods and streams hold many treasures. Some a man sees, some he feels, some are in his thoughts as he stands knee keep in a pool, or relaxes by a nook that cradles the arm of his favorite lake.

      Each fisherman who ventures out into the wilderness—if he is after more than meat—had his own conceptions of the inspired vagaries of the day, of the dawn and of the dusky twilight ringing down its curtain on the night. To catch a fish may be the impulse that brought him to the witchery of the waters, from which he gleans a harvest of moments not in any way connected with a fish.

      Such a moment brought my own most unforgettable lesson of the wilderness, out of the seclusion of Cedar River, in upper New York state.

      Cedar River flows through the heart of a most desolate land. Born in a little spring under a granite cliff, it pours down the uneven mountain side, noisy and careless. In the valley it winds its corkscrew course through deep blue pools, flowing serenely through forests as ancient and dark and hoary as the wilderness itself.

      Cedar River is a sweeping virgin stream, with arctic temperatures and hungry trout. It's been a long time, but I have not forgotten those hours in swirling eddies, or when I stood beside some ancient pool which cast back the reflection of the hills and trees and of the very granite into which it was hewn. I remember flushed and dewy dawns, and dusks that only the One Master can paint. I remember tackle-smashing trout, which appeared like iridescent ghosts out of stygian depths and left behind them dangling, broken leaders. Those memories make Cedar River one of the most wonderful rivers on earth to me. But they pale into the list of insignificance when I remember that one great lesson of my life, learned from the solitudes of the Cedar River wilderness.

      In the surge and flow of this mortal world, I have lost count of the years. By the curl of blue pipe smoke, it seemed no longer than yesterday that I waited for Bradley Scott where a rowdy creek came thundering down its granite bed to join the Cedar. Bradley sat upon the boulder with me and showed me his creel, which contained two beauties. My own fish had been too small to keep. I borrowed tobacco for my pipe.

      I thought I heard you talking, I said, for fully an hour before we met.

      You heard the language of the river, Bradley replied. The voice of running water is more like the voice of man than any other wilderness sound. There is more music in and along this river than in the greatest orchestra ever assembled.

      I have never heard any music on this or any other river, I stated.

      Sometimes Bradley's eyes can look like gimlet holes in a block of ice.

      Why do you fish? he finally asked.

      To catch fish, I replied, promptly.

      Bradley set his pipe back in his jaw and looked beyond the river, far beyond the roaring, tumbling creek. He said, Some day you will discover the music in the woods or on a stream. If you haven’t heard it already, no words on earth can describe it to you. I hope for your sake it’s soon.

      We separated and I resumed fishing, but I couldn’t put my mind with my fly in the eddy of the pool. My ears were straining to catch soft bars of music. I kept thinking to myself that I should go back and stay with Bradley. After many years of intensive and useful wear, his mind had finally conked out. But I continued to fish from one pool to another, following the stream, taking an occasional small trout and returning it to its icy home. It was simply not my day. I could not raise a big one.

      Shortly after the middle of morning, the trout stopped striking altogether. I had already decided to take down my tackle when a raindrop hit my cheek. I glanced up to find a huge black cloud riding the crest of the ridge. A brilliant flash scorched the heavens and thunder boomed up the valley.

      I splashed out of the stream, running for the nearest rock cliff. The ledge under which I crawled was overhanging and well protected from the rain. I pushed my body into a dry, rocky niche and sat down with my face toward the rumbling, storming valley.

      By now the wmd had struck the trees along the river, tearing at their leaves and branches, whipping them unmercifully, screaming in a chorus of fitful voices. And then—suddenly—the music came! The whipping crescendo was like a million violins in some mighty orchestra. It faded and came again, with its boom of thunderous drums in the background. From the tinkle of the little rivulet near where I sat, to the harmonious fury of the opaque world outside, I had found the music of the elements!

      That night I did not tell Bradley what I had heard. He knew as well as if I had described it to him, note by note. He caught me listening eagerly to a tree frog in the birch tree at the river’s edge. The many tongues of the water, the night sounds of the valley—all had suddenly become a lovely, flowing melody to my ears.

      Since that day on Cedar River, I have known that no musical notes inscribed by human hands are half so beautiful as the music of the earth itself, with all its myriad instruments. Music conceived and executed by human brains can never be as dramatic or expressive as the music in an earth-rending storm, which tears and slashes at the wilderness.

      The quick, vibrant music at dawn, the joyful expression of gladness at the awakening of day, the slow, saddened strains when the sun is gone and night is near—those are a few of the songs which come from the heart of the earth.

      I recall a lonely seacoast where the surf is never still. Day and night it sings a booming base cantata. To un-attuned human ears, that monotonous undertone is the lone sound, but in reality it is only a part of the wild, symphonic concert of living throats and quickened elements. It forms a background for the flute-like semitones of the wind. It beats in rhythm to the arias of living creatures in the air and on the beach and in the woods behind the booming surf. Stand in that surf and it is like having your ear against the drum of an orchestra. Move into the balcony behind the first line of trees and the full melody of the wilderness falls upon your ears.

      One who has lived alone in the woods knows that trees do have tongues. The rustle and whispering of leaves is the most expressive language of the forest. A tree has laughter and sighs and secrets for ears attuned to know those sounds. The warning cry of a tree will herald the approach of a storm. The gentle sigh will breathe relief when all the wind has gone.

      There are spring songs, summer songs, songs of the harvest moon. Gently sifted snow flakes tinkle when they touch and in the stillness of the winter forest, they are audible to human ears. Birds and bees and insects are a part of this invisible and eternal symphony. Nowhere are the notes discordant. The music is full and satisfying to the hearts of those who recognize it.

      To ears which are trained to hear the singing of the earth and all the living creatures upon it, the wilderness means more than a collection of trees and hills and water. And the songs are there, although most of us in the complex urban nightmare we call civilization, have ears that hear not and hearts which do not understand.

      But your ears do not possess the only sense by which you can appreciate the wilderness from the butt end of a fishing rod. The play of beauty and drama and humor by the forest world and its myriads of citizens, is a show which has no beginning and no end.

      I remember the late June night when Hobart Fortenberry told me about the big trout that lived at the foot of Helton Falls.

      Th’ only time I ever got one of ’m t’ hit, Hobart confided, was on a moonlight night, jest like this ’un.

      For a long time after I had crawled into the sack, I lay looking out of the window into the night lit chalky white by the light of a full moon. I remembered that someone had once claimed the words cellar door as the most beautiful combination of sounds in the English language, in spite of their meaning. I didn’t agree. To me the most beautiful words in any language are the Cherokee words Nunda-sunny-ye-hi, which are pronounced Noon-dah-soony-ya-he and mean the sun that shines at night or moonlight.

      I love a moonlit night. There are so many things in the outdoors to see, so many things to hear. Big bass feed in the edge of the lake, and if you’ll look close enough, you can see the silver ripples flowing across the water. The green of the tree leaves are a golden black, outlined in silver, and that night there were half a dozen whippoor-wills singing on the hill. The forest was filled with rustlings and stealthy steps, as its little people moved in and out among the moonlit aisles.

      I looked at my watch. The hands informed me that the night was ticking along a few minutes after two o’clock. I slid quietly out of my bunk and pulled on my clothes. With my slender bamboo rod in my hands and a pocket full of flies and leaders, I took off down the almost forgotten, historic Frogtown road, the pioneer trail that led away at an angle from the more modern paved road through Neel Gap. It wound under the shoulder of a ridge to the creek.

      Where it crosses water th’ second time, Hobart had told me, you turn right off the road an’ follow th’ branch fer a couple of miles. Midway t’ th’ valley is a place where th’ whole creek pours over a cliff. It’s th’ most fetchin’ sight in these here mount’ins.

      I plunged into the shadows of the tall, massive oaks, where the trail began. Patches of brilliant moonlight splotched the forest floor. The cold, midnight summer breeze whispered in the leaves overhead. The trail twisted downward past a series of huge rock cliffs and out upon a grassy plateau. Beyond, filled with purple haze, the mountain valley lay at my feet. Nunda-sunny-ye-hi had dimmed the brilliance of the stars.

      Blood Mountain, draped in white clouds, was off to the left, seemingly having no connection with the earth, but hung suspended between la sainte terre and the heavens. I stopped for a moment to pay distant homage to Blood Mountain. This had been the sacred mountain of the Cherokees. Dwelling upon it were the Nunnehi, the little gods who watched over the tribe. I could understand at this moment why they held the mountain in reverence and superstition and in awe. It was an unearthly, purple dome against the sky.

      There was an old story about a cache of gold hidden in one of the caves that reaches down into the recesses of Blood Mountain. When the Cherokees were rounded up and moved out of their southern homes to the Oklahoma Territory in 1838, they had entrusted their fortunes to the Nunnehi, burying their precious trinkets.

      I stepped down the trail again, into the shadows, past mossy rock cliffs, through long stretches of darkened, moon-dappled forest. I occasionally stopped to listen to some unusual night sound. Presently the voice of running water came upward to me through the chalky night.

      Leaving the trail, I plunged downward, through thick matted laurel and rhododendron, toward the sound. Hanging on to the vegetation, half sliding and half falling, I entered a little amphitheatre, walled in on three sides by rock cliffs, hemlock boughs and rhododendron. The white moon hung like a stage light, casting its brilliance on the falls. I jumped a rivulet to an enormous boulder, flung there by a careless hand of the elements, and gazed upward to a hundred foot veil of water that floated sheer into a deep blue pool.

      I forgot the fish, and even about putting my rod together. I sat on the edge of the amphitheatre in the arm of a heavy, exposed hemlock root, absorbing the sheer beauty of the place. I never did learn whether those trout would bite at night. It was gray dawn when I climbed the mountain side again, back to the trail, without ever having cast a fly upon the purple waters.

      I have often wondered since if those trout were really there, or if Hobart Fortenberry had only wanted me to see one of the beauty spots of his southern mountains by the light of the moon.

      It’s Not the Fish

      2• There’s more to fishing than the fish. The old timers know that better than the young squirts, with their first rods and reels and their assortment of flies. Almost every old fisherman I ever met convinced me in one way or another that the statement is true.

      For instance, there was old Pate Jones, my mountain friend.

      Tell me, Pate said, wiping his blunt fingers across his grizzled chin, how does a mad trout act?

      "A mad trout? I asked. What is that?"

      "Why, one that’s been mad-dog bit, natcherly, Pate said.

      I don’t know, I admitted, but I’m acquainted with a fellow who might. I’ll ask him.

      I hadn’t seen Tom Sellers since we worked together on rabies control in foxes years before. I wasn’t surprised to find him elevated out of his laboratory into a plush office as Director of the state’s Department of Public Health. When told about Pate, he raised his brows.

      "A mad trout? That’s a new one."

      So I told him Pate’s story in detail, just as Pate had told it to me.

      The mountaineer had hooked a mammoth rainbow in the deep pool below the roaring branches of Jacks River. With all the experience of his three score and ten years, he brought the trout around the edge of the rock cliff that walled in two sides of the pool and out of the coarse sand bar on the shallow side.

      In spite of my preaching, Pate never used a net in his life. As he beached the rainbow, which he estimated at a good two feet, by dam’, Poke, his black hound, lunged through the brush and jumped on the fish. He sank his teeth in its tail, just as Pate dragged it into shallow water.

      Pate yanked at the leader, trying to slide the fish from under Poke, all the time kicking violently at the dog. Under the pressure, the hook snapped loose with such force that it stung him in the hand. At the same instant, Pate’s boot cracked against the dog’s ribs and sent him spinning.

      The trout, momentarily freed, finned slowly into deep water and swam out of sight.

      Three days later Poke was dead. Propelled by Pate’s boot, he had gone yelping out of sight into the blackberry bushes. Two days passed before he came home across the field and headed in a bee line for the feed lot. Pate, saw the dog glide under the pole barriers that served as a gate, and snap at Molly, his mare.

      Molly whirled out of the way, pivoted and crashed her iron shoes at the dog’s head. Poke spun sideways against the gate post and collapsed. Pate jumped off the porch and ran down the lane. He was too late. Poke’s neck had been torn almost loose from his skull by the blow. Pate looked closer. Around the hound’s mouth was a white froth, like shaving lather.

      The mountain man examined Molly’s legs for teeth marks and hitched her to the wagon. He put his dead dog on the board body and drove twelve miles into town. The doctor in charge of the local health office arranged for a state laboratory diagnosis. Two days later he drove over the winding mountain road to Jacks River to give Pate the report of rabies in his dog.

      After he had gone, the old man sat for a long time on his front porch, thinking of the moonlit nights he and Poke had run together, of the coons they had brought in just as the moon went down and of the many times the hound had followed him along the river and watched him take fighting rainbows from the pools and riffles.

      He recalled the day the dog had attacked the huge trout, too. It was the first time Poke had ever pulled such a stunt. The hound had always known

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