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    A Fisherman's Angles
    A Fisherman's Angles
    A Fisherman's Angles
    Ebook116 pages1 hour

    A Fisherman's Angles

    By Patrick R. Chalmers

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    About this ebook

    This vintage book contains a wonderful collection of useful fishing tips and instructions, authentic anecdotes, and Chalmer's classic fishing poetry. "A Fisherman's Angles" is recommended for those with a practical interest in angling, and it would make for a fantastic gift for anyone who enjoys fishing. Contents include: "A Fisherman's Angles", "On Little Fish Being Sweet", "McNair", "The Char", "The Knights in Scales", "The Limit", "A Young Man's Fancy", "A Bit of Binding", "A Soft Answer", "Out of the Deep", "The Sea Trout", "Fancy", "The Grayling", "Forty Years After", "Up in the Morning Early", "'Sing Cuckoo'", "The Coarse Fishes", "Cable and Cobweb", et cetera. Many vintage books such as this are increasingly scarce and expensive. We are republishing this volume now in an affordable, modern edition complete with a specially commissioned new introduction on fishing.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRead Country Books
    Release dateSep 15, 2017
    ISBN9781473340497
    A Fisherman's Angles

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      Book preview

      A Fisherman's Angles - Patrick R. Chalmers

      A FISHERMAN’S ANGLES

      THE three great exponents of angles are Euclid, Jack Horner and Master Izaak Walton. Euclid (‘let A B C’ etc.), I am told, is dead now-a-days, dead even to dominies; but Jack Horner and old Izaak endure for ever.

      And, talking of Jack Horner, to say ‘nooks and corners’ is part of the English language, and it would be equally correct, so the dictionary implies, to say hooks and corners, for a nook is a corner and a corner is an angle and an angle is a hook. So Euclid, Jack Horner and Master Walton are brothers of the angle and our brothers.

      And a fisherman’s angles may therefore be a miscellany, not only of his split-canes and lawful occasions, but of any nook and corner of his craft—‘each bend of river, each old tree,’ bar parlours, bites and sups, plums to be pulled out of Life’s pie, milkmaids (we have the word of Master Walton), points of gut and points of view—in fact anything, however nook-and-cornerish, that occurs to the cultivated mind so long as it be, even in the remote measure, piscatorial in application.

      The angler’s is a great inheritance and his hour is the sweet of the year. He alone, of the men who go to field, flood and forest, goes with the cuckoo and the daffodil. He alone, of sportsmen, may always come home in easy conscience. He has caused the minimum of suffering by his sport. If he has landed a trout, and I hope that he has landed three brace of trout averaging 1 lb. 15 ozs., the trout’s troubles, if ever he had any, are over at once.

      If he has hooked, and lost, the big fish under the bridge, it is the angler who will suffer, not the four-pounder. The reflective Gun must always be a little troubled for the Game that even Walsinghams must wound and lose.

      And who can go up to a dead stag, twenty stone and a royal head, unmoved that a beautiful life has just been, justifiably, taken? But it is too late then to restore old Bluebeard to his hill and his harem, so you must receive Campbell’s congratulations and look (and so you are, you know) as pleased as Punch, drink the deoch fala and sit down and be smoking a pipe while the men do what is necessary.

      But if you catch a little trout, or a big trout, it is never too late to give him his life, and, only last season, I saw five pounds of gold dust and silver go back to become ten pounds—bread upon the waters indeed!

      And so the fisherman’s lot is, in all opportunity for well being and well doing, an enviable thing, and full of many memorable and most diverse angles, as I shall show. And when we shall have come to the last angle of all, the chimney’s corner, may we never want a brother of the craft to fill the opposing angle and pull out plums with us, and add his D E F to our A B C.

      ON LITTLE FISH BEING SWEET

      NOT AT ONCE OF TEST AND ITCHEN

      Sing I, nor of Kennet’s state

      Whence my fario come to kitchen

      Salmon-pink and grampus-great;

      But, though Berkshire’s bulrush quivers,

      But, though Hampshire’s kingcup’s out,

      First I’ll sing of little rivers

      And of very little trout.

      Little trout whose claims do beckon

      So insistently and sound,

      Little trout whose bulk we reckon

      Six or seven to the pound—

      These I sing, to these beholden,

      These long since a song did earn,

      Crimson-spotted, plump and golden,

      Flung a-kicking from the burn.

      Leaping down the brown hill’s shoulder,

      Trailed of birk and mountain ash,

      Bent upon by granite boulder,

      Little waters hop and splash;

      Pied by snows of last December,

      Bens above the May days flout—

      Ah, that’s how you’ll best remember

      Little rivers, little trout!

      Grease your brogues with dreamland tallow,

      Forth with me and fish like kings,

      And, by pot and swirling shallow,

      Fill a creel with fingerlings

      Where our noses first got blistered,

      Where our green-hearts first went swish,

      Where the paws of boyhood glistered

      With the scales of little fish.

      Those were days, you say? Why, then it

      Scarce is odd if thus I wink,

      Ere we walk by lovely Kennet,

      Ere we follow Itchen’s brink,

      Where the Berkshire bulrush quivers,

      Where the Hampshire kingcups shout,

      Wink with love at little rivers

      And at very little trout.

      McNAIR

      THE Tyrant of the River’ is, to most people who fish, the Pike. And with some justice, I have no doubt. But to me the cliché recalls McNair, McNair every time. The elderly McNair.

      For McNair must be over seventy. But he has the figure of forty, he is splendid and tall, and tough as a mountain pine. He has a blue and masterful stare. His face is red with the weather and with what not. His hair, such as he has, is frosted and dingy red—like preserved ginger. His angry bristle of moustache accentuates the best and whitest teeth that ever came out of Aberdeen. He has drunk enough whisky in his day to carry a frigate. He is as good with the gaff as the head ghillie of a famous beat on a famous Scotch salmon river ought to be.

      The beat, over which McNair presides, is too valuable a property for a modern proprietor to fish himself, and too expensive for any one tenant to take entirely. It lets, however, in monthly lets of much cost. But three or four rods may, at once, go down to its dark and magnificent streams.

      Can you wonder then that McNair, who sees the come and go of men of many kinds (yet mostly men touchingly humble and eager to please), has become tyrannical and a little contemptuous? I will not say ‘a servant when he reigneth,’ because I cannot connect McNair with servitude. He picks up your fly rod and his own long gaff and away he stalks with them, and you will follow him and carry the spinning rod, please. He will take no telling from the likes of you. But, if you will be lowly and be remembering that though Obstinacy is a good dog, Obedience is a better, you shall catch salmon on the fly that McNair prefers, on the spinning bait that best pleases him.

      I asked McNair once if I might not try a spoon. He snapped like a wolf. The salmon that continually showed head and tail, head and tail, in McNair’s broad and rugged pools were, for a reason ungiven, not for the spoon. ‘There was a gentleman,’ said McNair, ‘who was for trying the spoon, he would not be told.’ ‘Yes?’ said I, for I felt that a moral was to come. ‘He took a fish on it,’ said McNair, and when I gaffed it to him, he said, I suppose you’re sorry I caught that fish? I am that, said I. ‘Now, Sir,’ said McNair to me, ‘ye’ll take the fly rod—.’ And so I did.

      But I sometimes think that McNair considered that a special disciplining was a thing due to me, a thing that concerned his personal honour and that of all Deeside. And I had meant nothing but to order myself modestly as an alumnus before an acknowledged master.

      It was my first day with McNair, my ‘first time down’ was just done. I had not stirred a fish though the long dark pool was never without the heaving lilac and silver of the ‘gey an’ dour.’

      ‘Ye throw a fair line, too,’ said McNair tolerantly.

      ‘I do not think that it matters how you fish,’ said I;

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