FOREST AND STREAM. 
[July- 8, 1899. 
Memories of Antigo* 
When, during the formative perrdS of tiie earth's ex- 
istence, the subsidence of the glacial' movement begiiii, 
the snouts of the foremost glaciers' lay in a straggling 
irregular line, from northwest to southeast, aross the 
North American Continent. This line is clearly indicated 
by heaps of boulders, foreign to the underlying formation, 
which bear the unmistakable signs of glacial abrasion and 
rise in many places to the height of the tallest pines. 
Nestling among these Titanic cairns are countless pools 
of purest spring water, whose uniform depth at all 
seasons suggests the absolute independence -of their 
sources of filtration and surface drainage, These pools 
seldom reach a greater depth than loft. in their deepest 
parts, and from center to shore line the inevitable 
boulder crops up. 
The trout preserve of the Antigo Fishing Club lies 
just inside the outer edge of this advanced line of 
glacial subsidence, and within its limits are two of these 
pools or miniature lakes. On the northern bank of the 
larger of these, flanked by a three-acre clearing, stands 
the club house. This lake, whose area is nearly equal to 
that of the club house clearing, has no visible inlet, yet 
its outlet is of sufficient volume to turn a country grist 
mill, _ 
So- clear are the waters of this woodland lake that 
frohi ally point of the banks objects lying' at the bottom 
can be -seen as- plainly a-s if suspended in midair at the 
same distance. On all sides, excepting the north, where 
the clearing comes ont to the bank, the foi-est grows 
down to the water's edge, and in manj' places the droop- 
ing- branches- of overhanging cedars form a permanent 
zone of shadow, extending well out from the shore, form- 
ing an ideal trout harbor. 
From the bank on the edge of the club house clearing 
you may see on a calm and cloudless day in June, when 
the sun is at its meridan, countless shadows as of float- 
ing leaves, projected against the bottom of the lake, 
although there may not be so much as a fleck of foam 
to be seen anywhere on its mirror-like surface. Only 
the closest scrutiny will reveal the presence of scores of 
speckled trout, poised motionless midway in the Umpid 
depths. For, seen in their native element, the rich and 
varied tints of this aristocrat of the woodland l^ilces and 
brooks become an elusive, phantom! ike gray. ' 
If the watcher on the bank, whether he be the merest 
tyro in the "gentle art" or the seasoned veteran of eastern 
trout preserves, would see something well worth the 
seventeen-mile drive and the two-mile tramp which it 
costs to get in, let him descend to the water level and 
drop his fly out as far as possible among those shadow 
spots. Your bait may have flicked the water so lightly 
that you scarcely saw the spatter of it, but keen eyes — 
many pairs of them — ^have seen it plainly, through inter- 
vening spaces of water greater than the entire length 
of your cast, and by the time you can carry yoU:r hand, to 
the reel that article is in active • requisition. . 
The Wisconsin trout is a hungry bitei-, and it does_ 
not need the electric tremor of the rod to tell you what 
is going on out there. You can see it for yourself, as 
plainly as through the plate glass sides of an aquarium. 
It is a case of "first come, first served." There is one, 
big beauty hooked hard and fast, while a school of his. 
fellows are struggHng for the honor of being first in' 
the frying-pan. 
If you have a party of hungry fellow, guests watching 
you im.patiently from the bank above, you will bring 
your fish ashore at once, attach two leaders to your 
line and reel the snappy creatures in by threes, till 
even the hungriest sinner there, who counseled and 
abetted the slaughter, turns down his thumb. 
If, however, you have a soul superior to the impor- 
tunities of appetite, you will wind in your first fish very 
gently until you can make out the markings on its satiny 
skin, and there, at your leisure., you will study the di- 
verting tricks of habit of the frisky "beauties" which 
are following, as far as they can, their luckless relati-\fe 
into captivity. There will certainly be a score of them — 
there may be a hundred—and you stand there with the 
mighty hush of the forest about you, forgetting the 
flight of time and the weakening struggles of your hap-- 
less victim, while you gloat with a sense of rich posses- 
sion over that exquisite pag« of animated nature^ il- 
lumined by the glad June sunshine. .. 
If a man be a public benefactor, who makfcs: two bl^^es 
of grass grow where only one grew before, what shall 
be said of the t-wo true disciples of Izaak Walton to 
whose zeal we ow'e it that to-day the waters of thg 
Evergreen and its tributaries teem with toothsome trput, 
where^ less than sixteen years ago, the flavorless chub 
and th« measly shiner alone rewarded the angler's quest 
for nobler -game'?. Voluntarily, and without hope. of re- 
ward, these two public-spirited citizens, whose names 
are 'withheld out of deference to their well-knowri 
modesty, undertook the seemingly hopeless task of stock? 
ing the Evergreen with speckled trout, from waters lying 
ten miles distant through the then unbroken forest. 
One morning early in the summer of '82, our two phi- 
lanthropists started from an eastern tributary of the Wolf 
bearing between them' two camp kettles filled with fresh 
spring water, each containing sixteen frisky young trout, 
or thirty-two all told. Over boulders, ledges and fallen 
tree trunks, the two plucky fishermen struggled with 
their precious burdens, reaching, after many mishaps, the 
East Fork of the Evergreen with only eight live fish in 
their kettles. And this was the humble beginning of the 
prosperous trout colony which includes the Antigo Fish- 
ing Club's preserve. 
I had been spending a week at the club's snug quarters 
still-hunting and grouse shooting in company with Mr. 
Henshaw, the Nestor of the club, and Mr. Lou Bucknam, 
the life of it, when business engagements which would 
not wait took my gfenial hosts to town, leaving to me the 
pleasant alternative of either going along with them or 
playing at housekeeping until they should return for 
me at "the expiration of Wiy ten days' vacafioh. : 
As I had picked up a smattering of plain cookery, and 
there was a saddle of buck lianaing up in the woodshed 
and a cellar crammed full of big Irish potatoes, i de- 
rided to remain in camp. Besides, I had not half gotteri 
my fill of the charm of the grand old Wisconsin woods 
in their brown November dress. So,- after turning Over 
to me the keys of . the larder, conferring upon the- dis- 
cretionary powers regarding the use of a certain axe and 
bucksaw, and investing me with absolute authority over 
Bismarck, the club's mongrel mascot, my late hosts 
departed down the Elton trail, shouting back a promise 
to come out and spend the following Sunday with me. 
X' had often watched with amused interest the exagger- 
ated air of importance which a small boy, left tempora- 
rily in charge of a pie and cake shop, assiunes toward 
another small Ijoy who has the misfortune to come in 
for a penny bun; but never had I understood the true 
inwardness of that sudden access of arrogance Until that 
perfect November afternoon when I set out to air the 
dignities of the office of major-domo — without portfolio 
■ — of the Antigo Fishing Club. As I stood on the steps 
of the club house, surveying the three goodly acres of 
clearing, with its patch of big pumpkins and fat shocks 
of corn, and jingling the keys of the woodshed, the pantry 
and cellar, I realized something of the oldtime nerve 
tingle of the night I ran races under the moonlight, in 
my first pair of red-topped, copper-toed boots. 
It was a typical November evening, save the absence 
of snow, and there were plenty of signs of that in the air. 
High up against the dull gray cloud rack, which had 
hidden the sun since early morning, a flock of wild geese 
were winging their way swiftly southward, squawking 
and gabbling as they went, as if sighting a familiar I'cst- 
ing place. 
There was that peculiar property in the air which the 
backwoods folk call "hollow," and the slightest sounds 
fell with startling distinctness on the evening solitudes. 
The barking of the dogs drifted faintly in from the Elton 
settlement, two long miles away, through the woods. A 
whirring of wings through the frost-browned leaves on 
the edge of the clearing told of the flight of a feeding 
grouse. A subdued rustling in the neighboring corn 
shocks betrayed the whereabouts of foraging squirrels 
threshing out their evening ration of corn. Out in front 
of the club house stood Bismarck, pricking his ears 
alternately at the sounds from the settlement, the thresh- 
ing in the corn shocks and the whirring of wings in 
the .foliage. In the dusky background the trout lake 
lay keeping in its prison of ice. its glassy surface mir- 
roring perfectly the dark woods beyond — the counterfeit 
presentment of a .sunimer calm. 
While I was lighting' the club house lamps that evening. 
Bismarck, grown tired at last, of his favorite pastime of 
barking at the settlement dogs, began scratching at the 
kitchen door, and when I opened it he came in shaking 
the wet from his back. There was a glimmer of white 
on the doorstep, and glancing out I saw the great moist 
flakes, the -first of the season, falling silently down 
through the t-wilight. 
There was that in the situation m^ost satisfying, both 
to the imaginative and realistic sense. Without, the 
witchery of the lone dark forest, the secrets of centuries 
locked fast in its silence, a mighty barrier reef, out- 
stretched between the haven of the woodsman's clearing, 
and the 'fret and din of a world gone mad from lust of 
gold and want of bread, in whose depths are hushed 
eternally the voices of shipwreck from its storm-swept 
outer shores. Within, the crackling of wood fires, the 
glow of lamplight, the swelling song of a tea-kettle 
conaiiig to a boil, a tantalizing combination of odor*- 
which three shrewd guesses would name as follows: 
.Potatoes roasting in a redhot oven, venison steak frying 
in its-own fat, and double strong Mocha threatening lo boil 
over. Bismarck, lying back of the kitchen stove, thumped 
ai)proval with his bony tail, as from time to time the 
odors of cookery came his way. 
"O, Solitude! where are the charms 
That sages have found in thy face?" 
sang the castaway of Juan Fernandez, to the accompani- 
ment of trampling surf and the shrill whistle of the sea 
winds, and solitude, up to the present time, having 
rnahitained a discreet silence regarding the whereabouts 
tif the attractive properties which the disgruntled bard 
of the desert isle in her found missing, I, her self-consti- 
tuted spokesman, do hereby declare not the least of those 
charms to be the unexpected discovery on an Upper shelf 
of a club house pantry of a deep punipkin pie with seven 
brown spots on it — "the kind that mother used to make." 
< 'ooking your own supper and sitting down alone to it 
in a backwoods clearing, with the nearest neighbor 
two miles away, may not be what it is cracked up to be, 
hut a pie like that on the table is a mitigating circum- 
stance. 
It seemed a little strange at first, those dark silent 
rooms overhead, where the echo of familiar voices 
seemed still to linger, the three vacant chairs in front of 
the fireplace, and the three pairs of hunting boots ranged 
by the wall — that intangible something which looks out 
at you from the w:indows of 'every deserted old farm- 
house. . . 
-A. cynical feminine writer of books has defined man as 
"the only animal that chews tobacco and makes love all 
the year round." For this. O fair Philistine! I respect- 
fully beg to substitute the following: The only domestic 
animal that deprecates dining alone. A man's enjoyment 
of a solitary meal is in the inverse ratio of his fitness 
for the higher duties of citzenship. The occasional bad 
breaks at stupid state dinners, such as spilling your soup 
in your neighbor's lap, is a trifle compared to the sense 
of 'isolation conveyed by the rattle of a spoon in an 
empty tea-cup, when supping alone on a wintry night in 
the aching stillness of a backwoods camp whence all 
but you have fled. 
It is under such circumstances as these that a man 
learns to appreciate the companionship of a faithful dog, 
stump-tailed dogs alone cj<cepted. At such a time there 
is more comfort in a single tail-wag of an honest old 
dog than in all the smoking tobacco in the United States 
commissary. Tl-\ere is iaractically no limit to the moral 
support stored up in the tail of a well-conditioned dog. 
It stands to-day as a symbol of the broadest democracy 
known to the world. Under the peasant's toil-stained 
garb and the cloak of the prince to the purple born, the 
eyes of a dog see only the man, and neither bribes nor 
blows tm g'din for either the prelerenee of that demo- 
cratic tail. .j . , 
Of all that botantiful stipper, only the pickles and dishes 
remained to be returned to the, pantry — thanks to Bis- 
marck's assistance. • The cares of housekeeping were 
resting lightly upon m-e. When the supper things had 
been put away and I sat ffi the Nestor^s easy chair smok- 
ing the Nestor's corncob pipe, my feet outstretched to 
the glowing maple coals, the lamplight falling over my 
shDulder on the pages of "Treasure Island,". I xould 
not help pausing from time to time, despite the fascina- 
tion of the yarn, to wonder why it was that womenfolk 
were everlastingly harping on that old string about 
"Man's work being from sun to sun, and woman's work 
never being done," and I made a mental note of some 
pointers which I intended to give mj'^ landlady upon my 
return to the city. Why, it had not taken me fifteen min= 
utes to clear the table, give Bismarck his supper, put a 
log on the fire and light my pipe, and here I was through 
for the day, with all the evening ahead of me for the 
cultivation of my mind. I had set the supper dishes out 
in the kitchen to await the breakfast dish-washing. What 
could be simpler? 
I had reached that part of . Stevenson's captivating story 
where the surviving mutineers of the Hispaniola, ad- 
vancing on the spot laid down in Flint's cha^t as the 
burial place of the blood-stained treasure, are suddenly 
halted by that awful cry in the familiar tones of the dead 
pirate skipper, ringing through the stillness. The very 
air of the room seemed echoing with "Darby McGraw! 
Darby McGraw!" when Bismarck, who was snoozing 
at my feet, suddenly, and without the slightest premoni- 
tory symptom of nightmare, uttered a prolonged and 
blood-curdling howl, followed by an excellent imitation 
of a mule in a treadmill with the belt and the brake off. 
Now, the genial author of this breezy pirate tale has 
made no provision whatsoever for a climax in any of the 
situations leading up successively to the discovery by 
Silver's cutthroat band of the rifled treasure pit, but it 
occurred exactly at the point where Bismarck's nightmare 
overtook the reading. Although I struggled on desper- 
rately to the end,. there was not a minute after Bismarck 
took a hand when the author's cleverly contrived climax 
stood a ghost of a chance of winning. It was all dog 
and "Darby McGraw." 
When, the last thing before retiring that night, I went 
out to take a squint at the weather, as is the custom of alt 
old hunters in camp, the air was still thick with the falling 
flakes, while a moaning sound in the neighboring pines, 
as of surf on a distant bar, told of the rising storm. 
What hour the storm burst over the clearing I did not 
lie awake to see, but at da-wn next morning I looked 
from my sleeping room window across a sea of tossing 
boughs, through which a roaring northwest gale drove 
the snow in a powdeny smudge. As I descended to the 
kitchen the stairs creaked frostily, and Bismarck's nose 
was like a lump of ice, as from time to time he poked it 
playfully into the back of my neck, as I stooped to the 
task of building the fires. 
Through the kitchen window I saw the clearing, a 
whirling eddy of snow, and when I opened the door to 
give Bismarck a morning run at the rabbits a barrel 
of the "beautiful" tumbled inside. There was an inch 
of new ice in the rain barrel and a foot of snow on the 
level. But within, the frosty air was fragrant with the 
scent of freshly kindled fat pine fires, and their snap' 
and crackle echoed cheerily in the dawn-lit silence of 
the rooms. 
- What to do with myself that day to keep off the' 
creeping feeling of loneliness was the question that con-: 
fronted me as I sat over my second cup of coffee, watch- 
ing through the window opposite the whipping pf the 
naked boughs along the margin of the trout lake. - It 
was an ideal day for still-hunting, barring the falling 
trees and flying limbs. Many a time-scarred monarch 
of the woods had gone down in that long night's battle 
with the elements. Two large elms had already tumbled 
into the clearing, their shattered branches lying about 
them like the arms of a fallen knight, and from time 
to time I caught above the roaring of the storm the 
sound of the great trunks crashing downward through 
the undergrowth. Oifly a man's necessities would take 
him into the woods on such a day. 
But if not still-hunting, what then? Out in the middle 
of the lake was a moorijig stake, rising through the ice 
to the height of a man, where we used to hitch the Baldy. 
the club house punt, during the summer fly-fishing, and 
which marked the location of one of the deepest troiit 
holes. Lying just inside this stake was a patch of open 
water about the dimensions of a double blanket. As I 
looked, my loneliness flew up the chimney, for I knew 
that out there in that patch of blue water were hosts of 
old acquaintances. 
There was a rack of rods oil. the dining room wall, 
with reels, lines, everything ready to begin work. At the 
foot of the bank was the Baldy turned bottom side up on 
the boulders. After dinner I would push it out to that 
emerald patch in the snow and catch a mess of trout for 
the Sunday breakfast of my returning friends. 
The sun came out along toward noon, a blotch of 
rainbow color in a flying, sparkling mist, but neither 
the storm nor the cold lost its grip. ' _ - 
I could not help but smile to myself at the incon- 
gruity of my outfit, as I scrambled down the bank that 
afternoon, with Bismarck bringing up the rear, to the 
spot where the rounded hillock of snow marked the lo- 
cation of the punt. Not often does it fall to the sports- 
man's lot to go fly-fishing arrayed in German socks 
and arctics, coonskin coat and fleece-lined buckskin 
gloves, nor seldom does his outfit include such things 
as a broom, a snow-shovel and an axe. 
With the punt resurrected and turned on its- bottom, 
and the fishing tackle placed therein, I began feeling my 
way through the soft deep drifts that bordered the springy 
margin of the lake. Once clear of these, I headed 
straight for the mooring stake, testing the ice at every 
step with the butt of the heavy axe. Proceeding slowly. 
I had worked my Avay out to within 15ft. of_ the dark 
green patch, when a loud thunk, thunk, a bending of the 
ice beneath my feet, and a wrinkling of the water along 
the edge of the opening — signs so familiar to all ad- 
venturous skaters — warned me back. 
To get to .the shore, exchange the axe for the snow 
shovel and broom successively, clear a slide through the 
length of my line of tracks, run the punt to the end of 
it and beyond was the work of a little less than an hour, 
and when I added my weight to the forward thwart of my 
amphibious craft the ice went down and the water came 
up, and the Baldy slid gracefully into the open. As the 
punt tpoli the Yv^ater, I caught, through a rift in the float-' 
