182 
FOREST AND STREAM. 
ANGLING NOTES. 
J^W ' , J ■ 
Winter FisUog. 
To the man who fished only with the artificial fly, and 
never under any circumstances with bait, winter fishing .is 
a sealed book, and he has m}' sympathy if he never ex- 
perienced the pleasure of standing near a hole in the ice 
waiting for a bite of pike or perch or trout, though the 
law now forbids fishing through the ice for trout. It is a 
good many years since I stood on the ice and watched a 
Jot of tip-ups, but when I came down the Ghamplain 
Division of the Delaware & Hudson Railroad recently and 
saw from the car window fishermen watching the baited 
holes in the ice of Lake Champlain, I confess that I 
would liave been glad to have had some lines of my own 
in the water. There have been improvements in ice fish- 
ing, too, since I used an ice chisel to cut holes for fishing. 
The first fisherman that I noticed had his holes in a 
straight line at right angles to the shore, and as the car 
rolled oi> and passed another and another, I saw that 
all had the holes in a line as straight as though it had 
been marked out by a surveyor, and I wondered that I 
had not thought of doing the same when I was a boy. 
Some of the fishermen had two lines of holes equally 
straight, and not far apart, and all could be watched from 
one end, where, in most cases, there was a little shanty 
with a stove. The old way was to cut the holes most 
irregularly without the least regard to convenience of 
watching, and as no fisherman that I have met had eyes 
in the back of his head, the man or boy on duty had to 
be a sort of revolving fisherman to watch all the tip-ups, 
and even then one would go down behind him while he 
was looking out in front. In this new way the fishermen 
has to look but in one direction, and aU his lines are 
under his eye. 
The tip-ups used puzzled me, for apparently they were 
all alike, and made of a strip of pine or spruce sawed or 
shaped with a knife, and laid flat across the holes so 
evenly that the holes and sticks looked like soldiers on 
dress parade. How the tip-ups were operated I could not 
see from the moving train, but they were not the elaborate 
afifairs I itsed for a season, and were like an old-fashioned 
well sweep with a long arm and a short one, and an up- 
right on which it swung; nor were they the simple beech 
with the thick end frozen into the ice so the twigs pro- 
jected OA^er the hole to one of which the line was hung 
by a loop and a bit of red flannel attached near the 
loop, the disappearance of the flannel indicating that the 
bait had been taken and line and flannel drawn into the 
water through the hole in the ice. That was the signal for 
a rush for the line before too much of it was drawn by the 
fish into the water. Perhaps my assthetic angling nature 
has been blunted, or it is possible that it never was highly 
developed, for I would like a little winter fishing right 
now to find if it would bring the pleasure it once did when 
I was a deal younger. If I should try winter fishing I 
might find that the pleasure in it was much less than it 
used to be. The streets in the town where I was born are 
much narrower than they were formerly, and the blocks 
are .shorter : and last summer I had occasion to visit a 
pond that I had not seen since I was a boy (the last time 
I went, to it, by the way, before last year, was on snow- 
shoes to fish in it through the ice for trout), and it was a 
mere pool of water, though the shore line had not 
changed since I saw it as a fairly good-sized lake. Years 
in their pasage do dwarf things so unpleasantly, and ice 
fishing may not have the charm that it once had, and it 
niay be safer to recall the glamor of it in past years and 
wait for the season of fly-fishing and softer air and bluer 
sky. 
When I saw the tip-up fishermen at work on Lake 
Champlain all pursuing the same method in their fishing, 
it occurred to me, as it has before, that fishermen of a 
locality followed a beaten path — what one does, all do. 
For twenty miles along the lake the fishermen had the 
same straight line of fishing holes in the ice, with the 
same style of tip-up. 
Where I once fished much m the spring for lake trout 
by trolling, all the fishermen used gangs of No. 6 trebes 
hooks, tied on single gut, and it was heresy to use larger, 
for the man who introduced that style of fishing used No. 
6 hooks on single gut. When I fovtnd that the trout 
smashed the books and twisted the gut to make it worth- 
less faster than I could make the gangs for myself and 
my friends, I used heavier hooks on twisted gut, and was 
almost voted as without the pale. Slowly the larger hooks 
came in use, and now all use them. Nowhere except in the 
St. Lawrence are bells used on the end of short rods to 
indicate the bite of a mascalonge. At one black bass lake 
I found the fishermen all used a sinker at the end of the 
line, and the hooks above it, probably a style intro- 
duced by some salt-water fisherman. If one discovers a 
peculiarity in fishing tools in a locality, the peculiarity 
pervades the entire fishing community. The Long Lake 
model of boat does not pass current where the Saranac 
model is the vogue, and the St. Lawrence fishing skiff 
is as unlike the Champlain fishing boat as the 
West Virginia scow is unlike the Canadian birch 
or the Gaspe wooden canoe. The fishing tackle in 
use in one locality may differ entirely from that in use 
in another locality for local reasons, but each community 
adheres to the kind of tackle it was brought Up on, and to 
the manner of using it. as firmly as it adheres to other 
family traditions or religious faith, and one who would 
advocate a change in either would better talk to the 
wind from the house top to change the location of the 
North Pole, as to hope to bring about a reform when a 
community has fished in a certain way througlj genera- 
tions of fishermen. The men who fish for smelts in Lake 
Champlain cut a thin slice from the tail of the fish to 
bait the hook for the next fish. The perch fishermen in 
Lake George, the two lakes being only half a dozen miles 
apart, catch one perch with a grub, and use the eyes of 
the perch for future bait, and so on to the end of the 
chapter, each perch furnishing bait for two of its fellows. 
This never did seem to me to be a square deal, for a man 
who had lived amid the refining influences of civili^^a- 
tion, to indulge in practices that would be condemned in a 
savage by any one but a nerch fisherman. If one can over- 
look the methods by which yellow perch are reduced to 
possession by winter fishing, the fish are one of the finest 
of winter fishes for the table. 
Economy of Water to Fishcaltute, 
One of the first things to be obtained to successfully 
practice artificial fish propagation is water, and the next 
thing is plenty of water; and yet fish are hatched with 
very little water, as Avitness the experiments of a Russian 
fishculturist. Dr. Grimm, who placed the impregnated 
eggs on a bed of damp cotton and covered them with a 
layer of the same material and placed them in a cham- 
ber wliere the temperature was kept at 54.5 degrees Fahr., 
and the cotton containing moisture until the fish were 
hatched. 
Too often this happens with eggs' that the owner does 
not wish to hatch out until he can select the time and 
place. -Eggs shipped a long distince get dry or the pack- 
ing worn and the eggs hatch prematurely. This happened 
to a lot of choice eggs that I imported from Eiirope, and 
the comparatively few eggs that did not hatch produced 
weak fry; but this Avas not an experiment of hatching 
eggs in moistened cotton wool, such as Dr. Grimm suc- 
ceeded in doing, but it came from poor packing and high 
temperature in the room on the .steamer. 
When Dr. Grimm had hatched the fry, Dr. Wiet took 
them, and he says: "I have noticed that many persons 
are deterred from taking up fishculture as a hobby from 
the fear that lai-ge aquarium or tanks would, be.; required, 
and that .the cost of a sufficient water supply would 
amount to] aloiost a sniall fortune. Thi?, h^weA'^er, is not 
the case. It is quite possible to rear 2,800 rainbow trout 
fry in a tank 3 feet by iVz by 2 inches, through which a 
stream of water, rtmning at the rate of l% pints 
per minute is allowed to pass. I, . mysejlf,ji - have 
tried this, and have proved it to he -very"^ sttc- 
cessful, since I did not Ipse a single fish during the A^hoSle 
of the .;p-iiie months that I kept the fish in the tank. I fed 
"^y J'oi^gijpxoteges upon very finely minced raw beef, arid 
I may' sa^^ they thrive exrcellentiy upon this gdiet. T|ie 
quantity of water used per day of twenty-four -hours, was, 
I found, one and one-half cubic feet, so that that would 
not be termed an extravagant use of Avater." The figures 
are given as I find them, and it was probably the intention 
to say that the water consumed was cubic feet per 
hour, for pints per minute would be over thirteen 
gallons per hour, and Avhile fish eggs may be hatched 
with a small quantity of water, it is much safer to have an 
abundance, For an experiment, just to see AA'hat may 
be accomplished in that direction, it is interesting, per- 
haps, to hatch fish eggs in moistened cotton, but where 
eggs are to be hatched by hundreds of thousands, running 
Avater will give better results, and until the Grimm- Wiet 
experiment is carried further to determine if the fry 
hatched in moistened cotton, are as vigorous and strong 
after they are hatched as fry hatched in the ordinary 
way, the fi)=h breeder Avould better adhere to miming 
water and plenty of it. 
Some years ago IVTr. C. T. Orvis, of Manchester, Vt., 
fitted up a hatchery in the laundry in the basement of 
his house, and used the water Avhich came from a spring 
at the base of Equinox Mountain in pipes to his house 
for domestic purposes. In this hatchery he hatched, as 
I now remember, something like forty or fift^' thousand 
eggs of trout in a season. The apparatus took up very 
little room, it was clean, and the room was dry and prob- 
ably less disordered than when in summer it was used 
for laundr}' purposes, and the water used would have 
gone to waste had it not passed through the hatchery 
troughs. How much water was used I do not know, as 
Mr. Orvis could not noAv tell, but it was not more than I 
haA^e seen running from pipes into the waste in some 
houses to keep them from freezing, and after I saw the 
little hatchery in operation, I wrote about it and de- 
scribed its construction, and advocated the construc- 
tion of similar hatcheries Avhere Avater and room were 
obtainable. Now I do not recall how many years Mr. 
Orvis maintained his hatchery under his own roof, but 
he turned out into the streams about Manchester a goodly 
number of j'oung trout that, except for his personal 
efforts, the waters Avould not have had. I have fixed the 
time of my Adsit to Mr. Orvis' hatchery as the winter of 
1889-go, from the fact that while I was there I received a 
cable from Mr. R. B. Marston, advising me that he had 
sent me a present of 10000 Hampshire trout eggs, and I 
find that I planted the fry from these eggs in April, 1890. 
My impression is that Mr, Orvis maintained his hatchery 
for several years, and I knoAv that he constructed ponds 
and reared the young trout to yearlings or older before 
they Avent down into the Battenkill, but I have no doubt 
but he Avould give information in detail to anv one whr> 
may desire to erect a hatchery of a similar kind. 
Pitched Out with Pole Hoofc. 
A friend Aviio frequently sends me newspaper clippings 
has sent me a fresh lot, which I find on my desk this 
evening. One is cut from a New York daily, and copies 
a story from Oregon, relating to Alaska salmon. A 
young man has been in Alaska for a year and returned 
to Oregon to visit his parents and entertain his friends 
with his adventures, and here is a small piece of one: 
**Fishing for salmon in the small creeks is immense. 
Sometimes they run up the streams so thickly that they 
actually da,m up the water. I have stood on the banks of a 
little stream and pitched them out with a pole with a hook 
on the end until I was tired." There Avas no one present 
to pitch him in and droAvn him, so the facts of the murder 
got into the newspapers, and will be^ circulated until 
some other young man who desires to return to his 
parents and friends Avith tales of his Avonderful destruction 
of fish ascending a stream to spawn, pitches them out 
with a pole hook until he is more tired than the first 
man. How far are the daily and Aveekly ncAvpapers of the 
daj' re.sponsible foi AA^anton destruction of fish and game? 
If I belonged to a debating society I would propose 
the question for discussion. 
Never since William Caxton invented printing in 1474 
have I seen in a neAvspaper a good Avholesome story 
about a man going out to fish and catching one big fish 
and taking it home to his family to eat of it prudently, and 
of giving what might remain to the poor, but let a man 
slaughter sometliing. no matter what, of food and waste 
it. and it is printed with double heads, and the bigq-er the 
killing the greater the circulation of the story. Perhaps 
Ave are not sufficiently far remoA-ed from our aboriginal 
and -avage ancestors, who 1i.ved by blood alone, to expect 
anytliing better of us than that we instinctively kill every- 
thing in sight that has fins or fur or feathers, but possibly 
the people of a few centuries later may not h'ave the kill- 
ing instinct so highly developed, for there Avill be nothing 
for it to feed on. 
Alaska Salmon. 
It is but a few years, comparatively, that salmon 
swarmed in every stream in Alaska, as the young man 
with the pole hook states, but about the time that Ave 
might say they were discovered by the white man, the 
white man began the war of extermination in the Avay 
that the white man has a habit of doing when he dis- 
covers that buffalo skins, or seal skins, or salmon in 
cans, or pigeons in barrels, will bring money to his 
pocket, and then another discovery was made — that in 
order to preserve the newly discovered salmon, not in 
cans, but for the future, they must have a "National 
Salmon Park," where no white man would be permitted 
except as guards with guns in their hands to preserve the 
fish from extinction and keep a remnant from going 
to that bourne to which the dodo has gone and the brook 
trout had a ticket until artificial fishculture and stringent 
laws detained it yet a little longer. 
In advocating a national salmon park hy setting aside 
one of the Alaska islands in the waters of which to rear 
salmon, unfretted by nets of canner and pole hooks of 
adventurous young men, Livingston Stone said : "How is 
it Avith the salmon streams of Alaska ? Not even there are 
the salmon safe. Countless myriads of salmon formerly 
filled all the river.? and streams of the long Alaska coast, 
and they were nearly 2,000 miles from the destroying hand 
of civilized man, but they were not safe even on these 
distant shores. * * * jj^p Karluk River, or Kodiak, is 
probably the most wonderful salmon river in the Avorld. 
On Aug. 2, 1889, the cannery nets caught on Karluk 
beach at the mouth of the river, 153,000 salmon by actual 
count._ A short time after the writer Avent up the Kar- 
luk River in a bidarka — the skin boat of the natives — ex- 
pecting to .see myriads of salmon spawning and thou- 
sands on their journey to the spaAvning grounds, but in- 
stead of the wonderful sight we anticipated, our Avhole 
party, I think, saAV less than a aozen in the river till Ave 
reached the loAver spawning grounds, and then to our 
astonishment we saw only a few scattering fish spawning, 
such as one might see in the most commonplace salmon 
river in the world." 
Another agent of the United States Fish" Commission 
who went to Alaska reported seeing at one river where 
there was a cannery a net stretched entirly across the 
mouth of the river, so that no salmon could ascend to 
spawn, all were taken in the nets, and fine salmon trout 
taken with the salmon were thrown onto the beach to 
rot. It is a horrible story, but true, and the canneries 
seem to be succeeding very well in the work of extinction 
Avithout the assistance of the young man who throws out 
salmon for exercise and to make himself tired so he 
can go home and tell his parents about it and make them 
sorry they ever raised him. 
Another quotation from Livingston Stone and I am 
through for this time: "The salmon are obliged to come 
inland to breed. They are compelled from sheer neces- 
sity to come up the rivers into the very midst of their 
human enemies. They cannot stay in the ocean like 
other fishes of the sea, where they are safe from the hand 
of man, but they must necessarily come, one might say, 
into his very grasp, and, like the buffalo, whether they 
turn to the north, south, east or west, they go into the very 
jaws of death; for Avhat hope is there for a salmon to 
escape after he has entered a river, if a man choo'^es to 
employ his most effective agencies for his capture. There 
is none. The salmon is doomed. There is no refuge for 
the salmon in this country any more than there Avas 
for the buffalo." 
Frederick Cox. 
I nearly forgot to say that the young man with the 
pole hook Avho destroyed salmon until he got tired, bears 
the name of Frederick Cox, according to the Morning 
Oregonian, and here I do my mite to hand his name down 
to fame, or shame. 
"Ice Fish." 
The common smelt of Lake Champlain are called "ice 
fish" because they are caught only through the ice, usually 
in February- and March. A few weeks ago when I was in 
Port Henry, no smelts had been taken ,as the ice had 
not formed on that portion of the lake, where the smelts 
are generally caught, for they are caught only in certain 
localities. This Aveek, on my way to New York, I met 3 
gentleman from Port Henry, who told me that "ice fish" 
had not yet been caught at that place, but as he had 
promised some to friend*, he thought they could be 
caught from a boat as well as froui a shanty on the ice, 
and he had sert two men to the smelt grounds to fish 
for them, and they had caught but one fi=h, about six 
inches long, and he could not explain why it Avas so, for 
he was sure that within twenty-four hours after the ice 
had formed at the place where the men fished from 
boats, the ice fishermen Avould catch half a ton of "ice 
fish." This is very strange that, on the same ground Avith 
same bait and same tackle and method of using it, the 
smelts will not bite just before the ice forms, and Avill 
bite directly after it does, and there is no reasonable 
explanation why it should be so that I can advance. 
The same evening of the day that the Port Henry, 
gentleman told me of the failure of his fishermen to catch 
smelts in Lake Champlain. I saw on a bill of fare at a 
New York hotel, "Lake Champlain frost fiph," and I 
asked the waiter to go to the steAvard and find what the 
fish really were, particularly if they Avere smelts from. 
Lake Champlain, and if so where he got them. The 
steward said they were smelts, but not from Lake Cham- 
plain, and the name had been placed on the bill by mJs- 
take. i| 
The Gat Crop, 
Every year about this time the English angling papers 
have a report on the srut crop, issued by a tackle dealer 
and gun importer in Manchester. In last Fishing Gazette 
I see that his report is marked the eighteenth year, and 
I must haA'e read it for that lensrth of time, and now 
Avish I had them all here together, for I seem to recall that 
there has been a sameness to these reports that would 
make one serve for all, and I >sre^'4 \^ 0 s^e. them. 
