Forest and Stream 
Six Months, $1 50. 
$3 a Year, 10 Cts. a Copy. 
NEW YORK, SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 6, 1913. 
VOL. LXXXI.-No. 10. 
127 Franklin St.. New York. 
Two Weeks with the Bass and Pickerel 
At Intermediate Lake, Antrim County, Michigan 
By KINGFISHER 
W HEN we drifted back to the island about i 
F. M. for lunch, I told my carefully pre¬ 
pared story about the little bass to the boys, 
and was greeted by the scoffers with what smack¬ 
ed of undue levity for so small a fish (story). 
They were jubilant over a fine string of large bass, 
and three or four pickerel in the bottom of the 
boat had evidently found the fighting editor in 
when they called. But I had my revenge in the 
afternoon. I fished the east side above the mouth 
of the little stream, and on comparing notes at 
camp in the evening I scored one over the boys 
with a small-mouthed black bass that stopped 
the scale at six pounds eight ounces—a glorious 
game fish that tried the temper of my little rod 
a dozen times till my heart was in my throat, and 
gave up the fight only when reduced to the last 
feeble “wiggle” of his broad tail. 
The handling of that bass in thirty or forty 
feet of clear water—no • roots, rocks or snags 
for him to whip around and break away—ap¬ 
proached as near to pure delight as is usually 
vouchsafed a follower of the gentle Izaak in a 
lifetime, and I was in a very serene frame of 
mind over it the rest of the evening. Eight 
other bass of from three to four and a half 
pounds each, and three longfaces made up an 
afternoon’s sport not soon to be forgotten. The 
boys had taken more fish than I, but none the 
peer of old “moss back” at the head of my 
string. 
Sitting around the fire in the cool night air, 
between puffs of smoke, the incidents of the day 
were related and battles with fierce pickerel and 
cunning bass fought over again, which lost noth¬ 
ing in the recital. There, off the little round 
island above the camp, Jim had a masterful fight 
with a four-pound bass, the largest one he had 
ever taken, and which he vowed with a mighty 
clincher, was worth the whole cost of the ex¬ 
pedition. “Some hope for him yet,” muttered 
the Scribe. 
A little further up the Scribe took five heavy 
bass in working over a hundred yards of water. 
Off “pickerel point” the writer struck a 
mighty longface, and after an evenly balanced 
fight of half an hour, the line flew back over 
his head with the remains of a badly frayed 
double gut snell at the end of it as a reminder 
of the meanness of pickerel in general. 
The Scribe changed his crossed legs, shoved 
a fresh shell in his pipe, and remarked that “it 
(Continued from page 263.) 
was natural and proper, as fish stories go, for 
one to always lose his biggest fish; he had fre¬ 
quently done so himself, but as to the ‘enormous¬ 
ness’ of my pickerel he had only my unsupported 
word, and he would have to put it down as an¬ 
other one on my old score of whoppers,” and so 
on till the fire went down and the pipes out. 
The scene was so quiet and restful that we 
sat around the dying embers till the candle 
burned low in the old bayonet candle-stick in 
the tent, the deep silence of the night being only 
broken by the splash of a fish or muskrat off¬ 
shore, and the occasional weird, lonely cry of 
a loon far up the lake. The soft beams of a 
nearly full moon spread a silver sheen over the 
placid waters between us and the east shore, and 
crept in hazy lines through the misty shadows 
in the foliage overhead. “Camp talk” lagged, 
and stopped, and each sat buried in his own 
thoughts till the spell was broken when the candle 
burned down into its socket in the old bayonet 
and dropped through, warning us that it was 
time to be in bed and in dreamland. 
Next day the boys fished below in the pocket 
while I went up the lake shore as usual, and had 
a quiet, dreamy day to myself. Floating or pull¬ 
ing lazily along the margin of the rushes and 
lilypads in the blue haze, feasting the eye on the 
scarcely ruffled lake and the green shores, the 
angler may dream away the hours, all too short, 
of a long summer day and wish the hard realities 
of life were fewer, and their angles a trifle less 
angular. If the fish are a little “off feed.” he 
may set his rod, lie back in his boat, and draw 
comfort from the happenings around him, for 
your angler, pure and simple, is. in the eternal 
fitness of things, a lover of nature, and sees 
beauty and harmony in all her creatures and be¬ 
longings. From a pleasant reverie he is sud¬ 
denly aroused by the sharp chatter of a king¬ 
fisher as he winds up his reel, with the click 
on. and flaps slowly away from his perch on a 
dead branch overhanging the water. Balancing 
himself on a projecting limb a few yards fur¬ 
ther away, he resumes his solitary watch for the 
small fry that live in the shallow water among 
the reeds and rushes, and on which he must 
count for his dinner. Watching a bald eagle 
soaring a quarter of a mile above the trees, the 
man has forgotten the kingfisher and his dinner, 
when he is startled by a splash inshore and turns 
in time to see him rise, dripping from the water 
with a struggling minnow in his mandibles. He 
hunts a convenient perch, bolts his prey at two 
gulps, and winds up his line for another cast 
He frequently misses his fish, but never gets 
discouraged. “Better luck next time” is a bit 
of philosophy drilled into him from the time he 
first peeps from his shell. Verily, the lines of 
the kingfisher are not always cast in pleasant 
places. 
The silent man in the boat may follow up 
with his eye yonder two little V-shaped waves 
to their point of divergence and catch a glimpse 
of the brown head of a “musquash” with a 
mussel in his mouth, as he disappears behind a 
branch of spruce dipping into the water, and if 
he keeps quiet a minute, he will see him crawl 
out on yon gnarled root at the edge of the water 
and open his prize. Yonder, dressed in his sum¬ 
mer suit of dark brown, skulks a mink along the 
shore, his mouth no doubt watering for the mess 
of frogs he appears to be in search of. 
The muskrat finished his mussel and slid 
into the water in quest of another, and I was 
on the point of taking the oars, when out from 
the bulrushes a few yards ahead of the boat 
emerged a beautiful summer duck, and swim¬ 
ming closely after, I counted nine little baby 
ducks not larger than walnuts, and looking like 
little balls of mottled brown fur. 
They had apparently not noticed me, but a 
stroke of the oars alarmed them, and at a low 
“quack” from the mother, they huddled closely 
together and paddled vigorously up the lake, she 
following between them and the boat, directing 
and encouraging them from time to time by a 
motherly “quack quack.” A few more strokes 
placed me between them and the rushes, when a 
word from the mother headed them out into 
the lake, and T watched them bobbing up and 
down on the tiny waves till they disappeared, 
mother and little ones, behind a long point on 
the opposite shore. It is not likely that the 
mother raised her whole brood, as 110 doubt one 
or more of them found their way into the hungry 
bowels of a sneaking pickerel, or fell victims to 
some prowling mink or “sly old ’coon." I saw 
them a day or two afterward, some distance 
away, but they slipped into the rushes and hid 
before I could get near enough to count them. 
The whimper of a little stream flowing into 
the lake to the left was a welcome sound, as 
I was hot and thirsty, and cramped from sitting 
