48 
FOREST AND STREAM. 
[July 8, 1911. 
We took his advice, and procuring a couple 
of quarts of clams sallied forth after din¬ 
ner. Forty men, thick and thin, big and little 
had already preceded us, each one catching a 
fish often enough to maintain interest and con¬ 
tentment, and we began the afternoon, confi¬ 
dently expecting to fletcherize blackfish about 
6:30 p. m. The four of us, Doc, Dick, my wife 
and I, fished from the Government buoy light 
to the east end of the breakwater hour after 
hour, painstakingly and laboriously, confident 
that we would strike a school and enjoy as 
good sport as our neighbors, a number of whom 
had caught several plump fish weighing a pound 
or more. Now and then we saw three or four 
good sized ones moving leisurely about deep 
down in, some rocky pocket and we tempted 
them with a cunningly baited hook. Invariably 
they would get the bait without sending up the 
fatal signal via the line. They seemed as skill¬ 
ful as the renowned oriental who is so well 
versed in the practice of legerdermain, and when 
sunset forced us to forego our gambling with 
the varieties of fisherman’s luck, the four of 
us had two cunners to show for our afternoon's 
work. Obviously our forte was angling in fresh 
water trout brooks and bass lakes. 
The failure to bring home a catch was of 
small consequence. If our neighbors on the 
breakwater rejoiced in our misfortune, it was 
of little or no concern to us. We had come for 
enjoyment and to conquer, and had discovered, 
first, that our hooks were too big; second, that 
the sinkers we were using weighed only an 
ounce, which was seven-sixteenths of a pound 
too light to hold against the tide; and third, 
that the cold, raw September wind sweeping over 
miles of unprotected sea' had all the chilling 
properties of a Minnesota blizzard. 
I woke up the next morning with the ravish¬ 
ing hunger of a half-starved wolf. If he had 
tried, the late Mark Twain could not properly 
have depicted my appetite. I have seen people 
that looked as if they possessed one as keen, 
but then their hunger had not been whetted for 
twenty-four hours by the salt air, so I do not 
know whether it was altogether my appetite or 
a little natural stubbornness that led me to pro¬ 
pose to Doc that we go out and catch a black- 
fish and fry him for breakfast. He objected, 
claiming his belt did not have holes enough 
in it, so we postponed our start just one 
hour. 
Armed with live bait and dead bait we pulled 
out for the breakwater about 8 o'clock. Anchor¬ 
ing our boat in the lee of the Government light, 
we began operations with fiddlers. We fiddled 
up and down in the rocks, continually baiting 
our hooks, but catching nothing. Then we tried 
clams and caught two cunners. They took hold 
like whales and when we hauled them in the 
boat we agreed that there was not a fish in 
the sea that had as powerful a yank in pro¬ 
portion to its size. By stretching one a little 
it might possibly have measured four inches. 
Doc threw down his line in disgust and grabbed 
the anchor, I caught up the oars and we moved 
to a new location. We barely managed to get 
our boat in position and made fast to a ragged 
granite boulder before the pastor of the African 
M. E. Church rowed around the breakwater 
and dropped anchor in our deserted location. 
On went a fiddler, over went the line, and out 
came a blackfish. In less than half an hour he 
had caught his day’s salary and Doc had caught 
a spider crab. 
Our case had reached an acute stage and we 
held a consultation. The landlubbers that could 
land the wily trout ought to be able to capture 
a blackfish now and then. What was the rea¬ 
son? So far as we could see the natives swore 
by the heavy hand line with an enormous sinker, 
and only two methods of rigging the tackle were 
in vogue. The most common was-to tie a billet 
of lead on the end of a thirty-foot line and 
place two leaders above it about one foot apart. 
The other was to tie two leaders with No. 4/0 
sproat hooks to a small brass ring and fasten 
this to a line upon which a sliding sinker had 
been placed. A native with long practice to his 
credit is about as skillful with such a rope as 
one of the expert cowpunchers depicted by popu¬ 
lar novelists in tales of the days when the man 
with the rope was king of the range. By force 
of circumstances we were landlubbers and had 
to have rods. With a rod in hand we were at 
home and it did not take us long to determine 
that the blackfish had ways of his own and tricks 
that were dark. We found that while they have 
a habit of taking the bait in a sharp snappy 
fashion, they will promptly eject hook, bait and 
all at the first indication of danger. By jerking 
the rod upward the instant you feel the slightest 
movement of the line and keeping a tight tension 
you will force your hook home nine times out 
of ten, and when once hooked they will fight 
with the grim determination of a bull terrier 
until you bring them to the surface. 
We were smiling and happy. Each had caught 
a blackfish and our party had lost half a box 
of hooks and a line or two. Any old fisher¬ 
man will tell you that this is merely an inci¬ 
dent of the sport, due to the fact that the fish 
prefer to inhabit rock heaps, old wrecks or 
any other place where man and fish are soon 
parted. 
About 11 o’clock when the sun was approach¬ 
ing the zenith with a blistering intensity, and 
we were oozing perspiration and contentment, 
out through a gap in the breakwater rushed a 
N EARLY 5,000 feet above sea level in the 
Santis Mountains, which lie between the 
lakes of Constance and Zurich, were found 
about four years ago human relics in two caverns 
on the Ebenalp. The caverns had been known 
for nearly 300 years, and a story is told that 
long before that they were inhabited by wild 
men. Up to the middle of the last century a 
succession of hermits occupied these caverns, 
who used to pick up from the floor bones of 
the cave bear and sell them to pilgrims. It was 
afterward found that the floors of these caverns, 
which cover an area of several hundred square 
yards, and are fifteen or twenty feet thick, are 
full of human relics. Only a small portion of 
this great area has as yet been dug over. Imple¬ 
ments made of quartzite and flint and of the 
bones of the cave bear are found, and it is evi- 
school of fish. They were hopping and skipping 
along over the surface as merrily as school boys 
playing leapfrog. 
"What do you suppose they are?” asked Doc 
jumping up on the rear seat of the boat. 
"Toadfish,” cried Dick; "get down before you 
spill us into the water.” 
Like magic the insatiable desire of man to 
conquer something new, to invade new fields 
after new experiences and adventure was upon 
us, and there was no resisting the call. That 
school of fish had.to be investigated immediate.y, 
and scrambling on top of the breakwater where 
we could observe them closely, Doc and I noticed 
that the school seemed to be after minnows. 
That settled our blackfishing for good and all, 
for with a fly-rod and little fish this promised 
to be more exciting sport, so we bent our backs 
to the oars and pulled for the beach, bound for 
a backwater puddle in the marshes which was 
literally alive with little bean-bellied spotted 
minnows called locally shiners. Why they bore 
that cognomen I could never determine unless 
it was because they shone as snapper blue bait, 
and there is no denying the fact that they did. 
We soon discovered that snappers were a hot 
weather fish. The hotter the day the better 
they would bite, and they loved to be in places 
where the tide was running swiftly, particularly 
close to rocks or anything else that would cause 
the water to swirl and hamper small fish in 
their efforts to escape. 
A pound snapper on the end of twenty or 
thirty feet of fine trout line is a game little 
rascal. He is one of the few fish of the sea 
that possesses an individual charm. He will take 
a spoon or minnow with equal voracity and like 
a true game fish, and prefers to have his food 
in motion. “They eats ’em alive, just gulps ’em 
down and depends on their digestion,” as the 
boat hostler explained, when we came in that 
afternoon with a creel of fine ones. In propor¬ 
tion to their size snappers are good fighters and 
can furnish a healthy man with plenty of en¬ 
joyment. Their name is a misnomer for they 
should be called scrapper blues. 
dent that the quartzite pebbles were picked up 
in a valley several hundred feet below and were 
brought up to the cavern, where the implements 
were manufactured. It is believed that these 
caverns must have been inhabited by man dur¬ 
ing an interglacial epoch with a climate not very 
different from that of to-day, and the geologists 
calculate that to reach this period we should 
have to go back one hundred thousand years. 
Of the discoveries lately made in some of 
these caverns, perhaps the most interesting is 
that in many cases their walls and ceilings were 
decorated by palreolithic man. Such decorations 
were first discovered in the cavern of Altimara 
in Spain about 1879, but were not then regarded 
as authentic, but in 1895, another discoverer 
found wall engravings in Southern France— 
Dordogne—which were accepted, and other 
The Primitive Hunter in Europe 
In Two Parts—II. 
