140 
had a long cast habit, as I enjoyed it. Not that 
I am an expert, as I dou'bt if I ever succeeded in 
placing a fly over sixty or seventy feet away; but 
the pleasure of trying for long casts compen¬ 
sated for lack of fish, which my skilled canoemen 
could not appreciate. They could not under¬ 
stand why I could be satisfied to cast diligently 
all the morning and take but one or two, or 
perhaps no bass; but it was not always thus, ac¬ 
cording to my angling notes. 
I find that on July 19th nine bass were taken; 
three with a fly and the rest with a minnow. 
On the 16th I took three bass with a fly and con¬ 
sidered it a red-letter day, as I worked hard for 
each one and took them on long and venture¬ 
some casts in Utile bays at the foot of a high 
cliff, from which a big mink stared at me, as 
though wondering what I was doing. 
At first I was seriously concerned for my 
canoeman and moose hunter, whose ancestors 
fought with Rouchambeau, and who says bon 
s-w-a-i-r-e delightfully when he leaves me at 
night. He is cheerful, well-bred and very anx¬ 
ious that I shall have good luck, and on what he 
terms the bad days, takes it very much to heart, 
and seriously tries to fasten my bad casting or 
mistakes upon himself or his management of the 
canoe. When I do make a landing with my long 
cast, he hastens to compliment me: “Remarkable, 
Monsieur; dat cas’ he mak me surpriz, dat a 
fac’.” Yesterday I took seven small-mouth black 
bass, using one fly for conscience sake. 
This morning the water was clear and still, 
Lac Perchaude lay like an emerald in the hills 
of deeper tones, reflecting the green slopes as a 
mirror, so that I was eternally landing my fly in 
a forest reflected in the lake. Here the phantom 
canoe had come down out of the sky many a 
time in the long ago, and over yonder on the 
rock near the white beaches came every year a 
strange figure on a pilgrimage, to weep and 
mourn the death here years ago of its friends. 
Sometimes the bass would bite best at early 
•dawn; again at night, and the biggest were always 
found in tall tule—an impossible place to cast, 
where 1 fancied they were hunting for insects. 
My favorite spot was on the west side at the foot 
of a big cliff. My canoeman would paddle along 
slowly, about seventy feet from it, and permit 
me to drop my diminutive fly into every little bay 
or crevice; and every now and then would come 
that sudden tightening of the line, the bending of 
the rod, and into the air would go the game fish 
of the world for his size and inches, flashing a 
moment in the sunlight, to drop and make a 
series of splendid runs up and down before 
coming defiantly to the net. 
The black bass fishermen who use those pseudo 
dynamite lures—diminutive flour barrels lined 
with hooks, which the unfortunate bass doubtless 
take for mice, would have scorned Lac Per¬ 
chaude, as on some days I drew blank after cast¬ 
ing hours, but the casting was part of the game. 
One day I met an angler who scorned barbed 
hooks, all his flies barbless. It was a little thing, 
but I fancy that angler obtained more pure de¬ 
light when he did land a good fish than many 
who know they have their game the moment he 
strikes. It is not well to pose as an ultra-hu¬ 
manitarian or an arbiter piscatorimn, or to claim 
FOREST AND STREAM 
for one fly or barbless hook all the virtues of 
self-abnegation, far from it. 
1 am a worm, minnow or spoon angler when I 
must have trout to save life , and the game will 
not take a fly; but I protest against the awful 
inventions of the trade with many hooks, which 
can but torture the fish and which have but one 
normal function—they illustrate the difference 
between fishing and angling. Not only this: what 
satisfaction is there in a two-hundred-pound man 
arraying himself against a two-pound bass or 
trout, aided and abetted by a monstrosity, fringed 
with deadly hooks? 
Angling is a gentleman’s sport and pastime; 
the object is to attain the impossible, and take 
your game with all the advantage on its side. 
There is a demand in all countries in these days 
when sport is one of the assets of the nation, 
for books on the ethics of sport, lectures in 
schools to teach boys what real sport is, and that 
it does not consist in trying to obtain the limit of 
ducks, geese, grouse, quail, trout or salmon. I 
believe the mental attitude of a gentleman sports¬ 
man is that he is a conservationist by intuition. 
Such a sportsman is Colonel Roosevelt; such an 
angler was still another ex-president, Grover 
Cleveland, who dignified sport by his mental atti¬ 
tude, and to mention one more, Dr. Henry Van 
Dyke. 
The “game’’ and “fish hogs,” so called, are 
found everywhere and are not to blame, as they 
are merely grossly and offensively ignorant. 
They have never been taught that there is such 
a thing as courtesy or fair play in sport. They 
entirely misconceive the idea o i f sport in its 
ethical meaning. 
I11 Italy I was struck by the utter absence of 
birds, and I found that every Italian considers 
that he has a right to shoot birds of every kind. 
Blue bird or robin, sea-urchins, raw and living, 
are game for our friends, kinsmen of Lucullus 
and others who fed their murrays on slaves. The 
point of view is different; also the appetite, 
which often does not wait on good digestion, or 
anything else, for that matter. 
To return to the angling, when the bass abso¬ 
lutely refused to strike, George Cadarette or 
Phil-o-rum would run the canoe ashore, and ex¬ 
changing the rod for the rifle (as a bear was al¬ 
ways a possibility), we would push into the 
fragrant and beautiful forest, and stride away 
with no objective point save to breathe the pure 
air, and find what a mericiful providence might 
throw in our way—bear, moose, deer, or nothing 
at all. 
Lac Perchaude possessed many attractions. 
There were always radiantly beautiful cloud ef¬ 
fects to be seen, while silvery temples of the 
empyrean above it, or the sky was so intensely 
blue that it gave to the deep green water strange 
and weirdly beautiful tints. To-day I longed to 
be an artist that I might more fully appreciate 
the splendid color schemes, to-morrow I would 
be a botanist that I could understand the flora; 
or, some wild melodious note deep in the heart 
of the Laurentians made me wish that I pos¬ 
sessed some keen bird lore intuition that I might 
classify or recognize the maker; but I invariably 
fell back on the homely consolation that I was a 
plain, all-round human, who at least enjoyed 
everything and specialized nothing. 
Indeed, in self-defense, I built up at times a 
speculative philosophy to cover my ignorance 
about plants and nature. If one was “tutored in 
the rudiments of many desperate studies,” if we 
knew everything at sight, half, yes all, of the 
joy of life would be gone, as anticipation, hope, 
expectation are the joy-givers of life, at least 
the very essence of angling, as what more melan¬ 
choly spectacle is there than' to go a-fishing and 
be able to land fish after fish without end. One 
day at San Clemente I was fishing with Dr. Gif¬ 
ford Pinchot for a certain whitefish. The very 
moment my hook reached a certain depth I had 
one, and I caught, I do not know how many, to 
help out an unfortunate Italian market fisher¬ 
man; but I have had positive aversion for white- 
fish ever since; I was surfeited. 
I have seen the blue skies of Italy, those of the 
coast of Afiica and California, but the flecks of 
Laurentian blue between the great billowy clouds 
of this lake region seemed to me the last word 
in color; and as we moved silently in there was 
a constant panorama, a living picture of subtle 
and beautiful changes. Now the slender, silvery 
trunks of the white birches filled the vision; now 
a mass of high ferns, still showing the trail of a 
moose, and beyond, the deep gloom of the forest. 
Suddenly we would enter a little bay, where the 
surface was covered with lily pads and the pure 
white flowers vied with the yellow grasses for 
supremacy. Now Phil-o-rum would send the canoe 
into a sea of wild hyacinth and I played my bass 
on the edge of the floating garden. Down a log 
half in the water runs a mink; the shallows are 
filled with tadpoles en route to frogs; four or 
five white gulls hover over the lake, in which a 
big loon floats and laughs and answers Phil-o- 
rum’s call and challenges-. 
When the canoe enters the shallows I see the 
writing of the unios or oysters on the sand, leav¬ 
ing explanation marks, letters, figures, as they 
crawl. Strange aquatic spiders run nimbly over 
the surface to be snapped up by the bass and 
trout. From a rocky ledge, ever and anon a king¬ 
fisher plunges down into the depths to frighten 
away my bass. Along the wild hyacinth beds 
trout are rising, and in the tule swamp bass are 
feeding on the unfortunate embryos that have at¬ 
tached themselves to the stalks, their clever mo¬ 
saic or basketry disguise failing them here. 
Colors run riot on the lake. A red splash of 
a house looks like a flame, and in the glorious 
sunsets disappears all criticism of Turner, if in¬ 
deed one can imagine that the master has lent 
wings to his sense of color. So, if the bass are 
not biting in Lake Perchaude there are other 
diversions of fact and fancy. 
This day of days when the bass would not 
rise, we left Lac Perchaude and struck into the 
forest to the northeast in the general direction 
of Lac des Grande Piles. The real carry was 
from Lac le Peche, a mile or two north, but we 
chose to make a great adventure of it, so fol¬ 
lowed the line of least resistance, as I often do 
without compass to prove up and correct my 
sense of direction, which was, possibly, some¬ 
thing in a modest way, to be proud of; that is, 
instead of walking in a circle after the approved 
method, I fancy I walked in a square, but more 
often really came out just about Where I in¬ 
tended, with nothing to guide me. 
