
2 S—————___—_ — 

SEPT. 7, 
1907. | 

FOREST AND STREAM. 






NID RIVER I 
LSIOUING 


SIbA\ A\ 


A Sea Angler Ashore.—IlII. 
of 
North, the St. Lawrence, is its infinite -variety 
ONE attraction of the great river the 
and the impossibility to exhaust its many 
charms. The term ‘Thousand Islands,’ doubt- 
less does the great river an injustice, as there 
are many more. I have never met any one who 
knows how many islands there are, but every 
one knows how beautiful they are and how end- 
less their variety. They range in size from 
one just large enough to step upon to almost 
principalities, like Westminster. I know a 
little one not far from Clayton, just large 
enough to cast from and to hold your fire and 
camping outfit. 
I know this, as on one happy day I lured 
a big bass from this region, a fish that had 
been whispered about season after season, like 
the big tarpon of Aransas with scales as b.g 
as dinner plates and the eye of an ichthyosaurus. 
Indeed, the most exacting collector of islands 
can be suited here, as they are of all kinds and 
sizes; no monotony here, as each has its peculiar 
charm. 
Bill had a name for them all, and a little 
story to tell af this one, where some old 
voyager fished or camped, fought or died. In- 
deed, there is a world of romance about the 
islands which has never been exhausted, nor 
can it be entirely killed by the modern man 
with a megaphone, who personally conducts the 
summer tourist through these isles of enchant- 
ment and makes and unmakes history with 
brazen tongue and adamantine assurance. Ay 
On my way home one afternoon when Bill 
was rowing slowly and we were drinking in 
the splendid colors of the sky and foliage re- 
flected in the clear water, we passed the en- 
trance of a litle bay that was so alluring that 
we turned in, and skirted the shore, passing a 
little cape where great masses of a deep, single- 
leaved, pink wild rose grew fairly in the water 
and sent its fragrance broadcast. Here’ I 
had a strike and into the air went the bass, 
flinging my hook ten feet along the waters. I 
glanced overboard, thinking, hoping, to see 
him, and just then the skiff passed over a 
singular heap of stones, a miniature mountain, 
though possibly too artificial, too symmetrical. 
Bill stopped and held the boat while I ex- 
amined it; a heap of stones four feet high, near- 
ly all about the size of an English walnut, 
though one I reached was large and weighed 
several ounces. _ ‘ 
I first imagined it the ash dump of some 
launch, but we had come up a very devious 
and narrow channel and no launches had ever 
profaned this charming spot. As I-stood up I 
perceived another mimic mountain not fifty 
feet away, and as we hunted about, I located 
four or five and concluded that I had found 
the mountains of the. fishes. 3ill said some 
kind of a “critter” made them. Another guide 
later told me that he had seen black bass on 
them; another was willing to make an aff- 
davit that the mountain which was eight feet 
or so across the base, and must have weighed 
a ton, was made by catfishes. In fact, I could 
not find a guide who knew what the heaps were, 
yet several said that the piles or miniature sub- 
marine mountains grew every summer, and 
when the river froze, the tops were frozen in; 
and when the break-up came in the spring, the 
ice would carry off the top. 
The piles of stones were made by a specits 
of “sucker” (Semotilus), I think, a fish which 
I had several times taken on a fly when trolling, 
and which made a very clever fight; but the 
sucker is not edible, at least to the average 
man. Its mouth is on the under side, too sug- 
gestive of mud and sharks as a regular diet, 
yet very conveniently placed for building mini- 
ature mountains, and every stone was brought 




there and dropped by a sucker, in a long time 
producing the heap. In the interstices the eggs 
were deposited, and I later frequently saw the 
fishes lying on the slopes of the mountains of 
their making. 
These lakes, bays and miniature fiords were 
charming places to observe the habits of fishes. 
In this same watery Eden I found beneath the 
lilypads the nests of the sunfish; a little clear- 
ing not so large as my hand covered with 
gravel, where the pugnacious male stood guard. 
Indeed, in one instance I found that I could 
not drive the fish away from the nest by reach- 
ing down; it stood its ground until I almost 
touched it. Not far from here I found later the 
nest of the black bass, along the same lines, 
though the clearing was larger. 
Every day we took a different route, meeting 
our friends at some beautiful spot, some island 
not discovered by the world at large, where we 
dined sumptuously under the cooking of the 
guides, and exchanged experiences of the day, 
compared the colossi, weight and length, and 
disputed them inch by inch. One morning we 
rowed down Westminster, followed it around 
to where a little river hardly wide enough to 
admit a boat separates it from Murray Island, 
about four miles from Clayton, forming a little 
island. abounding in forests and inland ponds. 
In a maze of trees, vine clad, I came upon a 
deserted house about which we built up a deep 
unfathomable mystery, and it would be very 
hard to convince me that it was not haunted by 
some cheerless, yet altogether delightful, chost. 
One night when pasing I heard the dismal hoot- 
ing of an owl from its inner gloom, and strange 
lights were drifting about which niight have 
been flambeaux in the hands of ghostly voy- 
agers of long ago. It is true that the lowland 
here was famous for its ignes fatui; but the 
ghostly interpretation appealed to me the most. 
Near the little separating river, from the 
mouth of which we looked off into a broad bay 
to cther and distant islands, I found some re- 
markable potholes, but they were eight or ten 
feet above the water, and how they were 
formed was something of a mystery. Possibly 
they suggested the river level long ago, or had 
been made by Indians. 
There was a little trail leading across Murray 
Island, which finally joined a trail on the east 
side, skirted the island and led to an inn and 
civilization, and the charms of this elysium after 
half a day in the skiff cannot all be enumerated. 
There were banks of daisies and other wild 
flowers, pastures given over to blueberries, 
rich and good; hollows of brakes and’ ferns, 
wild strawberries, picturesque vistas at every 
hand, where the clear and beautiful river could 
be seen through the trees. The colors here al- 
ways seemed marvelous to me, they were so 
tich, so clear and pure. On one side of the 
island a mass of wild roses blocked the landing, 
growing almost, and in some cases. in the 
water—big single-petaled flowers redolent with 
fragrance. Here we found old friends with their 
cottage and camp, boat houses and all the ap- 
purtenances of modern summer life. If you 
went to call on the clergyman who had taken 
three muscallunge, you went by boat. It was a 
sort of Venice with St. Lawrence skiffs for 
gondolas. The grocer came puffing around in 
a skiff with a two-horsepower engine. The 
milkman rowed from his island dairy, and one 
day I went down to the dock to extend a wel- 
come to a boatman, and ye gods and fishes! 
he was a book agent. There was nothing lack- 
ing in this ‘harbor of delights. 
Bill had promised me a wall-eyed pike with a 
fly, and one evening when we were rowing 
along the north side of Westminster, not far 
from the Canada shore, he backed the skiff up 
to a rocky point where there was deep water 
with a perceptible current and I began to cast. 

I was using an 8-ounce, 8-foot split bamboo, 
my short black bass rod, which had been tested 
On a 17-pound. yellowtail in California in an 
hour’s contest, and one of Andrew Clerk’s 
famous St. Patrick flies from a-lot he had 
given me in one of our many days’ fishing, an 
irresistible dainty I dropped a foot from. the 
cliff and allowed to drift dry-fashion, then cast 
again around: in a circle until the fly sank, and 
then allowed it to go down a few feet. 
It was just at dusk, the very hour for the 
big nocturnal perch, and I had just lifted my tip 
when something struck bang! I was not ex- 
pecting such luck, for I had been trying for 
this fish for days in different parts of the river. 
At first I thought thé Steady strain was sug- 
gestive of a pickerel, but when thirty teet o 
line had been forced from the reel, the fish be- 
gan a peculiar jerking or hammering on the 
line which kept my rod nodding, reminding me 
of the Chinook salmon in Monterey Bay, whicl 
often gives you blow after blow. 
It was some moments before I could stop 
the fish, as it had made for deep water, and 
taken us out into the stream, but when I reele« 
it to the surface, how it tugged and pulled! 
shooting from side to side in gallant fashion. 
its glassy eyes flashing, altogether a game fish 
of goodly parts. In about ten minutes I had it 
alongside and Bill netted my first wall-eyed 
pike, one of the epochs in the life of at least 
one angler. It was a darker, richer green than 
any I had-seen, doubtless due to the clear cold 
waters. 
The fly being unsuccessful, on a second trial 
I tried a minnow in the dusk and caught three 
fine fish, and doubtless could have lured others 
in the darkness; the largest weighed 
pounds, and the smallest two and a half. 
In my experience, this fish is not a common 
catch in this part of the river, and js only 
found in deep and rocky places, where the water 
is cool and clear. I never saw one which 
would weigh over five pounds, but I have heard 
of indrviduals ranging up to thirty pounds and 
even more. 
One day in fol 
Rue, casting and 
2) Tyee samy 

four 
owing along the shores of La 
trolling, I took a pickerel with 
amazement it went wriggling 
into the air, as I am told big muscallunge al- 
ways do, dropped, and with a swing threw it- 
self around on the surface of the water and then 
took fifty feet of line in as clever a straight- 
away run as I have ever seen. It has been my 
fortune, my luck to’ catch a number of these 
logy cousins of the’ battling muscallunge, but 
this was the only pickertl or pike that ever 
made a good resistance, not exactly redeeming 
the tribe, but showing their latent possibilities 
when really awakened. It is possible that this 
logy nature of the pickerel is due to the method 
of capture. One of the best trout fly-casters I 
have had the pleasure of fishing With, Mr. 
Alfred Beebe, of ‘Portland, Oregon, assured 
me that the rainbows of the Klamath would not 
jump, and apparently soon gave up when taken 
with .that barbarie contrivance known 
spoon, the reverse holding with a fly. 
It is cheering to the soul, after visiting an old 
fishing ground for the first time in twenty 
years, to learn that if you had only bought land 
then, you would have made a fortune. I was 
shown an island which I could have bought at the 
time of my first visit for twenty-five dollars, 
which is now valued at several thousand dollars: 
another, once “swapped” for a horse, could now 
be bought for fifteen thousand dollars. Why 
I did not make a collection of these wild, un- 
claimable and neglected islands a few years ago 
I do not know, but I had the fishing in its 
glory, that is an unperishable solace. 
There is nothing on lakes or streams quite 
so seductive as the skiffs the boatmen use. 
They are long, low, graceful, with fine lines. in 

as a 

