FISHERMAN'S LUCK
Has it ever fallen in your way to notice the quality of the
greetings that belong to certain occupations?
There is something about these salutations in kind which is
singularly taking and grateful to the ear. They are as much better
than an ordinary "good day" or a flat "how are you?" as a folk-song
of Scotland or the Tyrol is better than the futile love-ditty of the
drawing-room. They have a spicy and rememberable flavour. They
speak to the imagination and point the way to treasure-trove.
There is a touch of dignity in them, too, for all they are so free
and easy--the dignity of independence, the native spirit of one who
takes for granted that his mode of living has a right to make its
own forms of speech. I admire a man who does not hesitate to salute
the world in the dialect of his calling.
How salty and stimulating, for example, is the sailorman's hail of
"Ship ahoy!" It is like a breeze laden with briny odours and a
pleasant dash of spray. The miners in some parts of Germany have a
good greeting for their dusky trade. They cry to one who is going
down the shaft, "Gluck auf!" All the perils of an underground
adventure and all the joys of seeing the sun again are compressed
into a word. Even the trivial salutation which the telephone has
lately created and claimed for its peculiar use--"Hello, hello"--
seems to me to have a kind of fitness and fascination. It is like a
thoroughbred bulldog, ugly enough to be attractive. There is a
lively, concentrated, electric air about it. It makes courtesy wait
upon dispatch, and reminds us that we live in an age when it is
necessary to be wide awake.
I have often wished that every human employment might evolve its own
appropriate greeting. Some of them would be queer, no doubt; but at
least they would be an improvement on the wearisome iteration of
"Good-evening" and "Good-morning," and the monotonous inquiry, "How
do you do?"--a question so meaningless that it seldom tarries for an
answer. Under the new and more natural system of etiquette, when
you passed the time of day with a man you would know his business,
and the salutations of the market-place would be full of interest.
As for my chosen pursuit of angling (which I follow with diligence
when not interrupted by less important concerns), I rejoice with
every true fisherman that it has a greeting all its own and of a
most honourable antiquity. There is no written record of its
origin. But it is quite certain that since the days after the
Flood, when Deucalion
"Did first this art invent
Of angling, and his people taught the same,"
two honest and good-natured anglers have never met each other by the
way without crying out, "What luck?"
Here, indeed, is an epitome of the gentle art. Here is the spirit
of it embodied in a word and paying its respects to you with its
native accent. Here you see its secret charms unconsciously
disclosed. The attraction of angling for all the ages of man, from
the cradle to the grave, lies in its uncertainty. 'Tis an affair of
luck.
No amount of preparation in the matter of rods and lines and hooks
and lures and nets and creels can change its essential character.
No excellence of skill in casting the delusive fly or adjusting the
tempting bait upon the hook can make the result secure. You may
reduce the chances, but you cannot eliminate them. There are a
thousand points at which fortune may intervene. The state of the
weather, the height of the water, the appetite of the fish, the
presence or absence of other anglers--all these indeterminable
elements enter into the reckoning of your success. There is no
combination of stars in the firmament by which you can forecast the
piscatorial future. When you go a-fishing, you just take your
chances; you offer yourself as a candidate for anything that may be
going; you try your luck.
There are certain days that are favourites among anglers, who regard
them as propitious for the sport. I know a man who believes that
the fish always rise better on Sunday than on any other day in the
week. He complains bitterly of this supposed fact, because his
religious scruples will not allow him to take advantage of it. He
confesses that he has sometimes thought seriously of joining the
Seventh-Day Baptists.
Among the Pennsylvania Dutch, in the Alleghany Mountains, I have
found a curious tradition that Ascension Day is the luckiest in the
year for fishing. On that morning the district school is apt to be
thinly attended, and you must be on the stream very early if you do
not wish to find wet footprints on the stones ahead of you.
But in fact, all these superstitions about fortunate days are idle
and presumptuous. If there were such days in the calendar, a kind
and firm Providence would never permit the race of man to discover
them. It would rob life of one of its principal attractions, and
make fishing altogether too easy to be interesting.
Fisherman's luck is so notorious that it has passed into a proverb.
But the fault with that familiar saying is that it is too short and
too narrow to cover half the variations of the angler's possible
experience. For if his luck should be bad, there is no portion of
his anatomy, from the crown of his head to the soles of his feet,
that may not be thoroughly wet. But if it should be good, he may
receive an unearned blessing of abundance not only in his basket,
but also in his head and his heart, his memory and his fancy. He
may come home from some obscure, ill-named, lovely stream--some Dry
Brook, or Southwest Branch of Smith's Run--with a creel full of
trout, and a mind full of grateful recollections of flowers that
seemed to bloom for his sake, and birds that sang a new, sweet,
friendly message to his tired soul. He may climb down to "Tommy's
Rock" below the cliffs at Newport (as I have done many a day with my
lady Greygown), and, all unnoticed by the idle, weary promenaders in
the path of fashion, haul in a basketful of blackfish, and at the
same time look out across the shining sapphire waters and inherit a
wondrous good fortune of dreams--
"Have glimpses that will make him less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea,
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn."
But all this, you must remember, depends upon something secret and
incalculable, something that we can neither command nor predict. It
is an affair of gift, not of wages. Fish (and the other good things
which are like sauce to the catching of them) cast no shadow before.
Water is the emblem of instability. No one can tell what he shall
draw out of it until he has taken in his line. Herein are found the
true charm and profit of angling for all persons of a pure and
childlike mind.
Look at those two venerable gentlemen floating in a skiff upon the
clear waters of Lake George. One of them is a successful statesman,
an ex-President of the United States, a lawyer versed in all the
curious eccentricities of the "lawless science of the law." The
other is a learned doctor of medicine, able to give a name to all
diseases from which men have imagined that they suffered, and to
invent new ones for those who are tired of vulgar maladies. But all
their learning is forgotten, their cares and controversies are laid
aside, in "innocuous desuetude." The Summer School of Sociology is
assembled. The Medical Congress is in session.
But they care not--no, not so much as the value of a single live
bait. The sun shines upon them with a fervent heat, but it irks
them not. The rain descends, and the winds blow and beat upon them,
but they are unmoved. They are securely anchored here in the lee of
Sabbath-Day Point.