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Show FISHERMAN'S LUCK the easiest way is to ask your guide to make it for you. If he makes it in an old iron pot, so much the better, for then you can move it around to the windward when the breeze veers, and carry it into your tent without risk of setting everything on fire, and even take it with you in the canoe while you are fishing. Some of the pleasantest pictures in the angler's gallery of remembrance are framed in the smoke that rises from a smudge. With my eyes shut, I can call up a vision of eight birch-bark canoes floating side by side on Moosehead Lake, on a fair June morning, fifteen years ago. They arc anchored off Green Island, riding easily on the long, gentle waves. In the stern of each canoe there is a guide with a long-handled net; in the bow, an angler with a light fly-rod; in the middle, a smudge-kettle, smoking steadily. In the air to the windward of the little fleet hovers a swarm of flies drifting down on the shore breeze, with bloody purpose in their breasts, but baffled by the protecting smoke. In the water to the leeward plays a school 256 THE OPEN FIRE of speckled trout, feeding on the minnows that hang around the sunken ledges of rock. As a larger wave than usual passes over the ledges, it lifts the fish up, and you can see the big fellows, three, and four, and even five pounds apiece, poising themselves in the clear brown water. A long cast will send the fly over one of them. Let it sink a foot. Draw it up with a fluttering motion. Now the fish sees it, and turns to catch it. There is a yellow gleam in the depth, a sudden swirl on the surface; you strike sharply, and the trout is matching his strength against the spring of your four ounces of split bamboo. You can guess at his size, as he breaks water, by the breadth of his tail: a pound of weight to an inch of tail,-that is the traditional measure, and it usually comes pretty close to the mark, at least in the case of large fish. But it is never safe to record the weight until the trout is in the canoe. As the Canadian hunters say, "Sell not the skin of the bear while he carries it." Now the breeze that blows over Green Island drops away, and the smoke of the eight smudgekettles falls like a thick curtain. The canoes, the dark 257 |
