GREAT FISHING STORIES Digitized by the Internet Archive
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UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA LIBRARIES Physical Education and Health Reading Room Gift of Walter Lanier Barber BARBER GREAT FISHING STORIES Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2011 with funding from LYRASIS Members and Sloan Foundation http://www.archive.org/details/greatfishingstorOOmitc GREAT FISHING STORIES Q*x>4£JuwJid Qomfuled curd wtth a fy, Edwin, Vxrfentitie. mUcMl DOUBLEDAY & COMPANY, INC.— 1946 fiaWen. Qity,, YUw. ^oblk, COPYRIGHT, I946 BY DOUBLEDAY & COMPANY, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES AT THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS, GARDEN CITY, N. Y. FIRST EDITION ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Acknowledgment and thanks are made to the following publishers, authors, or authors' representa- tives for permission to reprint the stories listed below. "Big Two-Hearted River," from In Our Time, by Ernest Hemingway. Copyright, 1925, 1930, by Charles Scribner's Sons. "A Fatal Success," from Fisherman's Luck, by Henry C. van Dyke. Copyright, 1899, by Charles Scribner's Sons. Copyright, 1927, by Henry C. van Dyke. "Once on a Sunday," from Fish and Tin Fish: Crunch and Des Strike Back, by Philip Wylie. Copy- right, 1944, by Philip Wylie. Reprinted by permis- sion of Rinehart & Company, Inc., publishers. "Ol' Settler of Deep Hole," from Eben Holden, by Irving Bacheller. Copyright, 1900, by Lothrop Publishing Company. Reprinted by permission of Irving Bacheller. 5 ACKNOWLEDGMEMTS "Byme-by-Tarpon," from Tales of Fishing, by Zane Grey. Copyright, 19 19, by Harper Brothers. Reprinted by permission of Mrs. Zane Grey and Zane Grey, Inc. "Old Faithful," from The Wedding Gift, by John Taintor Foote. Copyright, 1923, by D. Appleton & Company. Reprinted by permission of D. Appleton- Century Company, Inc. "Salar the Salmon," from Solar the Salmon, by Henry Williamson. Copyright, 1935, 1936, by Henry Williamson. Reprinted by permission of Little, Brown & Company and Atlantic Monthly Press. "It Was on the Allagash," by DeWitt Mackenzie. Reprinted by permission of the author and Press Asso- ciation, Inc. "Butterflies and Brown Trout," by Compton Mac- kenzie and Moray McLaren. Reprinted by permission of the authors. "The Fisherman," from Sir Pompey and Madame Juno, by Martin Armstrong. Published by Houghton, Mifflin Company and reprinted by permission of A. D. Peters, London. "Gathering of the Clan," from Ye Gods and Little Fishes, by Eugene E. Slocum. Copyright, 1927, by Dodd, Mead & Company. "Crocker's Hole," from Tales from the Telling- House, by R. D. Blackmore. Permission of Sampson Low, Marston & Company, Ltd., London. *>;... FOREWORD No GOOD FISHERMAN, IT IS SAID, EVER TELLS A STORY under oath. Yet in spite of the popular notion that all fish stories are fiction, there is a distinction between those which are purely recitals of presumable fact and those which are frankly narratives of fancy. While doubtless a substratum of truth underlies many of the angling tales included in this collection, all are believed to be fiction or at least fanciful reporting, written primarily to interest and entertain the reader. At any rate, fiction rather than fact was the common denominator used in assembling the stories. Strangely enough, few similar collections of angling yarns seem to have been made in this country, al- though, as Philip Wylie has pointed out, fishing is our great national sport. Far more money is spent by anglers on their favorite pursuit than is expended by the crowds which patronize the so-called spectator sports of baseball, football, boxing, et cetera. Only a 7 FOREWORD few million Americans play golf and tennis, but or- dinarily some twenty million go fishing every year, not counting those who fish for a living. All, or nearly all, the stories which follow are by professional writers, but writers, it is safe to say, who are or were also good fishermen. For it is difficult to imagine any non-angling author having the temerity to write about so ancient and refined a sport as fishing. It is no reflection on the work of those fishermen who are only incidentally writers that they are not more fully represented. Many of them write as skilfully as they fish, although it may as well be admitted that much that is written by anglers for anglers does not rate very high marks as literature. Here it was simply a case of the choice being a wide one and the election happening to go the other way. In time and space the stories chosen cover a wide range. Frank Forester, W. C. Prime, and Judge Hali- burton, the author of Sam Slick, wrote nearly a cen- tury ago. The trouting episode by Henry Ward Beecher is from his three-decker work, Norwood, or Village Life in New England, published in 1867. The stories by Frank Stockton and Guy de Maupassant date from the eighteen-eighties; while those by Henry van Dyke and Irving Bacheller were published at the turn of the century. Henry van Dyke said that "Crocker's Hole" by R. D. Blackmore, the author of Lorna Doone, was the greatest English fishing story. It first appeared in book form in Tales from the Tell- 8 FOREWORD ing-House, published in 1896. All the other stories are of much later vintage. Of the eighteen tales, one is French, four are Eng- lish, and the rest American. The latter range from Canada to Florida and beyond, and the collection as a whole covers a variety of fishing. Methods of catch- ing fish may differ somewhat in different countries, but fish themselves behave pretty much the same the whole world over. Obviously not a book of instruction in the craft of fishing, Great Fishing Stories may nevertheless en- hance the pleasure of exercising that craft in retro- spect and prospect. Edwin Valentine Mitchell CONTENTS Foreword 7 Big Two-Hearted River Ernest Hemingway 15 A Fatal Success Henry van Dyke ....... 45 Plain Fishing Frank R. Stockton 58 Once on a Sunday Philip Wylie . 79 Crocker's Hole R. D. Blackmore 106 OF Settler of Deep Hole Irving Bacheller 133 Byme-by-Tarpon 2,ane Grey 143 11 CONTENTS Trout Fishing W. C. Prime . ... 151 A Shark Story T. C. Haliburton 166 The Hole Guy de Maupassant 180 Old Faithful John Taintor Foote 190 Salar the Salmon Henry Williamson 201 Pete and the Big Trout Henry Ward Beecher 212 It Was on the Allagash DeWitt Mackenzie 215 Butterflies and Brown Trout Compton Mackenzie and Moray McLaren 222 Trouting Along the Catasauqua Frank Forester 234 The Fisherman ] Martin Armstrong . 245 Gathering of the Clan Eugene E. Slocum .] . 259 12 GREAT FISHING STORIES BIG TWO-HEARTED RIVER % &uie4l HemLnguMxy, Part I The train went on up the track out of sight, around one of the hills of burnt timber. Nick sat down on the bundle of canvas and bedding the baggage man had pitched out of the door of the baggage car. There was no town, nothing but the rails and the burned- over country. The thirteen saloons that had lined the one street of Seney had not left a trace. The founda- tions of the Mansion House hotel stuck up above the ground. The stone was chipped and split by the fire. It was all that was left of the town of Seney. Even the surface had been burned off the ground. Nick looked at the burned-over stretch of hillside, where he had expected to find the scattered houses of the town and then walked down the railroad track to the bridge over the river. The river was there. It swirled against the log spiles of the bridge. Nick looked down into the clear, brown water, colored from the pebbly bottom, and watched the trout keep- 15 GREAT FISHING STORIES ing themselves steady in the current with wavering fins. As he watched them they changed their positions by quick angles, only to hold steady in the fast water again. Nick watched them a long time. He watched them holding themselves with their noses into the current, many trout in deep, fast mov- ing water, slightly distorted as he watched far down through the glassy convex surface of the pool, its sur- face pushing and swelling smooth against the resist- ance of the log-driven piles of the bridge. At the bot- tom of the pool were the big trout. Nick did not see them at first. Then he saw them at the bottom of the pool, big trout looking to hold themselves on the gravel bottom in a varying mist of gravel and sand, raised in spurts by the current. Nick looked down into the pool from the bridge. It was a hot day. A kingfisher flew up the stream. It was a long time since Nick had looked into a stream and seen trout. They were very satisfactory. As the shadow of the kingfisher moved up the stream, a big trout shot upstream in a long angle, only his shadow marking the angle, then lost his shadow as he came through the surface of the water, caught the sun, and then, as he went back into the stream under the sur- face, his shadow seemed to float down the stream with the current, unresisting, to his post under the bridge where he tightened facing up into the current. Nick's heart tightened as the trout moved. He felt all the old feeling. 16 BIG TWO-HEARTED RIVER He turned and looked down the stream. It stretched away, pebbly-bottomed with shallows and big boul- ders and a deep pool as it curved away around the foot of a bluff. Nick walked back up the ties to where his pack lay in the cinders beside the railway track. He was happy. He adjusted the pack harness around the bundle, pulling straps tight, slung the pack on his back, got his arms through the shoulder straps and took some of the pull off his shoulders by leaning his forehead against the wide band of the tump-line.