A River Never Sleeps - Hardcover

Haig-Brown, Roderick L.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1602399395 ISBN 13: 9781602399396

Verlag: Skyhorse, 2010

Inhaltsangabe

Few books have captured the haunting world of music and rivers and of the sport they provide as well as A River Never Sleeps. Roderick L. Haig-Brown writes of fishing not just as a sport, but also as an art. He knows moving water and the life within it—its subtlest mysteries and perpetual delights. He is a man who knows fish lore as few people ever will, and the legends and history of a great sport.

Month by month, he takes you from river to river, down at last to the saltwater and the sea: in January, searching for the steelhead in the dark, cold water; in May, fishing for bright, sea-run cutthroats; and on to the chilly days of October and the majestic run of spawning salmon. All the great joy of angling is here: the thrill of fishing during a thunderstorm, the sight of a river in freshet or a river calm and hushed, the suspense of a skillful campaign to capture some half-glimpsed trout or salmon of extraordinary size, and the excitement of playing and landing a momentous fish.

A River Never Sleeps is one of the enduring classics of angling. It will provide a rich reading experience for all who love fishing or rivers.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Nick Lyons is a former English professor and book publisher, as well as the author and editor of many books on various topics. He lives in New York City.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

A River Never Sleeps

By Roderick L. Haig-Brown

Skyhorse Publishing

Copyright © 2014 Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-60239-939-6

Contents

JANUARY About Steelhead A Fish for Firmin, 
FEBRUARY About Pike "Where to Fish", 
MARCH House Hunting Picking Favorites, 
APRIL H. M. Greenhill Little Lakes, 
MAY Sea-run Cutthroats The Big Salmon Water, 
JUNE Lewington's Carrier Pacific Salmon, 
JULY Buttle Lake Dark on the Water, 
AUGUST Salt Water I Salt Water II, 
SEPTEMBER Sachem River Why Fish?, 
OCTOBER First Fall Freshet Top, Bottom and Middle, 
NOVEMBER The Riddle of the Oxhorn Before I Die, 
DECEMBER Fishing Books To Know a River ..., 
AFTERWORD A Visit to Roderick Haig-Brown, 

CHAPTER 1

JANUARY

IT is easy to forget about the river in winter, particularly if you are a trout fisherman and live in town. Even when you live in the country, close beside it, a river seems to hold you off a little in winter, closing itself into the murky opacity of freshet or slipping past ice-fringed banks in shrunken, silent flow. The weather and the season have their effect on the observer too, closing him into himself, allowing him to glance only quickly with a careless, almost hostile, eye at the runs and pools that give summer delight. And probably his eyes are on the sky for flight of ducks or geese or turned landward on the work of his dogs. Unless he is a winter fisherman, he is not likely to feel the intimate, probing, summer concern with what is happening below the surface.

In the south of England our school holidays might have been planned to emphasize this break in interests. The Easter and summer holidays were times when the duns and sedges hatched and trout rose in every favorite holt of the quiet chalk streams. The Christmas holidays left us free for a full two thirds of each January, but trout rods were stored away and we hoped that tact and good behavior might win us permission to go out with shotguns. Fortunately — it seems now — the center of things, the pheasant-stocked coverts on the downs, the windy stubbles and root fields where partridges were wild and wise as geese, was kept for our elders and betters; the easiest-won permission was for a day in the water meadows after snipe and ducks, with the exciting chance of an old cock pheasant in any one of a dozen cropped and tended willow beds. They were good for many things, those winter days in the frost-browned water meadows. Plentiful game never yet made a good hunter, and we walked all day to spend a dozen shells. We learned where to look for snipe, how to walk them, and how to drive them. We learned where the ducks fed and when, how to test the wind and stalk them cautiously, how to hide ourselves along a line of flight at dusk or dawn. And we learned in sharp surprise that the duns hatched and the trout rose even in midwinter, even in the January frosts that brought the snipe south to us.

Perhaps the knowledge was profitless to us — certainly we could not turn back to the trout rods then, for trout were always left free to attend to their own affairs between October and April in those good waters. But the upright float of pale — winged flies on the winter-dark water and the heavy suck of a rising trout spreading on an overfast run were somehow even more thrilling and enticing to the mind than they were in summer. In the happy misery of cold and wet — for we were often cold and nearly always wet — under the gray skies and leafless trees of soaking or frost-brown meadows, one felt an affinity with the rising fish, a bond of hardihood that permitted one a share in this secret off-season life of his. In spring or summer he rose expectedly, and other fishermen watching there might see him and know his ways; probably they would be able to see, not merely the circle of his rise but his long, thick body also, poised close to the surface and waiting the float of the duns. In this winter water he was unseen, of a size only to be judged from the manner of his rise to an unknown hatch; but you judged him big, bigger perhaps than any fish you had ever seen in the river, a winter wanderer from the dark depths of some deep weir hole half a mile farther down. And you wondered about him: Did the roiled water seem good to him? Had he spawned and was he now growing back to condition for April? Did he feel the rain and the heavy sky as you did? Would he wander farther or find a summer holt near where you had seen his rise?

On those snipe-shooting days I marked down many good trout that I found later on fishing days, and it was borne in upon me that the life of the river is only slightly less full through the winter months. Inevitably this suggested winter fishing. But our Dorset river, unlike most south of England chalk streams, had no pike or grayling in it where we fished — a virtue that I regretted at the enthusiastic age of twelve or thirteen, though it probably made for better trout fishing. Pike, certainly, are a menace to a trout stream, and they seldom grow large enough in such water to make really interesting fishing; but grayling are another matter altogether. True, they compete with trout for the available food and so presumably reduce the river's yield of trout and the average size, but they are noble fish themselves and really test a fly-fisherman. Further, their competition is limited by somewhat different feeding habits, so it is likely that the total yield of the stream is increased, even though its yield of trout may be reduced. If you admire and respect grayling and if you want late fly-fishing when the trout have turned to spawning, you are better off with them in the stream; if you want only trout, presumably you are worse off, except that all the finest south-country trout streams have them. Anyhow, I was sorry that we had no grayling, and I still am because I am quite sure I should have learned a lot by fishing for them.

Apart from trout, the best fish we had in our river were the dace. Dace are little fish, seldom as large as a pound, never larger than a pound and a half, but they are bright, cheerful, quick little fish — the name is from the Old English dare or dart — and they spawn in April, so they were in prime condition during the Christmas holidays. And to make matters better still, we acquired merit by catching them because grandfather reckoned them as evil as other trout-stream owners reckon the grayling.

Most of our dace spent their days feeding over a long reach of shallow water between a big pool we called the Hatch Hole and a lesser pool known as the Trough Bridge for a wooden trough that crossed it to carry water to the meadows. They did not school as closely as I believe dace do in the Thames and other rivers but scattered out over the gravel and worked a slow way upstream, not independently, but in spaced formations of seldom more than five or six individuals. Each formation had its favorite beat of ten or fifteen yards and would work slowly up it, feeding steadily, then swim back down and start again.

Dace like worms and grubs and bottom feed of all kinds, and probably I should have done well with them had I been expert with such baits. But they also rose to surface flies, not steadily and regularly as trout do, but often enough, so I stayed with what I knew, and there were several winter days when I caught six or eight of them on a small dry fly. They are pretty fish with their big tight scales, bright silver on belly and lower sides, faintly olive or lemon gold on their backs, and they fought well...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Skyhorse
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2010
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1602399395
• ISBN 13: 9781602399396
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Zeichner: Darling Louis
• Anzahl der Seiten: 376
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar