Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 359
“Well, just a starter.”
“Jake, can I pass you along a horn?”
“Thanks, Professor, I don’t mind.”
There are four of us, mostly, apart from Jake, so it takes most of the time of the run to mix up and serve the drinks. I am thinking here especially of one party, though really it was just like all the others. There was my brother George and George Rapley, the bank manager (a tear to his kind memory), and Charlie Janes, the railroad man of a Lake Simcoe town. George Rapley always came because he could fish, and Charlie Janes because he couldn’t. You may have noticed that bank managers are always good fishermen; it’s something in their profession, I think, a kind of courtesy, that gets the fish. And I am sure that everybody who goes bass fishing will agree that to make the party right you need one fellow who can’t fish. In fact in any bass fishing party of friends who go out often together, there is always one who is cast for the part of not knowing how to fish. No matter how often he’s been out, he’s not supposed to know anything about fishing and he good-naturedly accepts the role. If he loses a fish, that’s supposed to be because he didn’t know how to land it; if we lose a fish it’s supposed to be because it was impossible to land it. It’s these little mutual understandings that fit life together.
So almost before the “horn” is finished, here we are bearing down on the big rock off McCrae’s point. It’s nearly a quarter of a mile from shore and six feet under water, but Jake steers to it like a taxi to a hotel door. The anchor goes down with a splash, our swing on it timed to throw us right over the rock! There it is! See it — big as a wagon! — and in another minute down go the baited lines trailing to go under the edge of the great rock.
This is the great moment of fishing, the first minute with the lines down — tense, exhilarating. It’s always the same way — either something big happens, or nothing. Perhaps — bing! the lines are no sooner down than a bass is hooked — by Charlie Janes, of course — just like the luck of the darned fool! And while he’s still hauling on it — biff! there’s another one — and Jake, it seems, has quietly landed a third one when the other two were plunging round. With which there’s such a period of excitement and expectation that it’s nearly three quarters of an hour before you realize that those three fish are all there are — or rather two fish: George Rapley lost his — too bad! he was playing it so beautifully. Charlie Janes, the darned old fool, flung his over the side of the boat, right slap into the ice-box.
Or else — the other alternative — the lines go down and nothing happens.
In either case we fish on and on under the rock till excitement fades into dullness, and dullness into dead certainty. That’s all. At last someone says, “I guess they ain’t biting here any more.” Notice “They’re not biting”; we never say, “they’re not here.” Any man who says, as I have heard some of our odd guests say, “Oh, hell, there are no fish here,” is not fit to be brought again. The only theory on which bass fishing can be maintained as a rational pastime is that the bass are everywhere — all the time. But they won’t bite. The wind may be wrong, or the air just too damp, or too dry, or too much sun, or not enough — it’s amazing how little will start a bass not biting. But the cause must always be one that can change in five minutes, or with a move of five yards. These beliefs are to a fisherman what faith is to a Christian.
“We might try out past Strawberry Island,” says Jake. This means a change farther out, right out in the open water of the lake with the whole horizon of wind and wave and sun open for twenty miles all around to the south. This is not exactly a shoal. The bottom of the lake drops here from twelve feet to thirty feet of water — like the side of a hill. Jake explains it all fresh every time, and he makes each new spot seem so different and so likely that we go at each with new hope eternal. If we don’t get any fish as each half hour stop goes by, Jake tells the story of how he and I fished once and never had a bite till after sundown and then caught thirty-three bass in half an hour off McGinnis’s reef. “You mind that evening, Professor?” he says (to “mind” a thing is to remember it). “It was thirty-three, wasn’t it?”
“Thirty-four I think, Jake,” I answer, and he says, “Well, mebbee it was.” We’ve brought those fish up a little every year.
Or else Jake tells the story of the young girl from Toledo who came up with her father and had never been fishing before and never even in a motor boat, and it was a caution how many she caught. This story, of course, conveys the idea that if inexperienced fishers, like the young lady from Toledo, can catch fish, experienced people like ourselves could hardly expect to.
Then all of a sudden as it always seems, comes the idea of lunch — all of a sudden everybody hungry and ready for it. And does ever food taste better than out in the wind and sun in a motor boat? — salmon sandwiches, cold chicken in a salad, chunks of home-made bread, mustard pickles; all eaten partly off a plate and partly with your fingers and with bottled ale to wash it down.
People who go fishing but are not real fishermen land on shore for lunch, light a fire and, I believe, even cook the fish caught. Some of them go so far as to have a game of poker or, in extreme cases of mental derangement, go for a swim. All of this to a proper fisherman is just deplorable, just lunacy. The true fisherman eats right in the boat with the lines still hanging in the water. There seems to be a sort of truce during lunch time; I never knew a bass to touch a hook till it’s over. But lunch on the other hand isn’t hurried. It’s just eaten in the natural way. You put into your mouth all it will hold; then eat it; then start again. Eating in the open air knows no satiety, no indigestion.
The whole point is that the longest day is all too short for fishing, and no one who really loves bass fishing can bear the thought of knocking off from it even for an hour. As a matter of fact, we do take time off but we never admit it. For there also came in our fishing with Jake a drowsy part of the day when we took a sleep. Not that we ever called it that deliberately. The sleep was just a sort of accident. A little while after we’d eaten all the lunch we could hold Jake would say: “I thought we might go and try for a spell down round the corner of that shoal — just off that way apiece. You mind we was there before?”
“Yes, sure, I remember it, Jake.”
The place is a sort of convenient little nook among the shoals — nothing showing on top of the water. We always reckoned as if the bottom were in sight. It had the advantage that the waves couldn’t reach it, because of the shallows, and it was always quiet, and no fish ever came there. Jake could anchor the boat where there were just enough waves to rock the boat gently and just enough light breeze to murmur a lullaby — and with the two-o’clock sun to make you pull your straw panama away over your eyes, a man seated like that in a wicker chair, with two pounds of sandwiches and six ounces of whisky in him, is as drowsy as a flower nodding on its stem, and asleep in five minutes. The lines dangle in the water; there is no conversation, no sound but the breeze and the lapping of the little waves. Up in front we could see only Jake’s broad back, but there was slumber in every line of it.
It didn’t matter who woke first. After about an hour anybody could straighten up and say: “By Jove, I believe I was almost asleep. Were you?” And the others would answer, “Darn near!” And then Jake would say, as if he’d never stopped talking, “I was thinking we might go out and try the dry shoal.”
This rouses us to a new search for bass, hither and thither half a mile, a mile, at a time. Even then we are only covering one corner of Lake Simcoe. The lake is just big enough to seem illimitable.
Bass fishing on Lake Simcoe is not like the bass fishing you can get a hundred miles north of it, on the rivers in the bush, out of easy reach. Up there it’s no come-and-go business in a day; you must stay at least two nights. You catch one hundred bass in the first day and the next day you don’t even keep them; you throw them back. The third day you hate the stinking things; a bass two days dead, with its skin discoloured, would sicken even a cannibal.
Not so Lake Simcoe. There are just not enough bass, just never too many — some dead, dull days without any — they’re there, but they won’t bite. But even on the deadest, dullest day, always the hope of a strike.
You might wonder, if you don’t know the life, why the afternoon never gets dreary, what there can be to talk about — especially among men often and always out together on the same ground. That’s just ignorance. In bass fishing there are vast unsettled problems, to be discussed forever. For example, do you need to “play” a bass, or is that just a piece of damn nonsense imitated out of salmon fishing? The school to which I belong holds that “playing” a bass is just a way of losing it. What you need is a steel rod with the last section taken out and an “emergency tip” put in — making a short firm rod about six feet long. When the bass nibbles, wait — then wait some more — then strike — with such power as to drive the hook right through his head — then shorten the line — not with a reel; that’s too slow — haul it in beside the reel with your left hand and hold it firm with your right — shove the rod close to the water, if need be under the water — by that means the bass can’t jump out of the water, there isn’t line enough — drag him against his will till someone else holds the net — and in he comes.
Contrast this with the artistic “playing” of fish that looks so skilful — paying out line — the fish leaping in the air thirty feet from the boat — and all that show stuff — only good for a picture book!
Now can’t you see that the discussion of that point alone can fill an afternoon?
Personally I am always an extremist for a short rod and rapid action — the bass right in the boat in twenty seconds. I think that in his heart Jake Gaudaur agreed with this. It’s the way all Indians fish and always have. But Jake’s calling demanded compromise. He favored both sides. Rapley, like all bankers, played a fish as they play a customer with a loan, taking it in gradually.
We always knew that the afternoon was closing to evening when Jake said:
“Suppose we go out and try that big rock inside McGinnis’s reef. You mind, Professor? The place where you caught all them bass, that night; thirty-four, wasn’t it?”
“Yes, or thirty-five, Jake. I’m not sure. Let’s try it.”
This sunken rock is the triumph of Jake’s navigation of the lake. It’s a mile from even the nearest point of land, and sunk six feet down. Beside it the big rock at McCrae’s is child’s play. That one you can find if you keep on looking for it. This one, never. It’s all very well to say that you can do it with “bearings”; any amateur yachtsman that ever wore Panama pants will tell you that. But try it. Try to get bearings that are good at all hours and all lights and shadows on the shores, good in rain and good in mist, and you soon see where you are — or are not.
Jake, erect at the bow as he steers, is as straight as Oshkosh; the boat gathers speed in a curve that picks up one of the bearings and then straight as a pencil line over the water for a mile — then a stop with a reversed engine, without a turn, or the bearings would be lost, and there we are — right over the rock. In a clear light it’s as plain as day, but on a dull day you can just make it out, a great rock sunk in a wide basin of water for the bass to get in.
Here we try our final luck. We can’t leave. If the bass are there (I mean if they are biting) it’s too good to leave. If we don’t get a bite, we just can’t leave.
We haven’t realized it, but the afternoon has all gone. The sun is setting behind the hills on the west side of the lake. Just before it goes its beams light up for a moment the windows of unseen farm-houses ten miles the other side of us — and then, before we know it, the sun is gone. But we can’t leave. It’s still broad daylight yet.
“There’s two or three hours good fishing yet, Jake, eh?”
“All of that, Professor.”
Somehow it seems as if the day were suddenly all gone. “Have another horn, Jake?” Surely that’ll hold the daylight a little, giving Jake a horn. Anyway we can’t leave. The light is fading a little. A cold wind begins to move across the lake; the water seems to blacken under its touch as the boat swings to it.
“The wind’s kind o’ gone round,” says Jake. “I thought it would.” It’s not surprising. The wind has gone round and the air turned chill after sundown every evening of the sixty years I’ve known Lake Simcoe. But we can’t leave. Charlie Janes has had a bite — or says he has. We never take Charlie’s word, of course, as really good; he may have caught in a crack of rock. But Rapley thinks he had a nibble. That’s better evidence. So we stay on — and on — till the dark has fallen, the shores have all grown dim and then vanished and the north-west wind is beginning to thump the waves on the bow of the anchored boat.
“I guess, gentlemen, it’s about time to pull up,” says Jake. If we had caught fifteen or twenty bass he’d have said, “Boys, I guess it’s about time to quit.” But “gentlemen” brings us back to the cold cruel reality.
So the anchor is up and the motor boat at its full power set for home. It’s quite rough on the water now; the boat slaps into the waves and sends the spray flying clear astern to where we have our chairs huddled together, back to the wind. It’s dark too. You have to use a flash-light to open the soda for the “consolation drinks” that mark the end of the fishing.
“Have a horn, Jake?”
“Thanks, Professor.”
Jake, with his oil clothes on, can’t leave the wheel now; he sits there all in the spray with one hand for steering and one for the drink.
It’s amazing how a lake like Lake Simcoe can change — a few hours ago a halcyon paradise, still and calm — and now with the night and the wind gathering over it —
“Oh, well, Jake knows the way,” and anyway it’s only three miles till we’ll be in shelter of the Narrows! — Whew! that was a corker, that wave! “Here, put these newspapers behind your back, Charlie, they’ll keep off the spray.”
Just enough of this to give one a slight feeling of night and mimic danger — and then, in no great time, for the distance is short, we round into the shelter of the Narrows with just a mile of water, smoother and smoother, to run.
All different it looks from the morning; what you see now is just lights — a perplexing galaxy of lights, white and green and red here and there on the unseen shore — and great flares of moving white light that must be the motors on the highway.
“What’s the red light away up, Jake?”
“That’s the one above the railway bridge.” We always ask Jake this and when he answers we know we are close in. The water suddenly is quite smooth, a current running with us — the summer cottages and docks come in sight, with “young fellers” and girls in canoes and the sound of a radio somewhere discussing war in Europe.
We’re back in the world again, landed at Jake’s dock with a little crowd of loafers and boys standing round to see “how many fish Jake got” — not us, Jake. We unload the boat and take a look at the string of fish. “Let’s see that big one that Rapley caught, eh?” But where is it? Surely it can’t be this small dirty-looking flabby thing — I’m afraid it is.
We divide the fish. Jake won’t take any. We try to work them off on one another. Fishermen want fishing, never fish — and end by slinging them into the car all in one box. “Well, we certainly had a fine day; good night, Jake.” And another fishing day has gone — now never to return.
I can only repeat, in tribute to a fine memory, “Good night, Jake.”
FINIS
My Remarkable Uncle
CONTENTS
SOME MEMORIES I - MY REMARKABLE UNCLE
SOME MEMORIES II - THE OLD FARM AND THE NEW FRAME
SOME MEMORIES III - THE STRUGGLE TO MAKE US GENTLEMEN. A MEMORY OF MY OLD SCHOOL
LITERARY STUDIES I - THE BRITISH SOLDIER
‘Soldier, soldier, will you marry me, With your knapsack, fife and drum?’
LITERARY STUDIES II - THE MATHEMATICAL PROBLEM OF THE LOST CHORD
LITERARY STUDIES III - THE PASSING OF THE KITCHEN
LITERARY STUDIES IV - COME BACK TO SCHOOL
LITERARY STUDIES V - WHAT’S IN A NAME?
LITERARY STUDIES VI - WHO CANONIZES THE CLASSICS?
AMONG THE ANTIQUES - AN ADVENTURE OF AFTERNOON TEA
SPORTING SECTION I - WHAT IS A SPORT?
SPORTING SECTION II - WHY DO WE FISH?
THE COMPLETE PHILOSOPHY OF THE ANGLER
SPORTING SECTION III - WHEN FELLERS GO FISHING
SPORTING SECTION IV - EATING AIR
A DISCOURSE ON THE MAGIC OF EATING OUT OF DOORS
STUDIES IN HUMOUR I - THE SAVING GRACE OF HUMOUR
IS THERE ANY?
STUDIES IN HUMOUR II - LAUGHING OFF OUR HISTORY
STUDIES IN HUMOUR III - WAR AND HUMOUR
MEMORIES OF CHRISTMAS I - CHRISTMAS RAPTURE
(PRE-WAR)
MEMORIES OF CHRISTMAS II - CHRISTMAS SHOPPING
(PRE-WAR)
MEMORIES OF CHRISTMAS III - WAR-TIME CHRISTMAS: SANTA CLAUS
MEMORIES OF CHRISTMAS IV - WAR-TIME CHRISTMAS: 1941
GOODWILL FOR AMERICA I - CRICKET FOR AMERICANS
GOODWILL FOR AMERICA II - OUR AMERICAN VISITORS
GOODWILL FOR AMERICA III - A WELCOME TO A VISITING AMERICAN
At the Canadian National Exhibition
GOODWILL FOR AMERICA IV - UNCLE SAM: AN ALLEGORY
THE TRANSIT OF VENUS - A COLLEGE STORY
MIGRATION IN ENGLISH LITERATURE - A STUDY OF ENGLAND AND AMERICA
THREE SCORE AND TEN - THE BUSINESS OF GROWING OLD
THE PERFECT INDEX - THERE IS NO INDEX, AND WHY
L’ENVOI: A SALUTATION ACROSS THE SEA
The first edition
SOME MEMORIES I - MY REMARKABLE UNCLE
THE MOST REMARKABLE man I have ever known in my life was my uncle, Edward Philip Leacock — known to ever so many people in Winnipeg fifty or sixty years ago as E.P. His character was so exceptional that it needs nothing but plain narration. It was so exaggerated already that you couldn’t exaggerate it.
