CHAPTER X

FRANKLY IRRELEVANT

A DRY-FLY MEMORY.

In the Test Valley a good many years ago the coarse herbage lay drying in the water-meadows in the heavy swathes in which it had fallen to the scythe, but all along the boggy edges of the streams and carriers a tall screen had been left standing shoulder-high, concealing the angler from the rising fish, but compelling him, unfortunately, to stand and to fish overhand instead of keeping low and switching a horizontal line to his quarry. During the afternoon a chilly wind from the north-west had supervened upon the blazing heat that for a week past had conjured such alluring visions of the evening rise to end each July day. The sky was overcast, and a troubled sun watched sulkily from the far side of the valley, through dun rifts in the clouds, the approach of two rods to the river-side. It was almost too early to begin. Scarce a fly was in the air, and only one sign of any promise gave any hint of possible success—the horses in the meadow opposite, driven to madness by the Hampshire flies, were charging and careering wildly about their pasture, heels half the time in air.

Just a cast above the bottom boundary was a run which promised a moving fish when the trout began to move, and half an hour’s wait in these exquisite meadows was time well spent, if only in observing the splendid profusion of life in this wonderful valley. The tender bloom of the meadowsweet was at its most perfect, great wild purple orchids put up among the boggy tussocks, while the lush richness of the water-side herbage baffled description. From some meadow near came the “crek, crek” of the landrail—less common, alas! than of old—the note of the snipe, the wailing cry of the pewit, the “coo” of the turtle-dove, were punctuated with the querulous gutturals of the moorhen, shyly under cover in the sedges. Presently a small pale olive rose from the surface and came drifting down the wind, then another and another, escaping their water-enemies below only, too often, to be snapped up by the screeching swifts that found them out too soon. Then, in the very neck of the run, a fish put up, and the serious business of the evening began.

The fly on the cast was a Tup’s Indispensable, then the latest invention of an ingenious West-Country angler, and, when the red spinner is up, a very killing fly, but the fish, continuing to feed, would none of him. Nor was the Red Quill to his liking, but the first cast of a Ginger Quill on No. 00, covering him correctly, brought him up, and he fastened. For a second he hesitated, then ripped the line from the shrieking reel in an upward rush, leapt into the air, and was off.

By this time the sun’s lower limb was resting on the opposite hill, and the wind should have dropped dead. But still it came with a certain bite of chill down the valley from the northward. Yet, in spite of cold, the long, fleshy forest fly vied with the mosquito in assaults upon the unprotected portions of the angler, and moths and sedges began to creep out and flit from flower to flower. Two other fish putting up in the next hundred yards were missed, and a small one was landed and returned. Then, as dusk drew on, the fly was changed for a large Orange Quill on a No. 2 hook.

A good fish was rising steadily, though not rapidly, in the next bend, but the Orange Quill, offered from perhaps too short a range, set him down with great suddenness. A shy fish! So was the next found rising, for he did not wait even the preliminary wave of the rod to cease from his impetuous and greedy feeding. Perhaps the necessary wading through the boggy margin to get near enough to the water for an effective cast sent over him a wave that put him down.

The next hundred yards provided no opportunity for the angler, but at the end of them the sedgy screen ceased suddenly, and it was possible to approach the shy quarry with a horizontal cast. Over a bank of weed trailing near the surface an under-water movement seemed to indicate a fish of some sort. The fly, an Orange Sedge on a No. 2 hook, dropped lightly on the right spot, with a line behind it slack enough to let it pass well over the fish before the inevitable drag set in. Up came a big black neb. Instinctively the line tightened, but the fish was already hard in the weed, and nothing could coax or force him out. Ten precious minutes wasted, at a time when minutes were priceless, in vain attempts to persuade him, before the inevitable break was effected and a new fly tied on.

A few yards farther on a snag divided the current, and a foot above it a good fish was taking merrily every fly that covered him. He was not proof against the Orange Sedge, and in a moment he was being led flapping down on the farther side of the snag. Nothing seemed to intervene between him and the landing-net, when suddenly the rod straightened and he was gone. A feel at the hook in the growing dark proved it to have broken at the bend. With difficulty another was mounted, but by this the rise had ceased, and naught was left for the angler but to feel his boggy way back through the eerie meadows to his starting-point, and thence to the village—disappointed to a certain extent, but with the disappointment more than tempered by the amazing charm of this valley of valleys.