How to Catch the Really Large Ones: A New Hampshire Idyl

NEWTON F. TOLMAN

CERTAIN upland birds and animals have become so adjusted to traffic, as every hunter knows, that they take fright only when a car stops and the motor is shut off. Here in New Hampshire the fish are learning a few tricks too.

Around 1918 a summer visitor arrived at one of our ponds with what he called an “outboard engine.” It would have discouraged Ole Evinrude himself; the best its owner could do that season was to coax it into running about ten minutes. But the local anglers all rose up in arms, sure every fish would be scared out of the pond. They gave the power pioneer such a hard time he never came back.

Some thirty years later we went over to the same water one spring day to try the trout. The pond had been “cleaned” and stocked with rainbows; it was becoming a favorite with the car-top and boat-trailer crowd from far and wide. (The state hatchery sends down a truckload of trout every Friday after starving them a couple of days.)

We took merely a canoe, not wanting to bother with a motor. Fish were rising, at a distance; but all day long we couldn’t get a strike, and we exhausted the tackle box. At the same time we noticed the outboard people were able to take fish, some of them on trolling lines fairly glittering with assorted hardware. Finally light dawned — we realized these fish had never seen a craft in their lives without the familiar rumbling and rattling outboard, and they would have nothing to do with us.

Now the traffic at that pond follows a set routine on weekends. A line of cars creeps toward the landing, while those ahead unload their trailers and roof racks. When you finally get waterborne, you ease out into a parade all going clockwise around and around the pond, with a low blue haze of gasoline fumes close to the surface. And when the evening rise begins you see that even the trout are all swimming in a clockwise direction. Every once in a while some novice tries to run his boat counterclockwise, and quickly gets rammed and sunk. Fishing has always been a friendly and sociable pastime, and this is the most sociable place to fish north of the Jersey Turnpike.

One aspect of the New Hampshire stocking program known as the “put and take” method is seldom understood. Every spring we hear, “Say, your fish-and-game people up here aren’t very bright, are they? Why, last weekend we saw some chaps dumping a whole load of trout into a stream right beside the state highway, in broad daylight!” We try to explain that the department is supported, to a large extent, by license fees of fishermen who follow the hatchery trucks; but we can see the point isn’t getting across. The average American fisherman instinctively feels that game wardens are always on the side of the fish. When he gets a big catch he puts one over on the man with the badge. This attitude is a historical hangover from Europe, where the eagleeyed English bailiff or the German Herr Einforgotnvatissdertitle still patrols the majority of the streams.

Now many of our states are transforming their wardens into something more friendly sounding, such as Game Protectors, Wildlife Agents, and New Hampshire’s Conservation Officers. “Contact your Friendly Fish-and-Game Distributor, and let him plan your vacation for you. . . . Nabbed with too many trout, or without a license? We will show you how you can pay your fine in easy installments.”

Actually our officers are fish salesmen. It is one of their jobs to see that as many as possible of their hand-fed hatchery pets are promptly hooked, because fish escaping downstream will for the most part fall victim to predators, lack of food, or the turbines.

Out-of-state deer hunters buy expensive licenses every year whether or not they ever kill a deer. They never really expect to get one anyway; and they’re so thankful if they end the season without getting shot themselves that they feel the money was well spent. Most fishermen are different. If a fisherman doesn’t catch something, pretty soon he’ll go somewhere else.

But New Hampshire doesn’t overlook the hardy minority: anglers who love to back-pack folding boats into remote ponds where they can listen to the beaver slap his tail, and the kind who spurn spinning rigs or bait. There’s the chap who will tramp all day to catch two or three small trout he thinks are “native.” One patron of our guide service not only used nothing but the driest of dry flies, but refused to make the slightest attempt at hooking a fish when it rose. Said he was accustomed to fish that hooked themselves, and all he had to do was reel them in.

I guess this man had fished “up north.” You have to get up into the north country to find real trout fishing. We’re told about it every season. Northern part of the state, the squaretails run two, three pounds. Laurentians — three, four pounds. Hudson’s Bay country — five, six pounds. I suppose up near the North Pole you would need a tuna rod and a swivel chair to land them.

When we have heard enough about the fishing up north, we tell them about our brook. This is a wild stream that rises on our place and is well hidden along its entire run to the lake by dense undergrowth. There is no road or trail. It is never fished by anyone except ourselves. The cold, crystal-clear spring water is teeming with native trout. They are darker than is common, brilliantly speckled, and full of fight. And they can be taken easily any time. We may also explain — at our discretion — that the brook is about a foot wide and the maximum length of the trout is five inches.

Once a year or so we do indeed fish this Lilliputian rill. It is the only place where we stoop to bait. A fly rod could never be managed in the tangled jungle, and a can of worms is the only way. (As Charles Dudley Warner remarked in the 1870s, a real sportsman never uses anything but flies, except when he’s alone.) On a warm June afternoon, when the pokeweeds are up so you can hide behind them, there is no pleasanter way of obtaining the main dish for supper. Especially if there is a very small niece or nephew along, to keep those delicious fouror five-inch trout in proper scale.

[Note from Conservation Department: Small trout indigenous to small streams do not move along to larger waters, as we formerly assumed. If you put these little fish into Lake Winnipesaukee and gave them all they could eat, they wouldn’t grow an inch.]

THE states are now pooling their conservation knowledge, with happy results. Today you hear more talk around the hatcheries of enzymes, genes, protozoa, and plankton than you do of poachers. It wouldn’t surprise us if they should come up any day now with a line of trout bred to subsist entirely on artificial lures.

In our lake (up here the nearest one is always “ours” though the state owns all waters of more than ten acres) it was found that “natives” of the lake proper had almost no chance to run up the inlet brooks to spawn. The lake is mainly springfed, and the inlets run largely underground. And as mentioned earlier, the pygmy trout inhabiting the brooks were not helping to stock the lake at all. A few hours with a bulldozer cleared a jeep trail. Then a few thousand fat cousins imported from the hatchery gave the population a shot in the arm that bids fair to last indefinitely. For the new recruits, differently conditioned, don’t seem to mind spawning right in the shallows of the lake itself. Riding around the country in a jeep seems to give a trout a broader point of view.

The newcomer to these waters may always pick up some tips from an Old Expert. Every New Hampshire lake has one. Ours can be found out in the middle on any fine day, still-fishing with a mysterious array of lines over the side of his flat-bottomed scow. The Old Expert is almost as broad-beamed as his craft, and he has removed the stern seat in favor of a large armchair. When you get within hailing distance of this floating oracle he greets you with the reminder he has fished right here for fifty years, and his Ancient Mariner’s voice echoes from shore to shore. Then follows the announcement that the squaretails are all but extinct.

“What’s happened to them?” you ask, and the old man intones mournfully, “It’s the togue! The togue has et them all. I’ve been telling ‘em for years they’d ought to screen the pond, but nobody does anything.” He shakes his head. “There’s only a few little ones left. Why, I used to take my limit of threeand four-pound trout, even five-pound, up in the channel every spring. Dry flies, five-ounce rod. Prob’ly I caught the last big squares there was in the whole pond. Now I just fish for togue, don’t even wet a fly no more.”

We mutter something sympathetic and move along, still rigging up our fly rods in spite of the prophet’s words. For we’ve heard the story before, and still the squaretails always seem to show up when the fly hatch starts, along in May. And there will come a certain day, if you happen to be there . . .

IT WAS a cloudy afternoon, warm and just breezy enough to keep the black flies away. Buzz Williams was with us. He is a retired scientific man and thinks nothing of taking ten minutes to debate about what fly he’ll start off with. But this time he got his rod rigged up in ten seconds flat. For as far as we could see up the shore, perhaps half a mile, thousands upon thousands of black sticks were being thrust up into the air from beneath the rippled surface by unseen hands. And when we got out on the rocks, we could see that the sticks were squaretail trout.

It made no difference at all what flies we used, wet or dry, large or small. There would be a savage strike at every cast, often by two or three fish at once. There were rises aimed at a knot in the line, the line itself, and the leader. We took up stations about a line’s length apart, and the shallows between us looked like feeding time at the rearing pools. Trout swarmed up from below, pushing the ones on the surface half out of water. When you laid out your line it rested across the backs of half a dozen, and if you weren’t careful you would foul-hook one.

We decided to avoid taking our limit until we had each hooked a “big one.” After a time I heard a sound, over near Buzz, like a wet hand slapping a rubber boot. “What’s going on over there?” I yelled, above the churning and splashing of hundreds of trout all around.

“I was retrieving my fly, right at my feet,” Buzz said, “when a trout — maybe two pounds — made a jump at it. From the opposite direction another big one came up, and they met head on — smack! Knocked one of them out cold for a minute, but I was too surprised to net him before he recovered.”

Even as Buzz was talking, as though to accent his story, close by my fly a twelve-incher shot out of water and struck the back of a threeor fourpounder rolling on the surface. The smaller fish ricocheted in a fifteen-foot arc, flipping end over end, before regaining the water.

And so, although we don’t have anything to compare with that north-country fishing, when the ice starts breaking up in the spring we begin to think again about certain old names: Parmachene Belle, Silver Doctor, Brown Hackle, Jock Scott, Queen-o’-the-Waters. Guess I’ll start off with a Black Gnat, dry — what’s your choice?