Gray's Sporting Journal's Noble Birds and Wily Trout by Ryan Will;

Author:Ryan, Will;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lyons Press
Published: 2013-12-17T00:00:00+00:00

“It Depends upon His Heart”

Bliss Perry

“Fishing with a Worm,” The Atlantic Monthly, 1904

When Shorty prowled the banks of the 1880s Pleasant Stream, the brook trout was the only trout. Tales of five- and six-pounders from Maine lakes drew trains of sportsmen north. In rivers closer to civilization, brook trout continued to decline in numbers and size through the period. In the mid-1880s, brown trout were introduced to Eastern rivers, most notably in the Catskills, and fly fishing would never again be the same.

Still, for many American anglers, brook trout fishing with worms continued to anchor their daily lives, which by all reports increasingly felt adrift as the pace of living accelerated with the new century. Even today, a good day of fly fishing for rainbows and browns can make you feel skillful or accomplished, but a good day with brookies leaves you feeling like you are where you belong.

Worm fishing was a way of life for generations of Eastern brook trout anglers, in large part because of the environs that sustained the native trout. Brush-thatched trout trickles accommodated whatever equipment a nineteenth-century boy could whittle or steal, and the hidden worlds and fontinalis treasures worked their magic on the imaginations of young and old. Authors might have written of fly fishing’s grace, but most nineteenth- and early twentieth-century anglers remained intent on a full creel, or “fishing for count,” as it was sometimes called.

By the turn of the twentieth century, the steady harvest and vanishing forest had further reduced the brook trout’s range, as well as limited the size of the fish within that range. The allure of small streams lingered, however, and, if anything, grew as the industrializing nation left the native trout behind in the countryside of its youth. Brook trout remained the connection to pre-contact America, to wilderness. North America was the brook trout’s home.

Fly fishing for brown and rainbow trout came into such vogue in the early twentieth century, and with it the criticism of worm fishing that it was too easy, that none other than The Atlantic Monthly published a 1904 feature article titled “Fishing with a Worm.” In some ways this story responded to the ever-present gap between what goes on in print and what goes on astream. In this case the author was the magazine’s editor, an eminent scholar named Bliss Perry. He rose to defend the worm, arguing for its facility in catching trout in brushed-over streams, celebrating the skill and sport that such a venture entailed. “There are some fishermen,” Perry noted, “who always fish as if they were being photographed.” His article, he explained, was not for them.

Perry set the story on a thread of black water that wound through the tangles of northern Vermont, a stream so small and wooded that you sometimes had to fish by sound. “The trick,” Perry explained, “is to shorten your line to two feet or even less” and then ease the worm-baited hook “into that gurgling crevice of water.” Chances are

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