The Fishing Life by Paul Schullery

Author:Paul Schullery
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: An Angler’s Tales of Wild Rivers and Other Restless Metaphors
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Published: 2013-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eleven

THE COLLATERAL CATCH

I CAUGHT a bat once. It took a #12 Irresistible late one evening on a small Wyoming trout stream. It was almost certainly the Little Brown Bat, Myotis lucifugus, and it grabbed my extended backcast just as it started forward. This was early in my fly-fishing, and the gnawed-down tippets I favored at the time held pretty much anything I might happen to hook, so the bat whizzed and fluttered right by my ear and out into the water. When I recovered from the surprise, I retrieved and released the bat, but for some years after that, I usually quit fishing as soon as the bats came out.

Except for me personally, there was nothing new in this experience. George Bainbridge, writing in The Fly Fisher’s Guide (1816), said that “in fishing in the evening, it will occasionally happen that bats and swallows mistaking the artificial for the natural fly, will hook themselves, instances of both having occurred to the Author more than once.”

But Bainbridge also reported on a less common catch, noting that “the celebrated Angler of the Dee, John Edwards, has assured [the author] that on one occasion whilst fishing, rather late with one of the moths, he hooked an owl, which after a long struggle he succeeded in securing!” I suspect that an owl would have tested even my hefty tippets.

Fishing or Angling?

When I started fishing as a kid, I naturally had no manners and no sense of moderation, but by the time I got to Yellowstone I’d begun to learn better. Being a life-long supporter of sporting codes and laws, it didn’t even occur to me that “fishing” for things other than fish might have its enthusiasts. But before long I started to detect a less restrained perspective among my fellow fishermen.

A year or two after hooking the bat, I looked out the front window of my quarters in Yellowstone to see my neighbor, a young firefighter, practicing his fly casting on the lawn. A few minutes later, when I again looked out, he was crouched intensely, casting a small dry fly to a curious robin. He made some nice presentations, and gave the fly some enticing little pops, but after a moment’s interest the robin spooked and flew away. Probably should have switched to a nymph.

Another young fellow I knew fished for seagulls on Yellowstone Lake. With spinning gear, he would race a bright spoon along right under the surface until a gull dove down to take it. He said that a gull, once airborne, put up a great fight, but releasing it was kind of complicated.

As the years passed, other people told me strange tales of snakes, turtles, and alligators. I heard dark rumors involving dogs. Except for the obvious and extreme cruelty that was often involved — a hook in a bird’s or mammal’s mouth seemed in any physiological sense wildly dissimilar from a hook in a fish’s mouth — I never knew quite what to make of all this. Are

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