# An Angler at Large/Chapter 14

I think I told you that I am not a Purist. Perhaps it is unnecessary to repeat it. But I want you to make no mistake. I fish by the dry-fly method because it suits my sluggish habits better than any other form of fly-fishing. But I claim no superiority for it over other methods. If I were not afraid of gentles I should no doubt be a roach-master, or something quite stationary like that. Now, sluggish though I am, my blood can mount at times. And, apropos of the dry-fly school, I feel it mounting now.
It is popularly supposed that dry-fly fishing is excessively difficult—difficult, I mean, beyond every other form of the art. I do not know who is responsible for this imposture. I imagine it must be the genius or genii who first applied the words "chuck and chance it" and "fine and far off" to the wet and dry methods respectively. I cannot think that any two epithets have ever ​more successfully exalted one set of men at the expense of another. You would suppose that any fool can go and throw a blue upright into the Barle at Dulverton and pull it out again with a trout on it. You would imagine that no chalk-stream fish may be lured at a less distance than seventy yards.
Now there is no special merit in fishing with a long line. No good fisherman, wet or dry, gives a trout an inch more than is absolutely necessary. Perhaps, of the two, the wet-fly man uses the longer line, and he certainly, if he means to catch fish, throws as "fine," by which I understand "light," as the wet condition of his lure will let him. But "fine and far off" remains the special property of the dry-fly school, and the wet-fly men continue to go about under the imputation of "chucking it and chancing it." This shows how important it is to be first in any field, even of mutual recrimination. The arrogant dry-fly school has fastened "chuck and chance it" on the other fellows for ever, and nobody pays any attention to their answering "creeping and crawling" beyond stamping it vulgar and jealous abuse.
This cheap sneer at the wet-fly man has proved so successful that he himself has come to believe that it is true. He forgets that his knowledge ​of the trout's habits is much larger than that of his self-constituted superior. He forgets that if the two of them (grant me two fishermen of a sort of hypothetical, mathematically abstract character, each knowing nothing of his rival's methods) are placed on the banks of an unknown fast stream, that knowledge will enable him to give the dry-fly man first fishing over every pool and run, and that, after the dry-fly man has laboriously and vainly flogged every inch of the water, he (the wet-fly man) can come along and take a brace or more in a dozen casts, placed deftly in the twelve spots where, from the condition of the water, the state of the weather, the season of the year, and a hundred other things about which the dry-fly man knows nothing at all, he suspects the good fish are lying. He forgets similarly that, placed on the banks of an unknown chalk-stream, he and the dry-fly man are reduced to an equality in that a rise, breaking the surface of the water, speaks to both of them with the same sound, and that a fish lying in mid-stream is equally visible to both of them. He does not realise that a knowledge of the fishes' habits is (I speak comparatively) practically no part of a dry-fly angler's equipment. The mere fact that on a chalk-stream he can jettison the best part of the lore which it has taken him many years to acquire ​without doing his chances of sport any harm whatever, should cause the wet-fly man to think better of himself. But he does not know this. Again, he does not realise that the dry-fly man owes half his vaunted accuracy of casting to the rod-maker and the line-spinner, and that in this particular also they are pretty much on a level (it is understood again that I speak of the skilful of both schools). He does not realise that to be the dry-fly man's equal, if not superior, he has only to buy a certain kind of apparatus, to learn not to work his fly, to avoid drag, to pull in his slack and to distinguish between a number of unfamiliar artificial patterns—all matters surely within his competence.
No, he accepts the estimate which the world, taught by the dry-fly man, has formed of his attainments, and until he has tried a chalk-stream for himself, imagines that he might as well fish in his mother's pail as in the Test. He is all wrong, and here is an incident to encourage him.
In the early part of this century a man, whom I will call MacArthur, came upon me out of the East, demanding a chalk-stream and instruction in the dry-fly business. As he made it already understood that he was to pay for the chalk-stream, I undertook to introduce him to a water which I had fished during the five previous ​seasons, and, because I was poor, had given up. My anxiety to return to that water (for it was this water), plus the deep affection I had for MacArthur, Winded me to the second part of his demand.
In the course of a few posts MacArthur was the better by a rod for the season and I by twelve guests' tickets. During those early days, while we waited for May to come round, MacArthur's confidence in and reverence for my knowledge and skill were highly gratifying. He had never used a dry fly, and although he had not his equal as a wet-fly fisherman, he was filled with that fear of the chalk-stream and that humbleness of spirit of which I have spoken. He had looked upon those who do their business in clear waters as belonging to an order of beings higher altogether than his own. He abased himself before me as an initiate designate of some esoteric cult might abase himself before its Grand Lama. He received my lightest word on dry-fly angling as if it were a revelation, and, without a word of complaint, permitted me to spend many pounds of his money on the purchase of a valuable rod, reel, line, and other things. He said that if he were permitted by Heaven's help and mine to slay one trout out of that river before he returned into the Orient, he would die blessing my name.
​Nothing that I could say would persuade him that chalk-stream fishing is pure skittles compared with that he was accustomed to find in a tiny bush-shrouded brook near Midhurst (a place in which he could catch trout all day long while I should have spent my time cutting down trees). Nor could I get him to understand that, easy though dry-fly fishing might be, I am extremely unhandy at it. He said that I only talked like that to encourage him, whereas I was really trying to encourage myself. For I had discovered that I possessed a reputation up to which nobody could possibly live, and as the day approached when I should have to "show him how to do it" at the expense of those fish under whose contempt I had writhed five summers long, I wondered sometimes if I had not better perhaps break my right arm in two places, and so preserve to MacArthur the last ideal that he was ever likely to cherish.
At length the first day of May dawned, and my right arm was still (as much as it had ever been) at my service. I made, as the newspapers relate of the condemned, a hearty breakfast of sausages and bacon, and smoked a cigarette while MacArthur greased his line for the third time since he had risen. Presently we were by the water's edge, and for half an hour I showed MacArthur how to cast his fly over imaginary fishes, and how ​to keep his rod's point up and pull in the slack, all of which he managed to do easily. You are to remember always that MacArthur was a most accomplished fisherman. Suddenly he found a fish—which I had failed to observe. It lay near the bank on which we stood, evidently just posted for breakfast, about fifteen yards above us. The water was clear of rushes and weeds, nor was there any eddy or glide. The bank was free from high grass and trees, and all other nuisances. The wind blew gently up stream. I had a perfectly clear right-hand horizontal cast. It was what is called a "sitter." As we looked, the fish sucked down a fly.
"Have at him," said MacArthur, as he crouched to the earth. (What he had not read about dry-fly fishing was not worth writing.) "I want to see just how you do it."
It was inconceivable that I should ever find a more easily-placed trout. I knelt down, as the books recommend, let out line, cast, and the wind—the kindly wind of the west—dropped a pale olive three inches above the nose of the fish, which took it instantly. I hooked him, rattled him down stream, and had him in the net before the howl which MacArthur uttered as I struck had ceased to reverberate among the surrounding chalk-hills. I do not hesitate to say that the ​thing could not have been better done. I said, "There!"
MacArthur was breathing heavily through his nose, and his eyes were shining with delight and excitement and triumph. He had seen the luring and slaughter of a chalk-stream trout—a trout of 1¾ lb., a trout twice as big as the biggest he had ever looked on. He said that it was magnificent, and launched into praises of my skill. I preserved a modest demeanour, and told him that now he must get one. He despaired of ever attaining to my accuracy and deadliness.
Seeing a fish rise about three hundred yards up stream (he has an eye like a telescope), he besought me to come and catch that one too, as he had hardly had time to observe my methods. He said it was a privilege to watch me. I did not say what I would do until we reached the rising fish, when I told MacArthur that he must have a go at it. I pointed out that he had not taken a rod on this river to watch me catching fish, but to learn to do it himself. I insisted on his trying for this fish.
The place in which it lay was situated twenty yards across the stream, under the overhanging branch of a willow, and on the far side of a thin line of rushes and weeds. The rushes and the branch were so disposed that the only possible ​chance of getting a fly to the fish was to shoot it out of a gun through a gap some ten inches wide. I said, "This is not a particularly easy cast. But, remember, if you hook him you must bustle him. Though you break, you mustn't give him his head. This is your only chance. Recollect what I told you about raising your rod high in the air and walking backwards into the meadow? This is an occasion when you must do that."
MacArthur asked me if it was possible to cock a fly properly at that distance. This seemed to be the only doubt that troubled him. I told him (because he had on a dry, well-oiled and well-made fly, which would cock itself quite independently of the person who threw it) that it was quite possible.
"For you, perhaps," said MacArthur, and as he began to get out line I could feel the blushes chasing each other up and down my body. The next moment MacArthur's fly passed through the gap which I have described and lit, cocked to a miracle, in the only square inch of water where it could have served any useful purpose whatever. The trout hurled itself on to the hook. MacArthur struck, raised his rod high in the air, and began to walk backwards steadily into the meadow, just as I had told him to do. ​The trout, paralysed with astonishment, followed obediently, wriggled itself bodily over the weeds and through the rushes, swung in the deep safe water for a second, and made off up stream like lightning. But he was well hooked, and there was never any cause for alarm. MacArthur reeled him in, let him run, reeled him in again, and after the usual fuss and bungling with the net, I got him to land—2¼ lb. MacArthur was dumb with delight. When I had recovered the power of speech, I said, "You now see how easy dry-fly fishing really is. Any man who can cast as you do may fish a chalk-stream with every prospect of success." I advised him to go up the river and practise on his own account. "All you have to do," I said, "is to avoid drag and pull in your slack, and forget that you ever thought there was anything difficult about this game."
The really remarkable feature of this story is that at the end of the day MacArthur admitted that the capture of his first trout was a fluke, whereas it was not. It was the masterly cast that did it. MacArthur, though he had never fished a chalk-stream, knew more about casting than nine dry-fly anglers out of ten that you will meet in conversation. But, though he brought back two other fishes, he had acquired a respect—a quite proper respect—for the many which he ​had failed to take, and in the light of this experience he was inclined to belittle his first supreme performance. He was enchanted with his sport, but by no means puffed-up, and he was as ready as ever to sit at my feet and hear me talk, in spite of my having caught nothing more. Subsequently, during that season, he beat my take every time, and I think he must have modified his view of my dexterity. But he never let me see this, which shows, first, what a magnificent nature is MacArthur's, and, secondly, that a first-rate wet-fly angler who approaches a chalk-stream with the proper rod and line, and takes an instructor in whom he has implicit confidence, can do as well as anybody, if he will only follow that instructor's hints to the letter. But I have yet to hear of the dry-fly man who mastered wet-fly fishing in a season, or in five seasons. Two things are necessary to both arts: an apparatus and manual skill. But to the wet-fly game must be added knowledge. And the greatest of these is knowledge.