# An Angler at Large/Chapter 24

I once read in a book on fishing these words: "No angler who has not landed a trout upon a fly of his own making can say that he has known the perfect thrill." Now, I am an amateur of thrills and sensations of every kind. I believe that every thrill, whether it be gained in the concert-room, in the theatre, at the dinner-table, or in pursuit of sport, is worth knowing, and to get a new one I will take any trouble. As far as the thrills of trout-fishing go, I had thought, before I read the words which I have quoted, that they were exhausted, always excepting the never-to-be-exhausted thrill of landing the largest-fish-yet. I had caught trout in all sorts of places, though, perhaps, not with all sorts of lures. I had never, for example, employed either poison or dynamite, but there are sensations which an angler, however curious and refined his taste may be, must deny himself.
And here was a thrill which I did not know. This alone made it attractive. But the "perfect" ​thrill! Gods! Was there any resisting such a promise? And so simply won! The condition precedent to this unimagined and supreme experience was the mere tying of a fly. At that time I knew that fly-tying was the easiest thing in the world. It wanted a knack. But what was a knack that it should stand in the way of my realising the perfect thrill? Anyone can acquire a knack. A little effort, a little patience, a few failures, and lo! one day the knack comes, and you wonder why you could not do it from the first.
This vision of the perfect thrill was given to me on an early day of a rather recent April. I think, to be as accurate as possible, that it was the first of the month. My whole soul consumed with eagerness, I cabbed it to a tackle-shop and bought a small handbook on fly-tying. I read this book in an hour. I had not been mistaken. Fly-tying was the easiest thing in the world. I cabbed it back to the tackle-shop and bought a vice, some dozens of assorted eyed hooks, many reels of brightly coloured silk, two pairs of delicately curved scissors, half a dozen forceps, a pound of beeswax, a bottle of liquid wax, a quantity of dubbin, some rare furs, and an "indispensable" packet of hackle and wing-feathers. I got, as an afterthought, a few pike scales and a jeweller's ​eyeglass. On my way home from my office, I stopped at Leadenhall Market and bought a fowl with all its feathers on. These purchases cost me a great deal of money, but who cares for money where the perfect thrill is in question?
Next morning I was still ungifted with any knack that could be called a knack. The silk broke very vexingly, I found, and the liquid wax was rather ubiquitous, and the hackles did not seem to wind on to the hooks quite so easily as the little treatise said they did; but these were early days to look for great results. During the following Sunday afternoon I called on a friend who boasted himself a tier of flies. In the course of our conversation I mentioned that I had never seen him make a fly, and suggested that he should do so now. He agreed in the most amiable way, sat down there and then at his bench, took a few things out of a cigar-box, and evolved a pale olive in the twinkling of an eye. I said, "Oh, that's how you do it!" He had, as far as I could see, done none of the things which the book laid down as essential. He replied that some did it one way and others another way. That was how he did it. It was, he added, only a little knack that one had to get. He made several other flies for me, and wanted me to try my hand, but I said No, I had no ambition of that kind. I went ​away, resolved to invite him to my home one day soon and paralyse him with my unsuspected skill.
Two months passed, and I had not known the perfect thrill. But although my duns had been rejected, hope did not die, for the May-fly was coming on. Making a dun is admittedly a niggling job. But a May-fly is a large, robust creature, and its imitation may be attempted with some confidence. It is a thing one can lay hold of and pull about with one's hands. Finesse (or so I thought) is not of the essence of May-fly making. I made a May-fly and went down into Wiltshire, the premonition of the perfect thrill already tingling at my nerve centres. I cast my line towards a magnificent trout and waited for the result. The trout, giving one glance of terror upwards, fled for its life into a thick bunch of weeds, while the surface of the river Clere was broken in every direction by the torpedo rushes of great fish which were copying his discreet example.
I now lost a good deal of my interest in fly-tying. I made up my mind to master it in the winter, when time cannot be wasted. A little later I went to that island in the Arctic Circle where MacAlister and I found out the inner truth of flounder-fishing. Here such fish as the poachers had left to us were innocent of guile. I caught ​my first of these trout on a large red Pennell, and, having thus discovered the only fly that was the slightest use, I stuck to it until my small provision was threatened with exhaustion. This disturbed me considerably, for I knew that none of the other two gross of patterns which I had bought before I left London were any good at all, and my thoughts turned naturally to my new art and my box of fly-tying apparatus. The second of these I found had been left in England. The first, however, was at my finger-tips, and my materials were not difficult to get. Your true fisherman can always find an expedient. I made a red Pennell out of the hook of another fly, a ryper, and some red worsted which I took from a deep-sea spoon-bait which happened to be in my fly-box. I found, too, some gay tinsel on a lampshade in the drawing-room of my hostess. As my copy differed slightly from the original I named it The Unapproachable. Then I stepped calmly to the edge of a bottomless lake and began to fish. At the forty-second cast a 4-oz. char of incredible bravery seized my masterpiece and attempted to drag it into the depths. A gentle touch of the wrist, and all was over. The char was in a bush of bog-myrtle behind my back. I had caught a fish upon a fly of my own making.
The perfect thrill? Well, I confess I was dis​appointed in a perfect thrill. But that may be because my fish was not a trout. But, trout or char, I feel that it might have been keener after all my labour in searching for it. I shall never feel it, whatever it is, for I buy my flies now. But then I am, and always shall be, a very low-class angler.