The Billiard table pool

My days on the preserved water that summer were Mondays and Thursdays, so that during the month's holiday there were four days in each week to plan either to put up with the free fishing, or else to devise short trips to other stretches.

The miller had his quarter of a mile, including the still piece above the dam and a few rocky pools below the weir. For this the charge was five shillings a season; and, although it was good enough during wet weather to be worth the eight mile journey there and back, the prospect for a cloudless fortnight in June of getting even a brace of good fish during the daytime was poor in the extreme.

It was however during one of the trips to this miller's water that my good fortune asserted itself - a piece of good fortune which lasted for several seasons on end. Lying on the grass one hot afternoon building castles in the water of two pound trout and fairy tackle, I heard a step behind me and a man of about forty passed along. We spoke about the usual topics, and it was soon apparent that he knew every yard of the river and had killed more fish upon it than he was able to remember. He said he was going out that evening; and for over an hour we sat on the bank smoking and talking.

Without asking my name or telling me his, he ended by saying I was welcome to fish his meadows, some three quarters of a mile, extending from below the miller's water down to the stone cart bridge. Perhaps he thought this sounded too general an invitation to be acted upon, for he then gave me a card ' has permission to fish Tuesdays and Fridays.' "You will find me there most evenings" he said " but whether or not there is plenty of room for two."

The possession of that card seemed almost too good to be true. Permission is one thing but the card out quite a different pleasure into it. The next morning I arrived at the inn, intending to sleep there that night so as to have every chance of stopping out as long as it was light enough to see a fly.

A drizzly rain after tea time promised a wet evening; and, by some unaccountable reason in strapping on my mackintosh my canvas creel was left at home. It is said to be lucky to forget something, so stuffing two extra hand-kerchiefs into a pocket I started off in the best spirits. The rain soon stopped: the clouds grew higher, and between six and seven o'clock there was every sign of a fine sunset and a perfectly still evening.

Turning off the railway line, 1 struck across the gorse meadow, enjoying the swish of the wet bracken against rubber boots, and the sight of the yellow wagtails running after flies in the hot odour of damp cow flanks. No better omen of a good evening rise can be cited than this; the birds often being absent from the meadows for days together, and then congregating among the cattle as though by prearrangement at a particular hour in the afternoon.

Half way down the water there are two dams across the river made of larch trunks, at either end of which were likely looking pools, and after waiting among the dwarf willows for some time my patience was rewarded by a rise. He came at the first cast, a gray quill gnat but let it go by; and the very next time changed his mind and had it well. The moment he felt the strike he was in under the willow roots, and no coaxing or hand lining would move him. After long manoeuvring the point frayed and came back minus the fly.

As I was looking for another, my friend the owner came up the meadow and told me he had lost the same fish the previous evening. Our estimate of his weight no doubt did ample justice, but still the fact remains that he v.-as worth anyone's best attention. ' Now you fish wherever you like, you won't interfere with me I am going above the wire bridge, but if I may give you a hint - with those boots on - you cannot do better than go down to the bridge - you see the wall, and that small grassy island- get across to that - you will find under the wall and in those runs above, the fish will rise well this evening. Hardly anyone goes there - the water is not a foot deep over the rocks between this bank and the island.'

[ thanked him and moved down, wondering secretly whether he wanted to get. me out of the way; for the tug of that lost fish had rather chained my affection to the larch dams as an evening anchorage. It was Hearing half past seven when I made up a new cast on the bridge, keeping my eye on the island during the process. ' Not too small a fly - a ginger quill for choice ' he had called after me, and much as the idea of an olive asserted itself, 1 threaded the ginger quill on to a soaked point and climbed down to the river bank. It was a hackled fly which floated inimitably and looked larger than it really was.

The water parted among some rocks just below the nearest point to the island, and I was just going to step on to one when I made a short cast. It was taken at once and the result was a half pounder jumping on to the stones at my feet with the ret clapped on top of him before he could get back. A very little further out two others were rising and one of these was landed.

After trying the other small runs without avail I got from stone to stone or, to the island. It was only a few yards long and was covered with coarse tufted grass eight feet high. Shelving stones on one side, banked up by the last flood, gave an insecure foot hold into deepish water: on the other, slab rock formed the higher level of a shallow. It is difficult to refrain from drawing a plan of it with bearings and soundings like the one in Billy Bones' sea chest.

To the right was the stone wall, studded with ferns in the crevices, and under this wall over mossy stones the water ran smoothly and swiftly, perhaps three feet deep, with some eddying boles. Two more fish were taken out of it, but neither was above the eight or nine ounce average. I pushed quietly through the tall wet grass and peered out. Never since I have fished that Devon stream can I recall such a small-world paradise. The whole sky in front was golden sunset and of course the water too, the various runs and channels being merely marked by flecks of lilac. To the right the wall had ended in a fringe of rushes, and the current lapped and murmured down over a slimy green slab of rock covered with weed, to be sucked into creeks and bays below.

Above this was a pool the shape and smoothness of a billiard table; and before looking at it for more than a few minutes, three fish rose repeatedly one exactly above the other. The difficulty was not to show oneself and yet to get space to make a cast without being hitched up in the long grass behind, but I parted a narrow lane and made just sufficient room to give the rod play. All this time the three fish rose with fascinating persistence, the rings they made changing immediately into a broken oval, which was carried down over the slippery rock.

The lower one was on the baulk spot, hardly two rods lengths away, seemingly taking a fly every few seconds with a vicious snap. Would he catch sight of me and be gone, or would the ginger quill attract him? It pitched two feet above him, a movement, a suck, a violent tug, and he came down towards me over the green weed into the deeper water under the wall. So short was the line after being pulled through the rings that it made the grass bend beneath it, and I had to step back on to the rocks below the island to play him Round to came held hard, for there was plenty of weed large clumps of dock leaves and other obstacles to catch any slack line. Fortunately I had stood up the net among the grass handy enough for sudden usage, and he came open mouthed over it.

Every second of time was grudged, and while thinking ' you are fully three quarters ' as I stepped across and put him on to the bank, my thoughts were with his fellow rising on the pyramid spot. The pleasurable excitement of stepping back into the old position, and again watching for the two other fish to rise, was checked for some minutes by a feeling of disappointment that their keenness was over, but with the fly between thumb and finger I waited breathlessly. The upper one rose, this time nearer to the rushes, and right under a heavy headed tuft of nightshade which bobbed forward at intervals and caught its crest in the current.

Just as I was thinking of casting for it the trout in the centre rose well, and it was easy to see that his proportions were attractive. He allowed fully half a dozen casts to be made without attention, and then perhaps the. seventh time, without a movement, he was on - a splendid ' rug,' a vigorous holding water, and round he came with a rush over the rock, in under the tangle of brushwood at the foot of the wall without a check on the short line, down under the stones of the wall, and round below me among the rocks. It seemed as though something must give way, but it was no use letting him have more rope: he would have hung himself up.

As it was he jumped and churned until the idea of a foul hooking suggested itself. But no, he allowed himself to be reeled in and the net received him kindly. I carried hi« across the rocks to the bank and unhooked the fly from the extreme edge of his upper In. Nothing but a break or the flattening of the iron could have saved his skin, and with an exulting feeling I saw he was better that the other and fully fourteen ounces.

A short space more and the billiard table pool was again before me, its smooth glide unbroken by any rings. The fish that had risen on the spot must be there, and but for the time wasted in landing his rival would no doubt have been secured. Above, in the gravelly shallow fish after fish were feeding, their snouts coming up and leaving a purple semicircle in the auburn off the water. But I watched the rocking nightshade near the top right hand pocket with intentness, and - he Was there.

The fly hit the leaves and for a moment the fear of a hitch up added excitement to the situation. Cast after cast followed, far too quickly, but the distance was right, and if only the fly would pitch just as the nightshade rose clear all promised well. It pitched too far out, a foot to the left, but a sideways movement followed and the next instant there was a dark form in the air with a right gold outline - a splash, and a dash up the narrow run leading right among the rushes.

I pressed my finger on the line and held the rod up tightly, hardly daring to think the gut could stand the strain. It did - and the sudden slackening told me that the same course down stream was taking place. Line was on the water, and as I tore it in lay in coils among the high grass and around my feet, fie would be off or under the broom bush of course, but a welcome wallop in the pool below showed that so far all was clear. Head and shoulders out of the water he kicked somewhere below me. The net had fallen in the water and in getting it I tripped forward and was on hands and knee?. It seemed impassible to save him and yet I had to try and pull him up chin over the rim of the net.

As I did so something gave way, and only a dark mass of weeds seemed there instead of the trout I felt inside, he was there, free in the net, swaying and arching in a way that made me afraid to lift it up by the handle lest the knuckle joint should give way. He was mine, upon the bank, carried well up over the stones in a spirit of caution and set down among the nettles before 1 dared to unchain him: a perfect fish in every way dwarfing the others and fully a pound and a quarter. Coils of line were still round my boot and took some time to adjust but the fly, the ginger quill, was unharmed and its barb as sharp as before.

The time was now eight forty, and the shallows above the island were still dimpled with rising fish. The trio on the bank made quite a warm place in ones heart, and their capture appeared to have occupied only a few minutes. It was now becoming unnecessary to take cover. The whole sky was ablaze in waning sunset so I waded slowly out a few yards above the grass clump where fish were rising well nigh between my feet.

Away to the left in shallow water, lit up by the warm afterglow, a good trout took my fly among the stones, ran up and across the river, jumped high, and vibrated off. He was a twelve ouncer; the last of that size I hooked. Four more, all over nine ounces, were taken, but at a quarter past nine they stopped, only a few dark rings under the shade of the rushes on the right being made from time to time. The last fish I had to slip into my boot, and it worked down so far that a visit to the bank became necessary. If only the creel were not hanging in the verandah at home what an opening there seemed for picking up two or three lumpers in the dusk.

To get the three prizes into two knotted handkerchiefs and to carry them n one hand was a difficult matter. It was no use putting them into the net; besides its mesh was not too safe, as it had been repaired with common string that afternoon. Hot with excitement, dripping with the various burdens of fish, rod and mackintosh, I thought - perhaps for the first time in my life that I had enough.

Deep ' ploops ' sounded from time to time close under my own bonk as I stumbled on, and twice I set down the impedimenta and threw for the rising fish. It was a mile and a half to the inn, the nearest way being up the single railway line, so by the time I had laboured over the wire fencing, dropping all three fish in the thistles and the dark, I felt fairly well done up, bathed in perspiration, and desperately hungry. Sitting down on the rails to cool I noticed that nearly every other sleeper was lighted by a glow worm; twenty or thirty I counted on the way back, and although a pair of fern owls were hawking round I never saw one taken. It was nearly eleven before the inn was reached and the fish laid out on the table and weighed. Each one was above the estimate. A golden day indeed, from water into which not an artificially-bred trout had ever been placed during the hundred odd years that anglers had haunted the stream. How my host had fared that evening I did not know then, but his advice was truly disinterested. He had told me of a veritable Arcadia. Twice again it fell to my good fortune to fish the same place but no such red-letter luck recurred.

A long rest after supper with the battle fought again amid wreaths of smoke - a nirwana of trout lore - brought that day to a close and sent me out down the road to the upper bridge a hundred yards off under the light of a moon but two days past the full. While stepping across the side parapet I saw and heard a rush in a shallow stickle and for a moment thought of salmon. it was a pair of otters who had been lying out in only a few inches of water.