But, as Grover Cleveland said: "He is no true fisherman who is
willing to fish only when fish are biting." The real angler will
sit all day in a boat in a pouring rain, eagerly watching the point
of the rod, which never for an instant swerves a half inch from
the horizontal. The real angler will troll for miles with a hand
line and a spinner, winding in the thirty-five dripping feet of
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the lure every ten minutes, to remove a weed, or "to see if she's
still a-spinnin'." Vainly he hopes for the muskellunge who has just
gone somewhere else, but, by the same token, the sure-enough angler
is ready to go out next morning, rain or shine, at sunrise.
It is a habit of Unshelled Fish to be in other places, or, possibly,
at your place, but at another time. The guide can never understand
what is wrong. Five days ago, he himself caught more bass than
he could carry home, at that identical rocky point. A man from
La Porte, Indiana, whom he took out the week before, landed a
thirty-eight pound "muskie" in trolling through that same narrow
channel. In the forty years that the guide has lived in the place,
man and boy, he has never known the fishing to be as poor as it
is now. Why, even "ol' Pop Somers" has ceased to fish!
But the real angler continues, regardless of the local sage.
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