Fishing on the Virginia Coast
BALTIMORE, Md., Sept. 15. -- Editor Forest and Stream: We wished for a few days to play truant to clear our brains of cobwebs and to practice deep breathing before the coming summer. The mind of one whose years are not a few, if he dwells south of the Mason and Dixon line, becomes slothful and the inflation of the lungs labor.
Since the time given to travel must be deducted from the few days we allowed ourselves, our accustomed haunts were beyond reach. Of nearby lounging places we knew little and an advertisement in FOREST AND STREAM describing a resort for sportsmen on the lower Virginia sea coast was interesting reading.
The longer the advertisements enumerated therein incubated in our minds, the more alluring they grew, until on a compelling May morning we set out to learn whether the attractive word pictures were fact or fiction.
We reached the quaint little seagirt village earlier than the best season for the heralded pastimes, but also before the arrival of summer guests and so the hotel, the coast and the sea were almost exclusively ours.
Guides were difficult to find because sturgeon fishing offered them such speculative possibilities that they had removed from the village and were camped on the beach within easy reach of their nets which trailed on the sea bottom several miles offshore.
The taking of a female sturgeon with a large roe from which caviar could be made promised a profit of a hundred or more dollars, and we possessed no magnetism to offset the influence of such a dream of good fortune.
To our rescue then came a lad whose life was one long vacation, and whose habits were good under the laws of his native State, but hardly to be approved by FOREST AND STREAM and those persons who would shield the migratory game birds in their spring flight and generally practice conservation.
The Indians and trappers and untamed people generally have always had my sympathy, as the game laws gradually constricted their natural, though wanton, lives and required conformity with a legalized mould of individual of entirely different temperament and fiber. Their descendants will comprehend the wisdom of preservation no doubt, but when the Virginia game laws are revised, and but one season of the year is open to this roving boy for indulging his natural proclivities, he, like the modernized Indian and trapper, will probably mourn. He could see no more harm in bagging some of the countless plover, curlew and snipe as they alight upon the marshes or the beach on their way north in the spring, or in taking the eggs of the marsh hens for a change of diet, than in prying oysters off the wooden piles at low tide or kneading the mud for clams, or taking crabs or fish from the water whenever so inclined. He was near kin to nature and preyed upon any other form of life that pleased his palate, just as has been done by wild creatures since the beginning of life.
All these things he had done instinctively since the day he donned trousers, and when we offered to rent his motor boat and pay him a guide's wage to accept us as confederates in his depredations, his enthusiasm was refreshing. Under such circumstances the days were not long enough for him.
After locating us in a blind he would put out his decoys and then sit beside us scanning the horizon in search of a light of birds, and the moment they appeared, however distant, he detected the variety and accurately whistled their peculiar call until they hovered over the decoys or passed quite out of sight.
He knew where the fish were biting within the quiet water of the harbor, and upon what tide, and where the drumfish could be found out at sea, and whether in the blinds or engaged in fishing, or when swimming in the briny deep, or churning the water of the thoroughfares among the islands of the inlet in the motor boat, the boy was a constant inspiration. He not only substantiated the verity of the advertisement that led to our introduction, but taught us that living is not a difficult accomplishment after all, and furthermore he taught us that our relationship to boyhood is not as remote as our accumulation of years had persuaded us to believe.
LIPPINCOTT.