A SQUARE DEAL

CHAPTER XIV

A SQUARE DEAL

E UREKA!" I shouted, but the cry was smoth-ered in salt water, as the big tarpon pulledme over the capsized canoe and sent me

upside down to the bottom of the bay. When I gotback to the surface, with my head where it belonged,I wondered if the philosopher of the tub came asnear drowning while making his discovery, so akinto mine. I had found how to rid the crowning sportof fishing of its alloy. That was my remedy: Givethe fish a square deal.

The idea was not quite original, but its applica-tion was unusual. From the days of Izaak Walton,fishermen of gentle instincts have worked in thisdirection. Linus Yale, as perfect an angler as he wasmechanician, loved to stop by the roadside and, witha few hairs from the tail of his horse, a tiny hook ofhis own delicate forging, a microscopic fly designedand made by himself, and a reed or tiny sapling fora rod, coax from his home in the mountain brooksome patriarch of the stream, twenty times the weightof the improvised gear. I have seen Mr. Jeffersoncapture (I hate the word "kill") a twelve-poundsalmon with an eight-ounce trout-rod, and to-dayif you tell your tackle-man that you are going to

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catch an eighteen-ounce trout and want him fittedwith a rod, he will pass over the counter one thatweighs three and three-fourths ounces.

But with little fish the cold fact remained that thecontest was between one pound and a hundred.Writers often treated it as a Homeric combat, andeven Warner's gentle satire failed to cure some ofthem. When bigger fish, like the tuna and the tar-pon, were dealt with, there were assistants andmachinery, and although the quarry might escape, itnever had the chance to hit back. One author haswritten in sweeping denunciation of this unfairness,and though I sympathized with his humanitarianism,and might have welcomed with him a system whichwould have killed fewer fish and more fishermen, Iyet thought his imagination perfervid when hepictured the fisherman as the "cold-blooded, cruelcreature at the wrong end of the unfair line," andwas reminded by the fisher with a camera of "aRoman painter who tortured a slave on the rack thathe might paint a man's dying agony."

Then one day the Camera-man came to me witha solemn face and letters in his hand, from whichhe read:

"We can use it, but we had hoped for somethingmore adventurous."

"Good stuff, but lacks human interest.""Deficient in local color . . . "We planned to compound a manuscript of equal

parts of adventure, local color, human interest, anda square deal, and then hunt up facts and pictures to

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A Square Deal

fit the story. I agreed to be the human interest, ifmy constitution held out, and began by getting intothe little Canadian canoe, fifteen feet long, twenty-sixinches wide, and eleven inches deep, and trying tostand up in it. I stopped down a tiny harpoon untilit could penetrate only one and a half inches andtook it aboard with a light line and tub. Thehunter-boy asked:

"Am I to go with you in the canoe, sir?""Yes."Then he went to his bunk, emptied his pockets,

took off his shoes, and got into the canoe. TheCamera-man was in his short little power boat, whichwould back, fill, and almost turn on its center at themotion of a hand.

I continued to practice standing upright, balancingmyself with the harpoon-pole, while the boy sat aslow down in the canoe as he could and paddled meout in the bay. The Camera-man zigzagged behindus, cheering me with offers to bet two to one on acapsize before a capture. He called my attentionto the three tandem fins of a fifteen-foot sawfishgliding through the water near me, but preferring tobe my own biographer I passed by on the other side.Chaffing stopped when we saw the bayonet fin of atarpon cleaving the water a hundred yards ahead ofus. As we approached each other there was noth-ing to fix the relation of hunter and hunted. Themien of the tarpon was at least as fierce as mine.His advance was swifter, straighter, his weightgreater, and he would have overtopped me by a foot.

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He bore slightly to the left, and I murmured to myboatman, in tones almost of anguish, "To the right,to the right!" for, being right-handed, to twist mybody half around to the right and throw from thatposition spells "capsize" in big letters. But theboy sheered just enough to the right, and as the fishcame on and distance diminished, slowed down andsteadied the canoe, while the thrill of the comingcrisis ran tingling through my veins, muscles hard-ened, and ceasing to take thought of my balance, Ifound it no longer needful, as foot by foot my eyemeasured the lessening distance between the canoeand that gleaming, oncoming, form. As the poleleft my hand I felt the shot was a sure one, and thesudden dash of the fish toward me brought forth theexultant cry, "I knew it!"

The tarpon's first leap was high in the air besidethe canoe and he whirled about as he plunged be-neath the surface, dashing water over us and nearlycapsizing the craft, in the bottom of which I wasthen kneeling. While getting under way and headedfor him I lost many yards of line which I slowlyrecovered until the bow of the light canoe was closeto his tail. When the Camera-man finally overtookus, the frightened fish swerved from his course, andas the power boat followed, the tarpon made circlesaround us, so near that I could not follow him withoutcapsizing the canoe. Once more he made a straight-away dash for a long distance, leaping often in theair, then, turning, swam straight for the canoe, sosuddenly that I could not gather .in the line as he

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A Square Deal

came. He leaped from the water so near me thatI could have touched him with my hand, rose abovemy head and then came a quick turn in the air, andthe descent of the creature, head downward, brush-ing my side and striking fairly, with all his weightmultiplied by a velocity which I have not yet figuredout, upon the side of the canoe. The canoe meltedaway and left me kneeling in the water and my boat-man sitting in the same element. He promptlyswam to the power boat and climbed aboard, but Iwas committed to the human interest and the squaredeal.

The tarpon was swimming away, and the line,which I had not dropped, was running through myhands as a few strokes took me to the capsized canoe.I rested against its side, with my arms extendedacross the bottom, as I took in line which came upfrom the bottom of the bay in hanks, and tried to getit into the tub, to which one end was fastened, andwhich I kept floating before me as best I could. Thiswork progressed intermittently, as the tarpon keptme occupied in other ways much of the time. Itwas during a special effort to control one of his rushesthat I was hauled across the canoe and plunged headdownward to the bottom by the rolling over of thatcraft. Things got tangled this time; I was mixedup with the line and had to swim around a good dealto straighten up. Finally I got into the submergedcanoe, right side up, all comfortable, head and toesabove water, tub between my knees and the gamein my own hands. That was all right while the tar-

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pon kept a straight course, but when he began totack I was in trouble. The way that canoe rolledfrom side to side, pitched back and forth, and tookheaders wouldn't be believed.

Of course the tarpon jumped. He always jumps,and is the only big fish that really knows how. Otherfish jump sometimes, but the tarpon makes it a mat-ter of principle. He leaps out of water at the firstprick of hook or harpoon, he leaps to catch the fishon which he feeds, and one unhooked tarpon jumpedinto the skiff, knocked my guide overboard, laidhim up for a month, and very nearly sent him intothe next world. His jumps are vertically upward,at any angle, in any direction, or he may skim thesurface of the water. He can hold himself straightas an arrow, bent into a circle or the letter S, or tiehimself into a bow-knot, and I never saw the leapof a salmon that the commonest kind of a tarponcouldn't double discount in his sleep. The perform-ance of a tarpon is so picturesque, so thrilling, thatto see it sportsmen travel thousands of miles, sit fordays in little skiffs, and then grind fifty-dollar coffee-mills on springless rods for hours at a time.

I wanted the tarpon to jump over the canoe, andto that end hung on and tugged till we were so neartogether that he struck the canoe on its side androlled it over; and as I came up on one side of it, histail, lifted well in air, banged against the other side.It was a joyous moment; nothing could have addedto my happiness but the presence of the author whowrote of the cruel control of "the wrong end of the

196

I got into the submerged canoe, right side up, with tihe game in my bands.

"Pii::: .... i iN~_i,;~iiiia i:-i-:-i:ii-ii·%ii~ii-: '-:---'-- :r

The tarpon slid into it of h iiis On ccrd, wich accptedas·-i-: ~fo m a surrender.::-:;:-::::--:: :: _::::·~:: ~-i:e~i~C i·i$ ~l:~~~~.;

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1.

A Square Deal

unfair line." I would have given him his choice ofends; he could have run with the hare or huntedwith the hound, if he could have made up his mindwhich was which. "The combat deepened"; some-times I was in the canoe, and at others I was not.The Camera-man's plates were "'most gone," andthe fight was now at short range. Whenever Ihauled the fish into the canoe, it rolled over with bothof us, until after one such capsize, as I was rightingit, the tarpon slid into it of his own motion, which Iaccepted as a formal surrender, and, with a suddenjerk of the lightly fastened harpoon, set him free,just as the last plate was exposed.

I had discovered a new sport which thrills from itsalpha to its omega. Whether one stands balancingon his feet, or kneels paddling in his canoe, the wholehunt is filled with charm. Overhead, wonderful pic-tures are painted, most often when the fishing seasonis best, of quick-gathering cloud masses, sometimessending back fingers earthward to invite great whirl-ing waterspouts, sometimes bursting into tropicalrainstorms, which suddenly melt away, leaving thesky filled with mountains of snowy clouds borderedby the richest colors of the spectrum, and back-grounded by the pure blue of the heavens. There,too, are the waters and the life in them, more variedthan the tourist dreams, picturesque streams; woodedshores and the life thereon; birds of many kinds onthe ground, in the trees, wading, and eternally onthe wing; the startled deer with big eyes followingyour every move, otters playing as they slide down

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the banks, big turtles and alligators, and, crowningit all, the gleaming sides of the royal fish, carved insilver, but charged with dynamite. Then, throwingthe harpoon! No other act of fishing compares withit in the skill involved or the thrill evolved. Withthe average sportsman, after a fair amount of prac-tice, the odds are half a dozen to one against hishitting the fish, and the chances are even that he willgo into the water oftener than a tarpon will comeout.

Playing the fish is another delight, not a struggleto destroy him, but to stimulate him to make thosegorgeous acrobatic displays which are without a paral-lel in the animal world. Then turn him loose. Theinjury to the fish is usually less than that which anaverage football-player would ignore in the glory ofthe game and count as trifling afterward.

I would like to suggest to the critic, who still thinksthe contest too unequal, that he substitute the stableskiff for the cranky canoe, take the button from hisfoil and with his sharpest harpoon, backed by sixfeet of chain and a hundred of half-inch manila, fol-low that black fin that is lifted a foot or more abovethe surface of the water, as its owner glides stealthilyin search of a victim. When he finds himself besidea murderous machine with a big mouth furnishedwith rows of serrated, introverted teeth, with headand tail overlapping respectively the bow and sternof his skiff, he can strike freely with the fullassurance that the next minute will dispel all hisfears of inadequate resistance to his attack. Or if

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A Square Deal

he will throw his iron into that other member ofthe family of sharks, so smoothly gliding beneath hisskiff, and hang on to the line till a four-foot weapon,four inches broad, wielded by half a ton of angryadversary, is broken across his craft, he will admityet other possibilities of fairness in fishing with aharpoon.

Sometimes it does happen that by accident youkill a fish, but the sharks will destroy a hundredbefore that accident will happen twice to you. Icannot agree with the author who believes the art ofthe angler "the refinement of cruelty," nor would Iwholly subscribe to the views of that other fanaticwho thinks that fish dying in air perish from anexcess of oxygen and pass away in a glorious deliriumof intoxication. My own belief, based on observa-tion of facts too numerous to be cited here, is on allfours with that of a learned doctor of metropolitandistinction who assures me that fish do not sufferpain as we understand it, that their apparent mani-festations of suffering are about as significant as theshrinking of a sensitive plant. I may add that Inever saw any action in any fish that indicated halfthe agony suggested by a hustling hen as she hikedover the fence when chased out of the family flower-garden. There is plenty of real trouble in the world,and it is not well to magnify the sorrows of thesecold-blooded victims, to the extent of getting yourmoral lens out of focus. Hunting the tarpon with aharpoon, under the conditions I have endeavored toset forth, is the very acme of sport. No man with

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red blood in his veins can resist its attractions if heonce gets within its field of influence. Of all sportsit is first in legitimate pleasurable excitement, fullestof thrills, unequaled in healthfulness, and the onlysport that gives the dumb object of pursuit a squaredeal.

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