Читать книгу Mike Mullins of Boston Crick - Owen Templeton Garrett Williamson - Страница 8
ОглавлениеCompleted Angler
“Fishing is it,” said Mike apropos a remark about a thirty-pounder caught in Lake Temagami. “I don’t hold with it. Not that I won’t eat the creatures on a fast day but, by the powers, I won’t play games with them.”
“Why the bitterness, Mike?” I said, surprised at his vehemence. “Fishing, of all sports, is designed for the contemplative soul attuned to Nature in her happiest mood.”
“Is it now,” said Mike darkly. “That ain’t the way it looked to me the only time I tried it.”
“Here’s my pouch. Fill your pipe and let’s have the story.”
With his briar drawing nicely, Mike looked thoughtful for a moment before he spoke.
“This was the way of it. ’Twas in 1908 it happened, the time I’m going to Gowganda to make my fortune. Them days I’m a young feller just out from the Old Country and full of ambition to see what makes the world go round. Well, I drifted up to Toronto doing this and that and I’m working on a track gang with the old Grand Trunk. One day the lads is talking about a place called Cobalt and one of the right sort named Murphy says he’s turning in his check and trying his luck up there come pay day.
“ ‘What’s there,’ I says, ‘and where is Cobalt at?’
“ ‘Sure, ’tis away up north,’ says Murphy, ‘and ’tis where the silver comes from. They has it in chunks as big as boxcars and anyone that finds it can have it. There’s so much they even makes sidewalks of it.’
“Well, I thinks to myself, I’d admire to see a sidewalk made of silver, so I tells Murphy that I goes along with him. ’Tisn’t more than a week later Murph and me steps off the train at Cobalt and starts looking round. Devil a bit of silver could we see. The sidewalks, what there was of them, is wood perched up on posts to keep them out of the mud but ’twas a bustling place with half the town always on the move. Getting a job was easy and I’m lugging mine timbers on the surface out at the Kerr Lake. The lad was right about the silver sidewalk and many a time I’ve scraped the heel of my foot across it to help the shine of it. The silver was there all right but of course the whole country’s staked and devil a bit of it was there for Mullins.
“Come spring, I hear them talking about Gowganda which is a country with silver sticking out of the rocks like promises at an election rally. So what do I do but chuck up my job and go along, for I’m bound to have a silver mine. Down to Latchford I goes and up the Montreal on the Booth boats and me knowing no more about prospecting than I does about ashtronomy. ’Tis the tail end of the evening when we arrives at Elk Lake and the rapids and the river and the bush is giving me thoughts about the bunk-house at the Kerr Lake. Well, I has a bit of money, for I’m never one for the blind pigs and such, and I gets bunked down at the King Edward right up from the landing stage. Next morning, I’m mooching round and I run into a feller and him looking for a partner. Right away, we hooks up and I’m an Orangeman if it don’t turn out to be Old John that was to be in the hair of me for forty years.
“Little did I know, as the lad says in the dunce’s cap, what was to come of it. However, there we was partners and us sitting on the edge of the Post Office verandah talking things over. Not that there was much to talk about for John was as green as me. For all that, we’re getting acquainted, with John talking pretty big about how he has handled boats ever since he was a little lad, him having been reared on a bit of the coast in the Old Country. To hold my end up, I’m telling him what a swimmer I am and how I swam the Shannon at its widest, though I never saw the stream and did my bit of swimming in the Liffey.
“By and by, two sports come along and plumps theirselves down beside us. You could tell they was sports by the clothes of them and the fishing taykle. Well, these gents was talking loud and we could hear that they was making bets. They’d bet on anything. Whether anyone would go in the Post Office before anyone would come out and how many people was going which way on the bridge or any other thing that took their fancy. Soon a crowd was gathered round listening to the fun and some of them starts making bets theirselves. Then one of the gents looks at me and John and he says:
“ ‘These gentlemen has the look of dead game sports. I’m thinking, if they’re agreeable, we could fix them up with fishing taykle and stage a fishing Derby on the bridge. To start the thing, I puts twenty dollars on the big one.’
“ ‘I covers your twenty,’ says his friend, ‘and I has twenty more if any of the gents in the crowd would like to try their luck.’
“Soon the bets is flying thick and fast and near the whole town is milling round placing their money. John and me can’t spoil sport like that so we says we is agreeable and I even bets ten dollars at two to one on myself.
“Well, you must know the bridge in them days was nothing more than a plank walk riding on barrels with a bit of a railing on both sides. About four feet wide it was, for there was devil a horse or cart in the country. The Montreal’s wide and deep with a nice easy current. So the crowd ropes off a bit of the bridge near the middle for me and John, and the gent gets out two poles joined together that they says is casting rods. They has little windlasses on them for to roll the line up and there’s a ugly little critter on the end of the line full of hooks that they calls a plug. The idea, they says, is that we throws the plug out and, when a fish takes hold, we works him in with the little windlass. ’Tis agreed by all that once we starts there’s to be no interfering. So out we goes to the middle of the bridge and someone fires a gun and we’re off.
“It don’t go so good because John hooks me and I hook John the first time we tries to throw the plugs. When we gets untangled, we moves a bit and things goes better. We gets so we can throw the plugs about twenty feet or so, John upstream and me the other way. We throws them out and we winds them in and nothing happens but the crowd is still making bets and the odds change every time a plug hits the water. Then I hear a roar from the crowd and, out of the corner of my eye, I see that John has got a fish with his windlass singing like it’s mad. But, bedad, I pays no more attention to him with my ten dollars to protect and all my backers howling at me from the bank. I cast again and gets a good one and I’m just winding in when something hits my plug and away it goes with me trying to grab a hold on my windlass. Just then, about fifty feet away, up comes the biggest fish I ever hope to see. It jumps clear into the air and I’m damned if it doesn’t seem to have two lines on it. ‘Lunge’ yells someone from the bank but I don’t know what it means and anyway I’m too busy for such trifles, with me winding hard for the fish is coming right for me but deep in the water. I hear John winding too. Then this devil of a fish dives under the bridge and my line runs out again and saws against a barrel.
“I hears John yell, ‘The creature’s my side of the bridge. D’you want to ruin the good fishing taykle? For the love of Heaven, under the bridge you go and we’ll get him on this side.’
“Well, I don’t like the idea so much but just then the fish jumps again and there’s a roar from the crowd so in I goes. ’Tis a hard swim with my clothes and all and the fish tugging at the line but I makes it with my breath near gone. When I comes up with my pole in my hand, John’s winding hard again and the crowd’s cheering and laughing fit to kill. I’m just starting to climb out, when John yells, ‘Back you goes. He’s making for your side.’
“ ‘Go yourself,’ I yells, ‘He’s as much yours as mine.’
“ ‘If I could only swim,’ says John, sorry like. ‘In you go,’ he says. ‘Do you want to be losing the biggest fish ever seen in Elk Lake?’
“So I takes a big breath and down I goes with the current fine to help me. I’m half way through, like as not, when something hits me on the shoulder. ’Tis the fish, for I opens my eyes as he streaks by, and I’m scared for he’s a wicked looking devil. So I swims hard but I makes no headway with something tugging at my shoulder. I’m near done but there’s nothing for it but turning back. ’Tis easier going then and, when I’m like to bust, up I pops clear of the barrels. I grabs hold, breathing hard, and there’s John laughing so he can hardly stand with his pole almost in my face and his plug hooked tight in my collar. There’s no sign of the fish and anyway I’ve lost all interest. There was a good deal of arguing but finally all bets is called off when I offers to fight any two of them if they decides what John caught was fish. As I says, since that time I don’t mind eating the creatures but devil a game will I play with them.”
“And what happened to the partnership?” I said. “Did you go to Gowganda and stake a claim?”
“Sure, I never got past Elk Lake, nor John neither. Me and John got jobs with the T. & N.O. up around North Cobalt and we’ve been with the road ever since.”
“Too bad John never learned to swim,” I said. “It was a one-sided show he made you put on.”
“Swim, you says. The cunning devil. That same summer he wins a hundred dollars for swimming across Lake Temiskaming from Ville Marie to Haileybury. Bedad, he was more like to catch that fish with his bare hands than with any pole and windlass.”
