Just a brief aside to start this column today. I recently saw a photo on the front page of the sporting section of our northern neighbor’s newspaper, the Billings Gazette, which, despite the left leanings of its parent corporation, often does a credible job of addressing outdoor issues that I would be mostly in the dark about without reading the darned thing. Being from Montana, I still like to keep an eye on their projects and politicians.
Regardless, I present the following. The photo referred to showed a serious angler, waist deep in the mighty Yellowstone River, fly rod extended and displaying a suitable riverene background. The text under the photo told the story.
Unable to catch fish with his fly casting gymnastics, this angler later gave up his fly rod and went all “Meinecke.” He switched to a spin cast rig, decorated it with garden hackle (worms) and started catching fish. At least he was honest about it. I’ve known a bevy of fly fishermen who have put a streamer or even just a naked hook on the line, added a small split shot and a segment of worm, and pretended they were purist fly fishermen without fault. Yeah, right. The desire to cheat at anything must be deeply ingrained in the human race.
Why? We beg for primitive hunting seasons for those of us who use traditional front-stuffers and then some short-cut Sammy invents a so-called muzzle loader that loads from the breech and muzzle and puts scopes on them. Good out past 250 yards on a wet, cold day. Thank you, Jim Shockey, for stacking the black-powder hunter’s record book and popularizing the use of those awful creations.
Some of us maintain a desire to hunt with revolver-style handguns, using open barrel iron sights and our basic hunting abilities. Once special seasons or inclusion into regular hunting seasons are legalized, we build what are basically cutdown rifles without butt stocks, call them handguns, mount scopes on them and then go hunting, calling ourselves handgun hunters.
Archery clubs spent years lobbying the Game and Fish for separate archery seasons and when the first opportunity appears, the cheaters and commercial interests develop all manner of compound bows, designed to have a minimum draw weight for holding at full draw or invent machines that hold an arrow at full draw with no help from the archer, whose only job is to hit the release at the right time. Eventually, commercial interests develop sights to fit the compounds or even crossbows, making these tools effective out past 100 yards and as deadly as any rifle and enjoy the special season intended originally for traditional archers. And that’s just the tip of that arrow.
Wouldn’t you say, in a moment of honesty, that all of that is cheating of some type and shameful at best? Hunting, to me has always been a traditional blood sport that is supposed to be all about the one-on-one challenge of hunting? I also believe in God, country and family, but also recognize that for others, not so much. Yeah, I’m outmoded and pathetically old-fashioned. Heck, I even believe in monogamy.
Anyway, with apologies to fellow columnist Tim Wade and other conscientious fly guides and fly slingers, I’ll still happily hook up with a few split shot, a No. 6 hook, 6-pound test and a lightweight spinning reel and, adding a garden variety night crawler, enjoy a day of drift fishing and keeping my dinner.
Did you know that some fishermen don’t like to eat fish, they just enjoy being outdoors, and the contest? That’s not a bad thing, depending on how one does it. Add being able to communicate with the wildness of the mountains, the anonymity of the wild water and the bush folk, while worshipping in God’s natural cathedral to that list. Granted, some days I’ll plunk my buns down in a not-so comfy chair and plop a bobber out in a lake and call it fishing. Still, when my legs worked better, nothing stirred my blood and soothed my soul like a day or two spent wandering the high reaches of a favorite mountain stream, and trying to feed myself on brookies or hybrids that had never seen a man before. Days like that quieted my rage when it seemed like the whole world was going nuts.
Sadly, those days are gone, in part thanks to the genocide practiced on our high country waters by our own red shirts. Regardless of their justification, that poisoning is detrimental to fish, aquatic insects, aquatic plant species and most everything involved in the wetter side of a riverine habitat. It takes longer than I’ve got to explain the wrong headedness, but trust me, poison affects everything in those aquatic food chains in one manner or another.
Oh, and stocking a few dozen brood stock biggies in Beck Lake or Newton Lake (thank you guys for that anyway) doesn’t truly compensate for the thousands of angler days lost in the high country over the years by G&F poisoning out established fishing stock.
And, just off the cuff, how many non-hunters do you think work for our Game and Fish department? How many do you think are anti-hunting at their core?
One thing the military taught me was that what often seems to be blatantly obvious usually isn’t.
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