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Side 107 av 112
An attempt to produce almost any other kind of a fire will bring
forth smoke abundantly. But when you deliberately undertake to
create a smudge, flames break from the wettest timber, and green
moss blazes with a furious heat. You hastily gather handfuls of
seemingly incombustible material and throw it on the fire, but the
conflagration increases. Grass and green leaves hesitate for an
instant and then flash up like tinder. The more you put on, the
more your smudge rebels against its proper task of smudging. It
makes a pleasant warmth, to encourage the black-flies; and bright
light to attract and cheer the mosquitoes. Your effort is a
brilliant failure.
The proper way to make a smudge is this. Begin with a very little,
lowly fire. Let it be bright, but not ambitious. Don't try to make
a smoke yet.
Then gather a good supply of stuff which seems likely to suppress
fire without smothering it. Moss of a certain kind will do, but not
the soft, feathery moss that grows so deep among the spruce-trees.
Half-decayed wood is good; spongy, moist, unpleasant stuff, a
vegetable wet blanket. The bark of dead evergreen trees, hemlock,
spruce, or balsam, is better still. Gather a plentiful store of it.
But don't try to make a smoke yet.
Let your fire burn a while longer; cheer it up a little. Get some
clear, resolute, unquenchable coals aglow in the heart of it. Don't
try to make a smoke yet.
Now pile on your smouldering fuel. Fan it with your hat. Kneel
down and blow it, and in ten minutes you will have a smoke that will
make you wish you had never been born.
That is the proper way to make a smudge. But the easiest way is to
ask your guide to make it for you.
If he makes it in an old iron pot, so much the better, for then you
can move it around to the windward when the breeze veers, and carry
it into your tent without risk of setting everything on fire, and
even take it with you in the canoe while you are fishing.
Some of the pleasantest pictures in the angler's gallery of
remembrance are framed in the smoke that rises from a smudge.
With my eyes shut, I can call up a vision of eight birch-bark canoes
floating side by side on Moosehead Lake, on a fair June morning,
fifteen years ago. They are anchored off Green Island, riding
easily on the long, gentle waves. In the stern of each canoe there
is a guide with a long-handled net; in the bow, an angler with a
light fly-rod; in the middle, a smudge-kettle, smoking steadily. In
the air to the windward of the little fleet hovers a swarm of flies
drifting down on the shore breeze, with bloody purpose in their
breasts, but baffled by the protecting smoke. In the water to the
leeward plays a school of speckled trout, feeding on the minnows
that hang around the sunken ledges of rock. As a larger wave than
usual passes over the ledges, it lifts the fish up, and you can see
the big fellows, three, and four, and even five pounds apiece,
poising themselves in the clear brown water. A long cast will send
the fly over one of them. Let it sink a foot. Draw it up with a
fluttering motion. Now the fish sees it, and turns to catch it.
There is a yellow gleam in the depth, a sudden swirl on the surface;
you strike sharply, and the trout is matching his strength against
the spring of your four ounces of split bamboo.
You can guess at his size, as he breaks water, by the breadth of his
tail: a pound of weight to an inch of tail,--that is the traditional
measure, and it usually comes pretty close to the mark, at least in
the case of large fish. But it is never safe to record the weight
until the trout is in the canoe. As the Canadian hunters say, "Sell
not the skin of the bear while he carries it."
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