All Comforts of Home While Hooking Trout

1915

Rancher Invents Fishhouse, in Which Stove and Camp Chairs Help Some in Zero Weather

B. Maynard, a rancher in the mountains near Bozeman, Mont., who is a devotee to the art of fishing, has contrived a unique fishhouse by means of which he and his friends can enjoy all the comforts of home while pulling in the sportive trout in below zero weather.

A good sized tent was boarded up four feet high on the inside, a floor put in it and a trap opening about a yard square was cut in each of the four corners. A stove was set up in the center with the stovepipe running up thru the canvas and several camp chairs were added for furniture. The tenthouse was mounted on wooden runners and tied in a convenient place at the shore of Madison Lake.

On fishing days a horse is hitched to the house and it is taken to any part of the lake desired. Holes are chopped in the ice under the trap-doors, a good fire is built, then each member of the party chooses a corner, seats himself on a camp stool and drops in his line attached to a short length of pole. The trout can be plainly seen at the hook and are easily captured. A number of record catches have been made this winter. A ten-pound steelhead was one of the prizes recently hooked.

—Saturday Blade, Chicago, Dec. 18, 1915, p. 9.

This Fish Chews Gum

Connecticut, 1914

Winsted, Ct., Jan. 2. — Pete, a tame trout in Highland lake, has acquired a taste for sweets and also chews gum.

The fish, following a New Year's dinner of bits of roasted turkey and liver, was given molasses candy, which he chewed until it melted in his mouth. When the gum was dropped into the deep walled spring where Pete lives the year round he quickly took it and began chewing.

Half an hour later he still was chewing the gum while leisurely swimming about in a circle. The trout weighs a pound and a half and will respond to its name and eat from its owner's fingers.

The Trout in His Lair

1907

He Is an Alert and Elusive Unpictured Beauty

Whoever has had the privilege of lying at full length on some mossy overhanging bank while watching a large trout in his lair perceives that a true figure has yet to be drawn of him.

Even photography can give no hint of the wavy circles from the spotted dorsal fin undulating loosely athwart the broad back, of the perpetual fanning of the pectoral fins, of the rapacious gills opening and closing, the half open round mouth, the luminous brown eye, the ceaseless slow vibration of the powerful tail, nor can pen adequately describe the startling suddenness of the dart at some idle fly touching the surface, the quick return to the old position and the resumption of the poise with head elevated at a slight angle, pectorals all tremulous and floating watery circles emanating from every slight motion of the body.

It is also worth while to watch a trout rush four feet up a perpendicular fall of water, pause, tremble violently all over and in a moment throw himself clear of the stream and fall into the basin above at an elevation of about three feet more. — Arthur P. Silver in Outing Magazine.