Issue link: http://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/68594
"If fishing interferes with your business, give up your business," any angler will tell you, citing instances of men who have lost health and even life through failure to take a little recreation, and reminding you that "the trout do not rise in Greenwood Cemetery," so you had better do your fishing while you are still able. But you will search far to find a fisherman to admit that a taste for fishing, like a taste for liquor, must be governed lest it comes to possess its possessor; that an excess of fishing can cause as many tragedies of lost purpose, earning power and position as an excess of liquor. This is the story of a man who finally decided between his business and his fishing, and of how his decision was brought about by the murder of a trout. Fishing was not a pastime with my friend John but an obsession – a common condition, for typically your successful fisherman is not really enjoying a recreation, but rather taking refuge from the realities of life in an absorbing fantasy in which he grimly if subconsciously re-enacts in miniature the unceasing struggle of primitive man for existence. Indeed, it is that which makes him successful, for it gives him that last measure of fierce concentration, that final moment of unyielding patience, which in angling so often make the difference between fish and no fish. John was that kind of fisherman, more so than any other I ever knew. Waking or sleeping, his mind ran constantly on the trout and its taking, and back in the Depression years, I often wondered whether he could keep on indefinitely doing business with the surface of his mind and fishing with the rest of his mental processes – wondered, and feared that he could not. So when he called me one spring day and said, "I'm tired of sitting here and watching a corporation die; let's go fishing," I know that he was not discouraged with his business so much as he was impatient with its restraint. But I went with him, for maybe I'm obsessed myself. SPO R TIN G CL ASSICS 132