WHERE THE POOLS ARE BRIGHT AND DEEP

By Dana S. Lamb '21. Illustrations byEldridge Hardie. New York: Winchester Press,1973. 145 pp. $8.95.

Among expert anglers Dana Lamb evokes admiration. They envy the way he casts a long straight line below the millrace of the Kennebago dam and his Hendrickson on the oil-smooth glides below Cooks Falls. With butt piece in and drag just right he taps his rod to cause a jump, for a sulking fish too long conserves its strength. He knows when to employ a Fanwing, Brown Bivisible. Royal Wulff, Badger Spider, Spent-Wing Coachman, or Pink Lady. Sly as foxes and wild as hawks, big brown trout are no match for a man who has brooded half a century of winter evenings over what flies and when.

Nature in a minor key. fascinates him: graybrown grape vines twining about old fence rails, whitethroats searching for hidden seeds and sober-Plumaged turtledoves making mournful music, solemn unseen owls lamenting as lugubriously as the doves, Wilson snipes feeding in tall marsh grass by springs, red-winged blackbirds riding the swaying cattails in swamps, a hundred geese on creek banks dreaming of eggs to cover and nests, and a thousand broadbills idling by sunlit waters gleaming like polished platinum.

A hunter gauging the distance and speed of flying birds, Dana Lamb would shoot skillfully and straight and miss cleanly rather than maim. He dwells on frosty mornings, hills crimson and gold, with time-tested friends in places where partridges feed. Steady, sound, and slow, his snow-white setter, no over-eager Brittany putting 'em up a hundred yards ahead, never ranges like a quail dog. An easy-handling twenty gauge fits his shoulder and arm, and he prays for strength enabling him to work swales and swamps. Submerged in Dana the Hunter is Dana the Poet, who prays for better eyes to see and better ears to hear: deer floating down hill in single file, fox on the prowl, sluicing of a distant waterfall, chorus of a flight of crows, and chatter of a squirrel. The echoes of a shot far off cheers him more than his own.

Dana the Poet merges into Lyric Historian. He raises his tankard of New England rum and drinks deep to the clear waters of the undammed Connecticut 200 years ago when a man, too busy with cows and crops to salt his own salmon, might buy a year's supply, if the run were on, for just a cent a pound. His ears reverberate with the diatribes of Cotton Mather against the sin of catching fish for fun, but Mather thunderings are diminished to rumbles as the roar of fish-filled rapids on the Kennebec, Penobscot, and An - droscoggin drowns him out and renders sterile his puritanical voice box.

A bon viveur, Dana Lamb is not one to torture himself on burned bacon and cereal soggy with condensed milk. After a dry martini and well iced clams, he may savor sauteed soft shell crabs, little ones shipped up from Maryland, an artichoke with Hollandaise, watercress salad, a demi-tasse, and Brie. For variety he may switch to Lowenbrau, smoked eel, and shad roe from the Nissequoque. He unites the civilized with the primitive when, from his hunting-lodge window watching a bear, he sips Scotch and dines on lobster.

Deep even in the young Lamb and now deeper in the old, an urbane nostalgia pervades. Smilingly and lovingly he lingers with his memories and renounces the challenges of more spectacular hunting and fishing exploits. In nocturnal reveries, he contents himself with an older and happier world and with the simplicities of the present: a dog at his feet, friends knocking on his door, the tinkle of ice against crystal, and the glow from burning logs on ruddy faces of outdoorsmen full of laughter and tall stories about what they hooked in pools deep and bright.