Bill Jones went to visit a French financier who lives near Deauville and has a private trout stream. The financier was very fat. His stream was very thin.
“Ah, Monsieur Zshones, I will show you the fishing,” the financier purred over the coffee. “You have the trout in Canada, is it not? But here! Here we have the really charming trout fishing of Normandy. I will show you. Rest yourself content. You will see it.”
The financier was a very literal man. His idea of showing Bill the fishing was for Bill to watch and the financier to fish. They started out. It was a trying sight.
If undressed and put back on the shelf piece by piece the financier would have stocked a sporting goods store. Placed end to end his collection of flies would have reached from Keokuk, Ill., to Paris, Ont. The price of his rod would have made a substantial dent in the interallied debt or served to foment a central American revolution.
The financier flung a pretty poisonous fly, too. At the end of two hours one trout had been caught. The financier was elated. The trout was a beauty, fully five and a half inches long and perfectly proportioned. The only trouble with him was some funny black spots along his sides and belly.
“I don’t believe he’s healthy,” Bill said doubtfully.
“Healthy? You don’t think he’s healthy? That lovely trout? Why, he’s a wonder. Did you not see the terrible fight he made before I netted him?” The financier was enraged. The beautiful trout lay in his large, fat hand.
“But what are those black spots?” Bill asked.
“Those spots? Oh, absolutely nothing. Perhaps worms. Who can say? All of our trout here have them at this season. But do not be afraid of that, Monsieur Zshones. Wait until you taste this beautiful trout for your breakfast!”
It was probably the proximity to Deauville that spoiled the financier’s trout stream. Deauville is supposed to be a sort of combination of Fifth Avenue, Atlantic City, and Sodom and Gomorrah. In reality it is a watering place that has become so famous that the really smart people no longer go to it and the others hold a competitive spending contest and take each other for duchesses, dukes, prominent pugilists, Greek millionaires and the Dolly sisters.
The real trout fishing of Europe is in Spain, Germany and Switzerland. Spain has probably the best fishing of all in Galicia. But the Germans and the Swiss are right behind.
In Germany the great difficulty is to get permission to fish. All the fishing water is rented by the year to individuals. If you want to fish you have first to get permission of the man who has rented the fishing. Then you go back to the township and get a permission, and then you finally get the permission of the owner of the land.
If you have only two weeks to fish, it will probably take about all of it to get these different permissions. A much easier way is simply to carry a rod with you and fish when you see a good stream. If anyone complains, begin handing out marks. If the complaints keep up, keep handing out marks. If this policy is pursued far enough the complaints will eventually cease and you will be allowed to continue fishing.
If, on the other hand, your supply of marks runs out before the complaints cease you will probably go either to jail or the hospital. It is a good plan, on this account, to have a dollar bill secreted somewhere in your clothes. Produce the dollar bill. It is ten to one your assailant will fall to his knees in an attitude of extreme thanks-giving and on arising break all existing records to the nearest, deepest and wooliest German hand-knitted sock, the south German’s savings bank.
Following this method of obtaining fishing permits, we fished all through the Black Forest. With rucksacks and fly-rods, we hiked across country, sticking to the high ridges and the rolling crests of the hills, sometimes through deep pine timber, sometimes coming out into a clearing and farmyards and again going, for miles, without seeing a soul except occasional wild looking berry pickers. We never knew where we were. But we were never lost because at any time we could cut down from the high country into a valley and know we would hit a stream. Sooner or later every stream flowed into a river and a river meant a town.
At night we stopped in little inns or gasthofs. Some of these were so far from civilization that the innkeepers did not know the mark was rapidly becoming worthless and continued to charge the old German prices. At one place, room and board, in Canadian money, were less than ten cents a day.
One day we started from Triberg and toiled up a long, steadily ascending hill road until we were on top of the high country and could look out at the Black Forest rolling away from us in every direction. Away off across country we could see a range of hills, and we figured that at their base must flow a river. We cut across the high, bare country, dipping down into valleys and walking through woods, cool and dim as a cathedral on the hot August day. Finally we hit the upper end of the valley at the foot of the hills we had seen.
In it flowed a lovely trout stream and there was not a farmhouse in sight. I jointed up the rod, and while Mrs. Hemingway sat under a tree on the hillside and kept watch both ways up the valley, caught four real trout. They averaged about three-quarters of a pound apiece. Then we moved down the valley. The stream broadened out and Herself took the rod while I found a look-out post.
She caught six in about an hour, and two of them I had to come down and net for her. She had hooked a big one, and after he was triumphantly netted we looked up to see an old German in peasant clothes watching us from the road.
“Gut tag,” I said.
“Tag,” he said. “Have you good fishing?”
“Yes. Very good.”
“Good,” he said. “It is good to have somebody fishing.” And went hiking along the road.
In contrast to him were the farmers in Ober-Prechtal, where we had obtained full fishing permits, who came down and chased us away from the stream with pitchforks because we were Auslanders.
In Switzerland I discovered two valuable things about trout fishing. The first was while I was fishing a stream that parallels the Rhone river and that was swollen and grey with snow water. Flies were useless, and I was fishing with a big gob of worms. A fine, juicy-looking bait. But I wasn’t getting any trout or even any strikes.
An old Italian who had a farm up the valley was walking behind me while I fished. As there was nothing doing in a stream I knew from experience was full of trout, it got more and more irritating. Somebody just back of you while you are fishing is as bad as someone looking over your shoulder while you write a letter to your girl. Finally I sat down and waited for the Italian to go away. He sat down, too.
He was an old man, with a face like a leather water bottle.
“Well, Papa, no fish to-day,” I said.
“Not for you,” he said solemnly.
“Why not for me? For you, maybe?” I said.
“Oh yes,” he said, not smiling. “For me trout always. Not for you. You don’t know how to fish with worms.” And spat into the stream.
This touched a tender spot, a boyhood spent within forty miles of the Soo, hoisting out trout with a cane pole and all the worms the hook would hold.
“You’re so old you know everything. You are probably a rich man from your knowledge of fishworms,” I said.
This bagged him.
“Give me the rod,” he said.
He took it from me, cleaned off the fine wriggling gob of trout food, and selected one medium-sized angleworm from my box. This he threaded a little way on the number 10 hook, and let about three-fourths of the worm wave free.
“Now that’s a worm,” he said with satisfaction.
He reeled the line up till there was only the six feet of leader out and dropped the free swinging worm into a pool where the stream swirled under the bank. There was nothing doing. He pulled it slowly out and dropped it in a little lower down. The tip of the rod twisted. He lowered it just a trifle. Then it shot down in a jerk, and he struck and horsed out a 15-inch trout and sent him back over his head in a telephone pole swing.
I fell on him while he was still flopping.
The old Italian handed me the rod. “There, young one. That is the way to use a worm. Let him be free to move like a worm. The trout will take the free end and then suck him all in, hook and all. I have fished this stream for twenty years and I know. More than one worm scares the fish. It must be natural.”
“Come, use the rod and fish now,” I urged him.
“No. No. I only fish at night,” he smiled. “It is much too expensive to get a permit.”
But by my watching of the river guard while he fished and our using the rod alternately until each caught a fish, we fished all day and caught 18 trout. The old Italian knew all the holes, and only fished where there were big ones. We used a free wriggling worm, and the 18 trout averaged a pound and a half apiece.
He also showed me how to use grubs. Grubs are only good in clear water, but are a deadly bait. You can find them in any rotten tree or sawlog, and the Swiss and Swiss-Italians keep them in grub boxes. Flat pieces of wood bored full of auger holes with a sliding metal top. The grub will live as well in his hole in the wood as in the log and is one of the greatest hot weather baits known. Trout will take a grub when they will take nothing else in the low water days of August.
The Swiss, too, have a wonderful way of cooking trout. They boil them in a liquor made of wine vinegar, bay leaves, and a dash of red pepper. Not too much of any of the ingredients in the boiling water, and cook until the trout turns blue. It preserves the true trout flavor better than almost any way of cooking. The meat stays firm and pink and delicate. Then they serve them with drawn butter. They drink the clear Sion wine when they eat them.
It is not a well-known dish at the hotels. You have to go back in the country to get trout cooked that way. You come up from the stream to a chalet and ask them if they know how to cook blue trout. If they don’t you walk on away. If they do, you sit down on the porch with the goats and the children and wait. Your nose will tell you when the trout are boiling. Then after a little while you will hear a pop. That is the Sion being uncorked. Then the woman of the chalet will come to the door and say, “It is prepared, Monsieur.”
Then you can go away and I will do the rest myself.