Free Fly-Fishing the 41st by James Prosek

the creaky steps looking at several paintings. I read some passages here and there about Courbet’s life and learned that during the months prior to painting his famous Trout, Courbet had served a jail sentence and suffered severe hemorrhoids.
    In the summer of 1872, back in Ornans to recuperate and to work freely, Courbet painted a different kind of real allegory of his experience. Though he had obviously fished many times before, he had never used fish as a theme as he had other game. Now struck perhaps by the fish as creature who is caught and who struggles vainly against his captor, he paints them: first in a more traditional way, as dead game, and then even more strikingly as a kind of self-portrait, inscribed with the phrase in vinculi fecit (made in chains). 1
    Philippe and I drove upstream to a bridge over la Loue where Courbet often went to watch trout.
    We searched the bushes near the bridge for big stoneflies. Holding them by their abdomens we flicked the insects’ heads with our middle fingers and then tossed them, stunned, off the bridge into the feeding zones of the big trout below. The trout watched the crippled stoneflies as they hit the water and floated downstream. Usually they took them with big sucking swirls, but sometimes they just rose and touched their noses to them without eating. “ Il le refuse! ” Philippe yelled.
    L A B IENNE
    P hilippe showed me all of his favorite views of the nearby river valleys—the Doubs at Goumois, the monastery by the Dessoubre, the turn in the river by the big mansion on la Loue. But the Bienne, above all, seemed to be Philippe’s most secret trout river in the Jura.
    Part of the attraction of the Bienne for Philippe was its difficulty. He also had not been fishing it that long; therefore, like a new love, it held the allure of the unknown. By contrast, he knew just about every fish on the Loue near his home.
    â€œThere are fewer fish in the Bienne,” Philippe remarked, comparing the two rivers, with a tone as if to say that was good “not because more people fish it; there just aren’t that many. But the ones that are there are big and difficult to catch.”
    We parked on the first bridge over the Bienne and stepped out of the car to take a look. Upstream of the bridge, Philippe spotted a good trout.
    â€œDo you see it?” Philippe asked me, “it’s next to the willow with the twisted branch, on top of the white rock.” Philippe made a mental note of the fish’s position. He took his fly rod out of the red Citroën and strung the line through the guides.
    With the rod in the crook of his arm, Philippe inspected his flies in the battered metal boxes he kept in his vest. He picked out a small pheasant-tail nymph with an orange head and tied it onto his line. The wind was up and agitated the river’s surface.
    Philippe walked to the river and positioned himself behind the fish. He stood there one hour, waiting for the sun to come out of the clouds so that he might be able to see the fish again. I waited on the bridge above him.
    He had nothing to aid him in the wait, neither a cigarette to smoke nor a piece of grass to chew on. I wondered what he was thinking about. When the sun did come out, the big fish was no longer there.
    By the time we arrived at the next bridge the sky had cleared. Under a tree that overhung the left bank of the river, far below, Philippe spotted an enormous trout, probably six pounds. Its head was facing downstream, into the circling current of a large eddy. “It’s the largest trout I’ve seen this spring,” he whispered, as if the fish could hear us. “If I catch it I’ll buy a bottle of champagne and we’ll drink it.”
    If Philippe could position himself to cast under the overhanging tree without spooking the trout, the rest would be easy; the trout would take the fly and he would tire it and kill it in the deep green water under the bridge. It took