Free Fly-Fishing the 41st by James Prosek Page A

him forty minutes to clamber down the hill and approach the fish. When he was close enough to cast, though, he saw that fungus had attacked its head and sides. “ Truite malade, ” he muttered, and walked back to the bridge.
    We ate lunch out of the back of the red Citroën. Philippe was impatient to get back to the river. It was well into the afternoon and still he had not caught a fish.
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    When we arrived at the next spot the wind was up and it was difficult to spot fish in the uneven water over the flat yellow gravel. We sat on a rock above some briars overlooking the river. The clouds passed over and Philippe stared into the yellow-green water, looking for any movement or incongruence beneath the current.
    Philippe touched his neck, red with sun, and let his rod lay limp in the briars. He shifted, stretched his spine, even picked up a pebble and flicked it in the tall grass along the bank. Cars passed behind him on the road and long shadows crept across the stones where he sat. I was passing into sleep.
    Before Philippe had seen the cruising fish he had sensed it coming and was up on his feet. The trout he saw was big, movingupstream toward him, and he had slid down through the briars to the bank to prepare himself for their meeting. He changed the fly at the end of his leader, and by the time he did so, the fish was within casting range.
    The trajectory was perfect, the fish sipped in the fly, and with a swift strike it was hooked.
    Philippe ran down the river after the fish, holding his rod high, his arm extended above his head. One hundred yards downstream the gravel flats ended in a deep hole. He had landed the fish in his mind prematurely, though. The line broke and he held his head in his hands pulling air through his clenched teeth. He made one guttural curse at the passing clouds and then climbed through the briars to the car.
    C RAYFISHING IN THE B OIS
    F ishing in the Seine was not the only option for one who chose to subsist as a hunter-gatherer in Paris. In his Paris memoir, A Moveable Feast, Hemingway wrote of killing pigeons with his trusty slingshot and making meals of them. He would not have bothered, perhaps, had he known of the prolific crayfish population in the ponds of the Bois de Boulogne in western Paris.
    On my return to Paris, Pierre invited me to join him and his family on one of their mid-spring rituals, crayfishing in the bois.
    The bois was a verdant wood of willow, chestnut, and plane trees. By Pierre’s accounts the écrevisse were plentiful, large, easy to catch, and delicious in a cream-and-butter sauce.
    Inside the old bordel, Carole was preparing food in baskets for our outing. The three children, May Fario, Venice, and Marlin, were running up and down the stairs fighting and yelling at one another. Pierre was in his cave, hastily filling a bag with the crayfish nets.
    â€œThis is the only way I can survive living in downtown Paris,” he noted, “to get out once in a while.”
    After fighting through traffic in Pierre’s van, we arrived in the bois, where the heat was dampened by the shade trees and the crowds had vaporized. Parisians in swimsuits sunbathed on the grass, and in quiet corners they lay out nude.
    The collapsible crayfish traps were made of nylon netting pulled over concentric wire circles. The traps flattened when set on the mud-bottom of the pond, but when you pulled them up they were basin shaped.
    May Fario and Venice were in charge of two traps each. They lowered their traps baited with chicken wings to the bottom and tied them by a string to trees on the bank. The best spot to set the traps was by a little bridge at the north end of the pond. They caught many crayfish, olive colored on the backs with orange legs and underclaws, and put them in a creel of woven reeds. Pierre set traps too, but never checked them; he fell asleep on the grass with a straw hat covering his face.
    Marlin was too young to set his own traps. Instead, he