Fishing With A Straight Hook

ONE SUMMER, I tried fishing on Lac Catherine, a small lake in Quebec near the village of Entrelacs.

- Marni Jackson

Around this privately owned body of water is a deep band of forest and only three habitable structures, including the two-room cabin that my husband and I rent for a month each summer and the capacious log home of the owners, our friends Anne and Arne. They live there year-round and use some of the 121 hectares of forest to make maple syrup in the spring. Come summer, local fishermen sometimes pay them a fee to drop their lines in Lac Catherine. Usually, they leave a few hours later with one or two or three small trout. This alerted me to the fact that, technically, evidently, there were fish in the lake — fish that other people caught. So I was happy when a friend of our son, an experienced angler, showed up at our cabin one day. I would learn his secrets, I schemed, and catch a fish at last.

Roberto was in his early thirties, a lifelong fisherman from Brazil, where, he tells me, they sometimes fish with worms called minhocuçu that are three feet long. Now we’re talking! He arrived at our cabin with his partner, Madeleine, their three-month-old baby, Celeste, and a large, heavy tackle box that appeared to come a very close second to the baby in its significance for Roberto. First, he presented the baby to us, coaxing laughter out of her by flubbing his mouth against her belly. Then he brought his tackle box into the cabin and placed it reverently in the centre of the room. When he opened it, a three tiered bleacher expanded into jewellery-box compartments packed with lead sinkers, bright feathery lures, and hooks that ranged in size from a comma on a page to a pirate’s prosthetic metal hand. “Those are for carp,” Roberto said, “which can get very big in Brazil.”