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You’ll make more friends with eggs than flies, even with a lie

There seem to be two types of hunters and fishermen: Those who stretch the truth, and those who shrink it. Either way, the truth is a nebulous concept for most of us.

I learned this while hunting rabbits when I was a teenager. My brother Kenny and I had a pretty good morning with the cottontails, and were near limits by noon. Then we headed into town for lunch.
A well-known truth-stretcher approached our table to talk about hunting. “We were just out for an hour or so and got two pheasants,” he said. “How’d you boys do?”

“Oh, we didn’t get anything,” Kenny said.

After the older man left, I asked my brother, “Why didn’t you tell him about the rabbits we shot?”

“I knew he didn’t have any pheasants,” Kenny said. “So I figured if he was going to lie to us, why should I tell him the truth?”

My son has adopted a similar strategy for steelhead fishing. When someone asks if he’s having any luck, Russ generally says, “Nope,” whether he has or not. If they ask what kind of bait he’s using, he says, “Eggs.” Russ might have the biggest, shiniest plug you ever saw dangling from his rod tip, but he still says, “Eggs.”

I really can’t fault those answers. When a person catches fish, it’s probably not a good idea to broadcast it all over the county, and salmon eggs are certainly a time-tested bait.

In his book, The Best of Ed Zern, the great humor writer tells about one of his friends who spent much of his life on the trout streams of the Northeast. The fishing pressure and finicky trout in that part of the country turned this fellow into an expert with those tiny flies they call nymphs.

When a business trip took him to Portland, Ore., this man wasted no time in renting a car and heading for the Deschutes River.
After studying the water for a while he noticed a tiny midge was hatching. So, he tied on a Number 20 nymph (slightly larger than a fruit fly) and proceeded to clobber trout the rest of the day. He lost quite a few fish on the little flies, but managed to keep five in the 16- to 18-inch class. (Daily limits on the Deschutes were larger in those days.)

As he was walking back to the car, he ran into a party of three local fishermen – all of who seemed about eight feet tall. When they saw his stringer of fish, they asked what kind of bait he caught them on (bait was still legal at the time).

The fly fisherman showed them the tiny nymph, and these Western fishermen “became moody,” as Zern puts it. One of them picked Zern’s friend up by the scruff of the neck and said, “In these parts, stranger, when a man asks us what we caught our fish on, we don’t try to kid him. Now, git!”

He got. But before he made it back to his car, he ran into another group of eight-foot-tall fishermen. After admiring his trout, they asked what he caught them on.

“A great big glob of salmon eggs,” he said.

Then, he jumped in his car and drove to Portland as fast as he could!

Readers with questions or comments for Roger Pond may write to him in care of this publication.

12/16/2009