community weblog - [ Fresh Mongolian Prairie Dog Bait ]

I came to Mongolia to flyfish for taimen, the legendary salmonlike fish that lives in its big rivers. When flyfishing didn’t work, I tried spinning with lures. When spinning with lures got no bites, I tried half a dead lenok (another kind of fish). When the lenok was a bust, I went to the can’t-miss bait: a prairie dog. And now, in the last hours of the last day, the dead prairie dog at the end of my line was mocking me.

After five hours of continuous casts into the Delger River without so much as a nibble, the dog was both absurdly stiff and unbearably heavy, the twin effects of rigor mortis and being waterlogged. And even though it had been dead for almost 24 hours, it somehow stuck its stiff, black tongue out at me.

Sure, I’m dead, it seemed to say, but you are one sorry-as fisherman. You couldn’t catch a taimen if you were both in the same bathtub.    more...