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plaid shirt, and corduroys, and had two days or more of stubble on his face. His hair was matted on the back of his head from sleep, his sea blue eyes not alert but aware.
    When my eyes adjusted to the small space I saw there were two rooms. Against the walls were shelves from the floor to the ceiling choked with thousands of objects: books, magazines, terrariums with taxidermied fishes, fish spears, harpoons, plaster casts of fish, reels, rods, silk lines, and carousels full of slides.
    In the second room by a pair of frosted windows was a desk piledwith books and paper and an antiquated computer. On top of it all Pierre opened a world atlas and bade me to sit on the opposite side. Flipping pages gently, he perused parts of the 41st parallel and made suggestions on where I should go based on places he had been.
    In his forty-five years, Pierre had fished many of the world’s major rivers: the Volga, the Nile, the Amazon, the Amur. I pulled my chair closer. “What’s your favorite fish?” I asked him.
    â€œOh, I like them all,” he replied, “but if I had one day left to fish I would probably go to Sierra Leone for giant tarpon. My favorite fish though is the Atlantic salmon. In my twenties I was a guide on several salmon rivers in Iceland. I wrote my thesis for veterinary school on the Atlantic salmon, which by that time, in the mid-seventies, was in very poor shape in France. The Allier, a tributary of the Loire, is my favorite salmon river in France, that and the Gave d’Oloron in Basque country. The salmon once ran the Allier by the thousands.” He flipped to a map of France. “They congregated here, between Brioude and Chanteuges, to spawn. Now we would be lucky with a run of three hundred. For fifteen years I fished the Allier, an average of twenty days a year, and I caught one salmon.” Pierre paused to clean his glasses on his shirt, then refocused his attentions on the map.
    â€œWhile fishing the Gave d’Oloron I became friends with an old man who fished for salmon commercially with a fly rod. He averaged a hundred salmon a year, and back then, to a poor man, two salmon were equivalent to a month’s wages. That old man taught me how to fish for salmon. I loved him.”
    Pierre talked about native brown trout in the Pamir Mountains of Kyrgyzstan and Afghanistan—“When the shah was still in power in Iran it was possible to drive there from France.” He also spoke of a strange trout that lived in spring-fed streams in the Balkans, the giant brown trout of the Aral Sea, the taimen of Mongolia. It was alternately drizzling and raining outside the dirty windows as Pierre spun his tales.
    â€œI landed a huge taimen one night in the Orhon River, or Gol, thirty kilos! and tied a rope through its jaw and around a log hoping to take photos when first light came the next morning. I was up with the sun and left the ger [a Mongolian tent for which the Russian word is yurt ] for the river carrying my rod. The big fish was still in the small eddy where I left him the night before—there must have been three feet between his dorsal fin and tail—he was still alive; I intended to photograph and release him. What would I do with such a big fish? I went away to fish a bit and wait for ideal light. Two hours later I returned to the spot and the fish was gone. The ground was covered with hoofprints. Some bloody Mongolian stole it. Probably fed the whole village.
    â€œWell,” Pierre concluded, looking at his watch, “there’s just too much to talk about all at once; let’s return to my place for lunch and we can speak about the fly-fishing salon. ”
    Under a light drizzle I followed Pierre to his home, several doors down from his office, also on rue Dauphine.
    â€œSo what is the name of your fiancée?” Pierre asked me casually.
    â€œHer name is Yannid.” I didn’t find it worthwhile to tell him she was not my