CONFESSIONS OF A POACHER

Two weeks after the opening day of Mongolia’s taimen season, I received a message that still haunts me: a picture of a large fish gleaming on the cobbles. Even now I find it hard to focus on the facts of this taimen’s death. At the time, however, I struggled just to make sense of the image. The fish’s eye appears healthy, but the body—stretching more than three feet away to that distinctive red-orange tail—looks gaunt. A mass of pink extends from the taimen’s gaping jaw like a caricature of a tongue. Near the end of this protrusion lies the key to my comprehension: a treble hook.

From that point it’s simple to trace what happened. An angler had knotted that hook to the line, baited it with a chunk of grayling or lenok, then tossed it into the river. During the fight, the taimen broke the line several yards above the swallowed hook. Later, the trailing line became wedged beneath a mid-current boulder, tethering the taimen like a junkyard dog on a meager chain. The fish strove to free itself, trying so desperately that its stomach everted.

I have heard anger defined as “the feeling that makes your mouth work faster than your mind.” That’s why I’ve been waiting so long to say something about this incident. It is illegal to fish for Mongolian taimen with treble hooks—or to kill them—so the responsible parties are, by definition, criminals. But that designation doesn’t begin to describe my complicated feelings about such wrongdoers.

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