The First Cats Of Spring Are The Finest Cats Of All!

I know of nothing so pathetic, so sadly sour, as properly soured fish—sours, we call them. Good wine, however, takes time. Well, there’s something in the aging of these road-killed “carci.” Not only does it smell bad, it’s pervasive. A million dollars says no no-scent soap can handle this wound.

Which is why it works, I suppose.

The best bait is natural; that is, bank bought with effort—find your own kill, a carp perhaps if you’re fishing a river, and, if it has aged, ripely so, wearing 7 layers of rubber gloves, you scale it and fillet it as you wretch. Then you segment it and wrap it in 7,000 layers of plastic.

Sour shad, suckers, and such are just fine, mind you, except they don’t hold together so well as portions of fish, like carp, with tough hide. Carp’s tough. A 7-pounder-worth of cut sour will often last the spring in rivers, where they’re easiest to find because carp float forever—used to whack ‘em with .22 caliber hollow points in the days when kids ran free with rifles. It’s the other smaller road-kill specimens the cats must be feeding on, of course, although festering carp portions are a fine bait.

Making it is never quite the same, but suffices. Times were when I froze several sides of carp in fall, jarred them after portioning them in spring, and buried the jars 6 inches down in the black dirt of a sunny spot in the garden. Soil maintains its temperature at night, and in a week or so—or next year if you forgot a jar and dug it up with the taters in fall—it was ready, but never quite so ready as it should have been, never quite so ready as real road kill.

Better to leave the jar sit in the sun by day, I found, and bury it at night. Too much work, though. Better still to sack the fish in say 4 plastic bags and hang them on the clothesline. Even wrapped, it draws cats. The ripening process and the quality of the festered mess depends on the sun—sorta like fine wine, again,

Catfish Chablis.

Best of all, I suppose, would be to let the sides soak in a bucket in the basement for a month at about 60 degrees before you go fishing, but then who except Gus, who relishes rolling in such stuff, could stand the odor? An answer is academic, really, the idea being almost beyond comprehension.

Do not be embarrassed if your mouth starts to water when you handle sours. There you are, holding the bait at arms-length to put it on the hook—just nick the hook through a corner of the bait and for heaven sakes don’t bury the hook; just leave the hook point exposed so it doesn’t set back into the bait on the set. There you are with the bait at arm’s length and your mouth watering. A latent recessive response, I suppose, a Pavlovian response, a genetic trait passed down from our cave heritage.

Although this is about death in the name of spring cats, it’s appropriate to interject that the second-best bait going now certainly may be more agreeable to you. No winter-kill purist would stoop so low, but live minnows work, also small chubs, or in a pinch, small suckers. In the case of minnows, use three or four impaled through the base of the tail. With chubs, use one 4-incher hooked the same way. Fish the live bait in the same spots you would fish the sours. Or where terribly oily baits like skipjack herring are available, use fresh-cut herring. It’s a great bait for blue cats in particular.

Cats are as programmed to eat recently injured, still-struggling bait in spring as they are to eat road kill, although certainly for about a month, the latter with the bloated bladder is more compelling.

This is not about rigs. Any of your favorite slip or set rigs will get you fish. The secret is knowing where the road kills are and fishing sours there.