Toad Smith was my best catfishing buddy, a guy so charitable of spirit that he would gladly give up two days of catfishing to help you finish your work so you could go too, and so much so the practical joker that he just couldn’t help himself given a chance to spread a fine line of stinkbait under the lettuce on your sandwich.

Then there was the Toad family dog, Gus, a black lab ‘bout 90 pounds. Gus was loved (“The intelligent son I never had,” Toad liked to say of Gus in the presence of his sons, John and Elliot), yet the subject of constant good-natured “abuse.”

Toad’s favorite was the meat trick. Now, Gus certainly was better behaved than Toad in most respects. But Gus was a pathetic, slobbering piece of jelly in the presence of baloney on white, rye, the floor, anything. Knowing this, Toad tormented Gus.

A baloney sandwich appeared; the world stopped. Gus didn’t blink, didn’t move except to follow the path of the sandwich. Salivary glands gone wild, drool flowed, yet Gus’s attention and expression were so set that the most lovely female poodle at the peak of estrus could not have distracted him from his beloved baloney—portion of doggy heaven. Don’t pet him, don’t scratch his ears. Just give him a chew, a taste, a succulent, aromatic, lovely baloney morsel.

But Toad had time. The sandwich rose and fell, a bite slowly disappearing as Toad monitored Gus’s agony.

One bite left, Gus crazy with desire, Toad, the sick fellow, raised the last bite to his lips. Surely this moment in a dog’s life is comparable to seeing your best friend about to go over a cliff. Toad would always stop suddenly, pretending he had just remembered Gus. “Gussy wanna bite?” he’d taunt. “No-no-no-no,” he’d tut-tut through a sly smile. And then the morsel was placed just so on the bridge of Gus’s nose.

Geez, Toad. Gus sat there slobbering pathetically, looking cross-eyed at the meat three inches from his eyeballs, an inch from his lips, a half inch from his nostrils. Force a huge smile across your face—grimace—and moan, “Woo, woo, woo,” without moving your lips. That was Gus: “Woo, woo, woo,” he’d moan two octaves higher than normal.

“Geez, Toad,” we’d all say, our mouths watering along with Gus’s. Toad would always turn to look out the window—Gus’s signal. The meat stood momentarily motionless in midair as Gus’s head moved in one barely visible snap. “Woof!” he bellowed in a resonant bass voice, telling Toad that he, the wily Gus dog, had outsmarted his dreadful master.

Cats after ice-out are like Gus and baloney. Obsession. Long winter. Torpid metabolism. Finally warmer water and metabolic movement. Food please. Food!

Cat obsession is for winter kill, Mother Nature’s road kill—dead-something fish—shad in reservoirs; bullheads, bluegills and so on in lakes and ponds; carp, suckers, shad, carpsuckers, quillback, and such stuff in rivers.

Fish gotta go sometime and the going is better during winter for fish aged, starving, and in other ways not up to Mother’s standards. Ice-cold water delays decomposition. Warming water hastens decomposition, which brings gas, which makes the winter killed bloat like a blimp.

Floaters. Prevailing wind or current moves these pale, limp, dead-fish ships until in lakes they stack in necked-down areas or in bays; in ponds they stack in corners; and in rivers they find their way to backwashes (eddies) or they tumble in current along the bottom.

Decomposition continues, the warmer the faster. After a few days in the warm sun, bloated gas bladders burst. By this time, some firm floaters have become flaccid, torn sinkers. Certain bays, backwaters, necked-down areas, and eddies are full of them. In fast-moving rivers, the carcasses continue to tumble in the current along drop-off edges. In rivers, sinkers are washed from eddy to eddy.

In waters up north, pike—spawners at ice-out—are the first to feed on this winter destruction. Pike love deadbait. By the time water temperatures reach 45°F, however, even North Country cats are ready to feed.

Cats in cold water? Well, yes. I can’t tell you exactly where North Country cats become South Country cats, only that just as there are Florida-strain bass and northern-strain bass, there are NC cats and SC cats. SC cats don’t have to contend with frigid water, so they often feed all season long.

Most of the world seems to think cats stop feeding in September and don’t start again until April or May. Even in Minnesota and Manitoba, cats feed into November and are occasionally caught through the ice. And in spring, it doesn’t take long to get them going.

OK, so maybe 45°F isn’t the exact temperature. You know what I mean. You kind of feel it in spring after 20 years of fishing; you kind of feel it’s time a week or so or two after ice-out, and two or three days into warm, stable weather; and it’s overcast and you know a thunderstorm’s coming on and the crawlers might be out for the first time; and the cats, as Gus does, will turn into pathetic slobbering fools in the presence of the right food.

There’s no helping themselves. The cats will be there where they must be, the longer they’ve lived, the longer they’ve been programmed, the bigger they probably are, and the more likely they are to be there, in these spots filled with road kill.

About the road kill. I have always kept cats and dogs, and lately, kids, and know of burp-up on rugs and car seats and dog-do on vibram-soled shoes. I have spent 20 years experimenting with stinkbaits. I have spent a week in elk camp with Toad without a bath. I have spent hundreds of days toting blood and tolerating flies while catfishing in l00-degree heat. I have gutted a hundred deer and thousands of fish and arrow-killed bears. I have worked on the kill floor of meat packing plants. I do not have a weak stomach.

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.

During spring, the best catfishing often is during midday and on. A beautiful, bright, warm, calm spring day that slides gracefully into a warm evening signals good fishing. The more such days in a row along with a stable river level, the better. In those conditions, you may even get an evening bite. If there’s a nasty bite to the evening as the sun sets, however, the bite won’t last long.

As spring rambles on toward summer, fresh cut bait begins to outfish sours, although sours account for cats all season, especially during late summer, which is another story. Speaking of stories and bites, the ultimate humiliation for Gus was being bitten—by Toad. Reach across your chest and grab a tiny portion of skin—a pinch—just back of your arm pit. Tender territory.

Gus and Toad would be rough-housing. Eventually, Toad would pin Gus. Realizing his plight, Gus would lie perfectly still, desperately hoping that what he knew was going to happen wouldn’t.

“Grrrrrr,” Toad growled as he ducked down and nipped Gus in the tender skin behind his front leg. “Woo, wooo, woooo,” Gus moaned in a near falsetto. “Woo, wooo, woooo.”

Life is taxes and bills and plumbing problems. But it also can be a grown man with a mouthful of dog hair and a dog moaning pitifully for mercy. I do miss old Toad, and Gus, too. But the cats are still there waiting. n