A Gift From Cancer

2024 Author: Sebastian Paterson | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 13:47

Fishing tales

After getting out on my next fishing vacation in Karelia, I stopped in a small village in the house of a local old-timer Vasily Fedorovich Sazonov. According to rumors, crayfish were found in the surrounding lakes. Therefore, when we were sitting at the table and had tea, I asked:

- Vasily Fedorovich, are there crayfish in the local lakes?

- There are at least a dime a dozen crayfish here, - he answered and, looking from me to the kettle on the stove, said: - This kettle gave me cancer …

I even choked with surprise. And when he found the gift of speech, he did not believe:

- Are you kidding me?

- No way, - smiled my interlocutor: - This is actually a gift from cancer.

And this is what he told …

This spring, my neighbor Ivan and I were fishing on a distant lake. The peck was good. And with the next cast, I pulled out a roach of seven hundred grams. Then I caught the same one. When I threw the tackle again, the float immediately dived into the water, I hooked it, and the rod bent in a steep arc. “Surely another roach,” Ivan said, seeing how I could hardly hold the rod in my hands.

I tried to pull the line towards myself, but it did not give in. It was only after I moved the rod first to the left and then to the right that what was holding the line at the bottom finally moved. And gradually, gradually, I began to pull the catch to the shore. Imagine our surprise when a kettle appeared from the water!

"So much for the roach," Ivan was surprised and, looking at me questioningly, asked: "Since when have teapots been caught on a worm?" But it actually was that way: we both saw the bite! We got the answer when we examined the trophy.

The rather bulky red copper kettle was almost half filled with silt. When I started to shake out the silt, a hefty crayfish fell out along with the dirt. Probably, he dragged the hook with a nozzle into his teapot hole, and after the hookup, he let it go. At this moment, the hook caught on the handle.

- So, unexpectedly, unexpectedly, cancer made me a gift, - finished the story Sazonov.