I raise my hand and he half smiles, welcoming me in broken English.
Darkly tanned and tired eyed, he leads my translator and me to a beat-up SUV, where he shovels tackle and trash out of the seats to make room for us. Bait buckets rest on the floorboards. Open maps and food wrappers are strewn across the dash. I’ve been in France on book tour for nearly two weeks, and this is the first familiar sight I’ve seen.
My translator and I had caught the train from Bordeaux at 4:00 a.m. and still did not reach Albi until midmorning. We were late, but it was the only window we had, one free day before I was due at a book festival in Toulouse.
The Tarn River runs 236 miles from its headwaters near Mont Lozère to where it empties into the Garonne below Moissac. The river is known for the wels, a species of catfish that in pictures seems half leviathan. While its large mouth and color resemble those of the flatheads I’d
