Littlejohn noticed his thoughts matching his pace. Heading downhill they rushed along beside him, and as the slope wore vertical they dragged nearly to a stop.
Now, over scree, at an even trudge, he remembered how CC had gone on about the chorizo-fish:
CC had said, ‘It takes us everywhere,’ of the topic and not the fish itself, because the fish did not go far, and that was precisely the point;
CC had been fishing all over Europe;
CC had connected his fish-tripping to an invented peripatetic tradition that remained only vaguely defined so as to better legitimate one of the ambitions, now improper, that he’d held on to since childhood — namely the perpetration of some pure science;
CC had begun to understand the episodes of his fishing life as parts of a cohesive whole, one great and enduring research project into which all weekends might be integrated;
CC had focused his experiments on the types of sausage he used as bait;
CC had decided that he was testing something like the degree of openness or insularity among regional fish populations as communicated by their preference for or avoidance of sausages from other regions, on the basis of which each lake or river could be given a CC-score (a rating of Comparative Cosmopolitanism);
CC had taken andouillettes to the Danube and verivorst to the Ourthe, and so on.
Littlejohn rested with his wet back against a low stone wall.
2020-06-13 up that hill