Sport: Europe's Greatest Fish

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No fish inspires such zeal or exacts such sacrifice from its pursuers as the huchen of the Alps. He who would snare a huchen (pronounced Aooken) must fight his way to riverbanks through drifts of snow, shiver for hours in near-zero weather temperatures, often squinting at his line through a needling spray of sleet. For only in winter's nadir does Europe's mightiest game fish begin to strike as it gets ready to spawn in the spring. And only when the weather is abominable—visibility poor, the river lashed by storm—will the wary huchen flash up to hit a lure.

"A dragon—a monster!" says one lifelong Bavarian pursuer of the huchen. The fish is a bit of both: triangular head with gaping mouth and reddish eyes, a silver-bellied, copper-backed body that can grow as big as 6 ft. and 110 lbs. With snow on their foreheads and sweat on their cheeks, fishermen have struggled for more than an hour to land even 40-lb. catches, then continued the fight on shore with club and stone. One last-resort tactic: falling full-length on the huchen and smothering it in a snowbank.

Such a quarry stirs the huchen zealot to Ahab-like fanaticism. In summer he tramps miles through rough mountain terrain, sits for hours on the edge of deep mountain pools watching for the sudden, furious boil that marks the home of a lurking huchen. Come fall, he fashions a huchen Topf—a hook hidden in a clump of colored leather strings that his fish may mistake for a small school of river lampreys. By winter, he is so eager to have at his prey that he willingly pays $5 each day for a license, stalks off to battle with a reel big enough to tether a mule.

Despite this preparation, many a huchen fisherman goes for years without a catch (Austria's Rudolf Hartleib, the man who wrote a book on the art, averages barely more than two a year). Last week, as they completed another season of frigid frustration on the banks of the Loisach and Wertach, the fishermen could take cold comfort from the hope that their misery might some day have company. European experts are certain that the huchen, a landlocked member of the salmon family, would thrive in the unpolluted streams of the western U.S., if the U.S. ever decides to expose its fishermen to a lifetime of happy misery.