Never Sniff a Gift Fish by Patrick McManus

  

Author: Patrick F. McManus

Category: Short Stories, Humor

First Published: 1983

My edition: Owl Books 1984, paperback

Also by this author (that I’ve read): They Shoot Canoes Don’t They; A Fine and Pleasant Misery

 

Never Sniff a Gift Fish is the third collection of short stories by the greatest outdoorsman humorist of our time.

 

I don’t actually know that he’s the greatest. I was just practicing the art of Fibrication: a skill that McManus extolls in “The Fibricators”. McManus learned to fibricate as a child from the wily and crotchety mountain man Rancid Crabtree. According to McManus, Rancid had…

Devoted his whole life to mastery of the art of fibrication. Rancid was the Picasso of the fib. He could do little white fibs, big blue fibs, realistic fibs, impressionistic fibs, abstract fibs, surrealistic fibs, nonobjective fibs, and even pop fibs.

McManus learned well from the master. His short stories, always center around hunting, fishing, hiking, etc., and resonate with the outdoorsman. In most of his stories there is a “yes, something like that happened to me once” moment. But McManus’ adventures are retold with self-effacing drollery, irony, and exaggeration—in a word—fibrication.

 

Some of the tales are flashbacks to youth involving his pal Crazy Eddie Muldoon, or the sage Rancid Crabtree. Other stories are more contemporary with fishing and hunting buddy Retch Sweeny.

 

This collection includes gems such as: “Poof—No Eyebrows”, “Two-Man-Tent Fever”, “The Christmas Hatchet”, the title story “Never Sniff a Gift Fish”, the aforementioned “The Fibricators” and one of my favorites “The Bush Pilots”

 

Wherein, McManus describes a childhood adventure with Crazy Eddie Muldoon, when they built an airplane, and launched it from the roof of the Muldoon family barn. But in this story, he recalls an earlier ambition of being deep sea divers, again with homemade apparatus. Test Diver Patrick startles a nearby herd of cattle, as he emerges from a deep spot in the creek as a…

…streaming, slime-covered creature with an inverted milk pail on its head.

McManus notes that…

Oddly, the route of the cows’ departure was marked in later years by an unusually lush growth of grass. The wondrous vitality of the swatch of grass became something of a local mystery, as did the refusal of the cows to go anywhere near creek for two weeks afterward…

Not my normal fare, but a nice break in between two Dickens tomes. McManus never disappoints. Have you read this wonderful American humorist?

 

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