The End is the Beginning -Part 4-

Some day in the middle of May.                                                                              

“Of course, it’ll work” Hermann says. ”The under water concussion bursts their bladder and they float to the top. Easy pickings”. I am still not convinced, but I yield to my older and more experienced friend. We take only two hand grenades, a short cut of fuse and two ignition caps. We forget the crimping pliers.

When we get to the steeply rising “Slate walls” bordering a still side arm of the river Inn, we find a spot from which we can hurl the grenade and have relatively easy access down to the water where we expect to retrieve a harvest of carp and other fish.

The Walls of Slate

We cut the fuse in half and jam it with two thin twigs into the ignition cap. This cap, in turn, gets inserted into the ‘pot’ and also securely wedged with slightly thicker twigs. To properly ignite the fuse, you must hold the match against the end of the fuse and quickly rip the striker over the match, so that the fuse is exposed to the hottest moment of the igniting match. The expulsion of a thin streak of blue smoke shows us that the fuse has caught. Nervously Hermann hurls this makeshift hand grenade down the slate wall into the water. We wait. Nothing happens.

We wait some more in vain.

“Maybe the fuse slipped from the cap” I volunteer. “Yeah, or maybe the cap slipped from the pot.” Hermann is clearly nervous and upset. “We simply must do this more carefully” he says.

“We were sloppy and sloppy people get hurt.” We take great care in the preparation of the second grenade. We test how well the fuse is lodged in the ignition cap and how securely the ignition cap is in the ‘pot’. We light the fuse. Hermann throws it in a wide arc into the water below. A second after it hits the surface a water column rises. We hear a muffled thud. We rush like madmen down to the water.

Just as we get there the first fish float to the top, belly-up. We ignore the small fry and harvest four good sized carp. Hermann doesn’t want any, so I take all four home with me.

What a feast we have that evening. Even the Americans enjoy my mother’s carp. They ask where this wonderful tasting fish comes from.

 My mother smiles enigmatically:

“Mein Sohn ist ein guter Fischermann”.

In truth, she has no idea how we got this fish. If she knew, she’d have a heart attack.

The German hand grenade, called "the Potato Masher"

From that day on we ever only take one ‘pot’. We never forget the crimping pliers. We wrap the ignition cap in old handkerchiefs or other rags and tie it in place with string. Most important of all: We take a sturdy willow branch with a string tied to its end and a shoemaker’s sewing needle, bent in the heat of a candle into a hook. Equipped this way nobody could ask: How did you catch this beautiful carp?

We become the most successful fishermen in Braunau, but, inevitably, we run out of hand grenades.

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