A man describes his coworker Mac, who is an American around the age of thirty. Mac has a glass eye, and he is sometimes dour and alone. It is the last part of the winter in Paris, and they are all sick of the cold weather. The two men work at a newspaper where they are underpaid. Mac speaks often of traveling to the Don or the Dee to fish salmon, but they do not go because Mac's papers were out of order due to laziness, and they did not have enough money. However, Mac comes across a newspaper piece from Pau, where there is salmon running. They decide to go. Mac uses vacation days, and the other man calls in sick. They get on the train to go South. They read and nap on the train, and when they miss their spot where they are supposed to switch trains they must spend another day traveling. They do not have any fishing poles with them and they do not know where exactly they are going to find fish. They stay at a hotel in Pau for a night, and a boy at the hotel tells them of a town named Oloron where they can fish. They go to a market where the man buys Mac a pair of Arabian knives. Then, they get on the train. Mac remarks that this is much better than Paris, and he says that he was feeling pretty low in Paris. When the men get to Orolon, they try to figure out where they can go fishing. A man near the station advises them to go up to the left fork of the stream, and he sends them to a store his wife owns to get tackle. The men buy fishing gear at the store, and rent the man's car. They then have to cross back and forth over town multiple times because they keep forgetting things that they will need at the store. The y are advised to buy asticots as bait, which are maggots that live in putrified veal. The men find a house to stay at up the stream that is owned by a Spanish lady. When they are eating dinner the first night, they discover that the maggots have escaped the bag and are crawling around on the floor. The Spanish lady and some other men who are in the house scramble around helping them pick up the maggots and laughing. When the two men are out fishing at the stream, they talk, Mac speaks a lot of America, and they talk of how they are tired of reading so much every day at the newspaper. Even after fishing for multiple days, they still do not get a bite. One day, Mac decides to climb a mountain, and he is very tired afterwards. At dinner that night, they talk about war. The give their fishing gear to the Spanish woman's sons, because they decide that there is no point in fishing when the fish will not bite. The next day, the men travel in a wagon to Bordeaux. Mac is not upset that they did not catch any fish. They decide to stay the night, and as they are walking down the street, Mac remarks that his brother would like this place. As they turn the corner onto a street, they see many men and women marching in a demonstration in honor of the new manager of the department store that had just come from Paris. Mac respects the guts of the men to tell Paris that it was not the world, or even the whole of France. Mac begins to speak about his brother again. He says that the two of them grew up in Oregon, and one of them had to stay on the farm to help their parents. They drew straws, and Mac was the one who was able to leave the farm and explore the world. He remarks that it just as easily could have been his brother there in Bordeaux, and that he would have loved it there. The men get dinner and reminisce over their trip. When they get back to Paris, the weather had gotten even worse. It was windy, and there was a mixture of rain and snow falling down.