by Peter Carter photos: Pierre St. Jacques Ice Town, Quebec (part 2) Outfitter Eric Bédard has staked his future on a prosperous Sainte-Anne-de-la-Pérade. It’s only his second year of operation, but when Bédard scrapes away the early-morning ice from the fishing hole in one of his cabins, he looks as though he’s been doing it for ages. The cabin, about 16 feet long and 10 wide, is virtually a clone of all the other ice-fishing huts in the area. There’s a plank floor, a wood stove the size of a small footstool, a table, a kitchen chair or two and the kind of old couch you’d find at a cottage. On the table sits a little bag of diced liver—the local bait of choice for tomcod. A bare bulb illuminates the room, and nicely pressed curtains are drawn back from the windows so you can see the neighbour’s cabin three feet away. A poker leans against the table, under which a pile of firewood is neatly stacked. A landscape print hangs on one wall and a small dartboard-type game, with Velcro throwing balls, hangs across the room. It’s cozy. The cabin’s not insulated, but it’s plenty warm when the fire’s blazing, so you can fish without your jacket on. In fact, you can fish without getting up off the couch.      Inside each cabin there’s a 16-inch-wide trough cut through the floor that runs the length of the cabin along one wall. Below the trough there’s open water, at least once you scrape away the surface ice. The design came courtesy of a local butcher, Robert Mailhot, who had the bright idea 64 years ago of dragging a livestock shed out onto the frozen river. Mailhot simply fished through the manure trough and the idea caught on. THE TOMCOD CAPITAL OF THE WORLD Location: Lying on the north side of the St. Lawrence River at the mouth of the Sainte-Anne River, the village of Sainte-Anne-de-la-Pérade lies between Quebec City and Montreal on Highway 40 Population: 2,151 Median age: 44.4 years Aged 15 and over: 85.8 per cent Major occupations: Trades, transport and equipment operators; sales and service; business, finance and administration Employment rate: 56.6 per cent Unemployment rate: 6.2 per cent Population data: Statistics Canada, 2001      Above the trough, anywhere from 18 to 30 fishing lines hang from spools nailed to a joist that runs the length of the cabin just below the ceiling. The lines are not long—just long enough to stretch from the joist to about an inch off the river bottom, five feet or so below the surface of the ice. So at any one time, an angler can be fishing with a dozen and a half fishing lines, each outfitted with a lead sinker and two hooks tipped with chunks of pork liver.      You know that a tomcod, or petit poisson des chenaux in the local parlance, has bitten when the line shakes. When that happens, you give the line a tug and haul in the catch. It’s best to sit within grasping distance of the lines, veteran tomcod anglers suggest, so you can change the bait every 10 minutes or so; after the liver is drained of blood, they say, it’s no longer enticing to the fish. As for limits, you can catch as much as you want. In the cabin beside Bédard’s, for example, local women Colette Fecteau and Gabrielle Freland were averaging 250 tomcod a day. They’d pull them in hand over fist and then throw them onto the ice just outside the cabin door, where the fish would quickly freeze.      Not only is there no limit to how many lines you can run or how many tomcod you can catch, you don’t even need a permit—your fishing fee is included with the cabin rental. It takes about five tomcod for a single solid feed, so you don’t have to do too much math to know that you’ll catch way more than you’ll ever eat in one sitting. That’s why anglers usually keep some for themselves but give most of their catch to the local outfitters, the 16 businesspeople—Bédard among them—who own, rent out and maintain the cabins.      At one time, it was every outfitter for himself. After Mailhot the butcher prospered and his cabins multiplied, other locals followed in his snowsteps until there were 54 competing outfitters. Then, in 1988, everything changed when the outfitters decided to work together as a collective and formed L’Association des pourvoyeurs de la Rivière Sainte-Anne.      These days, each operator charges the same amount—$17 per angler, a bit less for kids—which includes the use of a cabin for 10 hours, firewood, tackle rental and as much liver bait as you need. There’s no need to bring your own gear, nor do you need long johns or special skills. In another nearby cabin, for example, four-year-old Marc-André Forget was doing quite well with a bit of help from his grandfathers, Jean Forget and Valmond Moreau. PART 1 | PART 2 | PART 3 | PART 4