A Wolverine Is Eating My Leg (29 page)

I was casting out to a weedy hole about fifteen feet from the pier, hitting it dead center every second or third try, when something big hit the plug and took the line halfway out with the star drag singing. I set the hook and started horsing the monster in. He never broke water, and when I had him next to the pier, I yanked him up onto the boards, like the perch I was accustomed to hooking.

He was a huge, enormous, gigantic, mountainous, monolithic fish of about fifteen pounds, and I screamed. My father came tearing out of the house, down the hill, and out onto the pier. He clubbed the fish, got a leather glove and tried to work the plug out of the fish’s mouth. Finally he just cut the line and tossed it back, plug and all.

“It was a garfish,” he tells me now, two decades later. A garfish is a particularly repellent trash fish with a nauseous oily taste. I do not believe that it was a garfish because I have a very clear mental image of the fish, and the fish’s mouth, and my father’s gloved hand in the fish’s mouth. What I see clearly are the teeth, like no teeth I had ever seen. They were staggered in rough rows across the roof of the mouth, and each of them curved toward the throat, so that any living thing caught there would be impaled and driven back to the gullet.

The fish, I know now, must have been a northern pike. These are found in the lakes and rivers of the northern part of the northern hemisphere. They are long, lethal-looking specimens, and the Anglo-Saxons called them pike because of their resemblance to a medieval weapon. A twenty-pound pike will go over four feet in length, and the world’s record pike weighed forty-six pounds and two ounces. There are bigger fish in the northern lakes—sturgeon and muskie—but I am fascinated by pike. They are among the meanest freshwater fish extant, a streamlined killing machine and the most satanic predator of the lakes. They take small muskie, cannibalize their own kind, hit crayfish, frogs, mice, small muskrats, ducklings, and any other birds
small enough to swallow. There are eyewitness accounts of pike killing and ingesting small swans.

I
was out on the ice, alone on Nagawicka, because I wanted to catch a northern pike. It would be my first through the ice, and I imagined that, in that place, I could confront those fears of twenty years ago, turning them to my own advantage—to fun. Besides, I think it’s silly to be afraid of a fish.

The first order of business was to drill a couple of holes. If you’re after northern, you’ll want to drill over about eight feet of water near the edge of a substantial bed of weeds. Pike skirt these beds and feed on the smaller fish that take refuge there. (If you don’t know the lake, it is sometimes possible to obtain a hydrographic map of the bottom.)

Kids and muscleheads use a spud to chop the hole. This is a long metal pole with a chisel on the end, and it takes up to half an hour to drill a hole through three feet of ice with one. An ice auger, especially the thirty-dollar Swedish brand that I prefer, will drill a hole in two minutes flat, provided you keep the blades sharp. Some Winnebago-camper types—cretins and moral paraplegics—buy augers outfitted with gasoline-driven motors.

After the holes were drilled, I set up my tip-ups. These are wooden cross-shaped devices with a line and reel located near the end of one long arm. They cost about five dollars apiece. The crossbar is balanced across the hole, and the business end, spool and all, goes into the water. This way, the spool won’t freeze over. When a fish hits the bait, a knob on the reel releases a long springy metal tip with a small red flag at the top. The tip and flag spring up, and the angler rushes over to deal with the catch.

If you’re after northern, as I was, you’d probably be using live bait, like four- to ten-inch suckers. I hook them just behind the dorsal fin, let them drop until they hit bottom, then pull them up a foot or two. When a northern takes a sucker, it will usually hit it from the side—this is the conventional
wisdom—break its back and run with it. This is where you must be especially careful. The smallest tug on the line will alert the fish that something is terribly wrong, and he’ll spit the bait out. If you let the fish run, it will stop, turn the disabled bait around, and swallow it head first. Always head first.

Having swallowed the bait, the pike will make a second run. Watch the line: one run, a pause, the start of the second run. Here you yank back on the line—the proper amount of force is a matter of practice—set the hook and start pulling him in, hand over hand on the line itself.

Because much of the work must be done with bare hands—baiting the hook, pulling the fish in—you’re advised to have two pairs of gloves or mittens. One pair always gets wet. Which was my problem that day out on Nagawicka. My right hand was numb. No feeling to it at all.

I decided to leave my three tip-ups in place and walk up to the old cottage to get out of the wind. The front door was open, hanging askew on the bottom hinge. Snow had drifted in through the broken windows and the floorboards were warped and cracked. It was smaller than I remembered it, and I wondered who my parents had sold it to, and why the new owners had let it fall into ruin. It was spooky and sad and colder than hell in the old place.

I had stuffed my right hand into my pants, under the belt, under the thermal underwear, and was holding it to the warmth of my groin. When a frost-nipped hand warms under these conditions, the first jolt of feeling is an intense, prickly sort of pain. It is a good pain because you know it will be over soon and because it means your hand will be all right. It was at this point—while I was feeling sad and spooked and hurt and happy—that I heard running steps on the porch outside.

It took no reflection at all to realize that my position was not a dignified one. I was standing there, motionless, trespassing in an abandoned house in the middle of nowhere, and I had my right hand sunk deep down the front of my pants. My face, I’m sure, reflected the pleasant agony of feeling coming back into my fingers.

The noise on the steps drew closer. Several people, it seemed, were charging into the old cottage at a frantic pace. Waukesha County sheriff’s deputies, no doubt. Guns at the ready. They probably catch a lot of perverts this way. There would be unpleasant headlines in the
Waukesha Freeman:
P
ERVERT
C
APTURED IN
A
BANDONED
H
OUSE:
P
ARENTS
M
ORTIFIED
.

The noise reached the front door just as I was trying to yank my hand out of my pants in the most guilty manner imaginable. There were, however, no people at all, only two big dogs, both huskies, romping together in the snow. Both had icicles hanging from their snouts and their breath came in foggy blasts. They stopped in their tracks. We regarded one another in surprise and dismay. Precisely at that point, a tip-up, over my northern hole, sprang erect.

T
hese days, whenever a little red flag is fluttering above the ice of a frozen lake I think of Old Hervey. Old Hervey is your archetypal old-timey ice fisherman. When I was a kid there weren’t many people who braved the ice for fish. Those who did were guys like Hervey, a sixty-five-year-old retired welder who watches roller derby on TV when he isn’t fishing. Hervey wore maybe six layers of clothes, wino-style, and caught more fish than anyone. Still does. But back in Wisconsin’s dark days—before Vince Lombardi came to Green Bay—it didn’t much matter because nobody tried to catch fish through the ice except a few Hervey types. They made bonfires and burned old tires and drank brandy for warmth. Decent home-loving folk considered Hervey and his ilk to be harmless masochists, rather like people who walk across hot coals or lie on a bed of nails for no particularly good reason.

Old Hervey has his reasons. He always catches fish. Always. Even if the bass and pike and walleye aren’t biting. Old Hervey gets a catch off his jig pole. Jigging, he calls it. In jigging, you drop a line baited with mousies or yellow wax worms into shallow weedy water. You lie on the ice,
put your face over the hole, and cover head and hole with the hood of your parka. Often as not, you’ll be able to see the little guys—perch and bluegill—swimming around down there. If you don’t, drop in some crumbled eggshells or oatmeal for chum. The fish are very slow in the winter, almost somnambulant, and they will approach the chum in a ponderous and dignified manner. Jerk the bait up and down in front of your fish. He’ll likely hit it on the uptake. Some days you can spend hours on the ice and never have one red flag. And yet, on the same day you may bag a score of foot-long perch on the jig pole, just like Old Hervey.

Old Hervey doesn’t bother to gut his perch. He cuts a fillet from each side, soaks them in milk, powders them with flour and bread crumbs or cornmeal, and deep-fries the lot. The money he saves on food goes for brandy.

If you are new to ice fishing or if you don’t know the lake, it’s always best to seek out a Hervey. A pint of brandy helps immensely in this endeavor, and you are likely to learn where the best holes are, what the lake bottom is like, and any number of valuable tricks. The Old Hervey I know does a thing with mousies. These are larvae of the drone fly, plump little brown fellows, about half the size of your fingernail, with a hairlike tail. On certain days the perch will hit nothing but mousies. They will not, however, hit a black mousie. Mousies turn black when they freeze, and they tend to freeze rapidly. Old Hervey keeps a dozen or so warm in his mouth, between the lower lip and teeth, like a plug of tobacco. Hervey’s mousies are always happy, fat, and brown.

There is another thing Old Hervey does that disturbs me. He refuses to kill the big fish fresh from the lake. Instead, he tosses them out onto the snow where they freeze solid in a matter of minutes. When you take these fish home and dump them into the sink, they clatter, but as you’re cleaning them, they tend to come to life and start flopping around. This blurs the distinction between life and death and makes for appropriately morbid funereal dinners.

I
ce fishing is no longer exclusively the sport of pensioned lushes. Somebody tried driving his car out onto the ice and watching his tip-ups in comfort. Others discovered that you could construct a small shack and tow it out onto the ice behind a car. Then all you had to do was sit in the shack, by the cheap wood-burning stove, and drink and lie and play cards until a red flag showed. The advent of fashionable ski wear and snowmobile suits has even given ice fishing a bit of a chic look. Some hardy backpackers crate up their tip-ups and bait and jig poles on a sled and make for the more remote lakes where the fishing is best, but the majority of the new people on the ice choose to fish out of shacks clustered together, sometimes by the hundreds, on the more popular lakes, like Wisconsin’s massive 215-square-mile Lake Winnebago.

It is a sociable scene. On weekends, entire families spend the day on the ice, and people can be seen tromping through the snow to a neighbor’s shack to borrow some baloney and a cup of brandy. These people also band together to prevent vandalism to their shacks, organize fishing jamborees with prizes for the biggest catch, and elect honorary mayors of their tip-up cities.

One day, on Lake Winnebago, everyone was catching three- and four-pound white bass. Whatever mysterious system that tells fish to bite was operative, and operative for miles in every direction. The tip-ups would spring erect, and people would come whooping out of the shanties to haul up the large flat fish.

That night, the Otter Street Fishing Club gathered to celebrate at Jerry’s, a bar near the waterfront in Oshkosh. The club is a service organization, and every winter they help plow a road ten miles across the frozen lake. They also construct bridges across the vast cracks that are created when the ice shifts. Everyone knows when this happens because the crack has the quality of a sonic boom and often it will rattle dishes in lakefront homes. When someone’s car
goes through the ice, the Otter Street boys are there with winches and tools to pull the vehicle up and, if necessary, save lives. The majority of the club members at Jerry’s were avid fishermen in their thirties, and most of them seemed to own four-wheel-drive vehicles.

The night of the white-bass feeding frenzy, about thirty of the Otter Street boys got tired of their dank little bar with dead fish on the walls and decided to make a run over the ice to the town of Stockbridge. It was a relatively sober caravan that left Oshkosh about nine o’clock that night. Getting lost or stuck in the deep snow on the lake, miles from anywhere in the middle of a twenty-below night, can be deadly. Five miles out onto the flatness of the lake, with bitter wind whipping up the snow and cutting the visibility, it was possible to imagine oneself alone on some Godforsaken tundra well above the Arctic Circle.

The serious drinking began in a waterfront bar in Stockbridge. I ordered a Heileman’s Special Export, which is a local brand and the best beer made in America. It tastes a bit like Heineken and, like Heineken, it comes in a green bottle. To order one in Stockbridge, you say: “Gimme a green hornet, willya.”

Some fellows were drinking their green hornets with a shot of schnapps, the white peppermint kind and no other. To order this combination, you say: “Gimme a green hornet and a little white guy, willya hey.” After a few green hornets and little white guys, the talk turned to fish stories.

“Remember when Dave and Mark speared that sturgeon, that two-hundred-pound sturgeon? Now that’s a big fish.”

During part of the ice-fishing season on Winnebago, it is legal to spear sturgeon. Rich guys fly their plane out onto the ice, set up a shanty, black out the windows, and saw a large hole in the ice. They sit there drinking green hornets and little white guys until a sturgeon swims by—happily, this seldom occurs—at which time they literally harpoon it. For some reason this strikes me as a repugnant and a stupid waste of time.

No matter. The proper response to “that’s a big fish,” is
“ainta,” or more emphatically, “ainta hey.” This usage corresponds to the French
n’est-ce pas
and means “is it not so.”