A Wolverine Is Eating My Leg (30 page)

Things seemed to blur over a bit after a few hours at Stockbridge, though I remember talking to a cabinetmaker named Mark, a short muscular guy with bowed legs who thought I was stupid.

“Anybody who fishes for northern is stupid and you’re stupid and I’ve seen a hundred guys like you and they’re all stupid and you’re the stupidest of the stupid.”

You can get into arguments like that over fish. Mark preferred to catch walleye pike, which is not a pike at all but a type of larger perch with strange, bulging milky white eyes. Walleye go six to eight pounds on an average, and they make for the finest eating fish of the northern lakes. Northern pike are more bony and the flesh tends to crumble rather than flake. Some people like them, but these people are considered by others to be stupid.

Mark was wearing a white sweater with three tiny mallards on it, winging their way across his chest. Whenever anyone walked by us, he would jab Mark in a mallard and shout, “Bang.”

“If you’re really a writer,” Mark said, “which I don’t believe because you’re stupid, what kind of stuff do you write?”

I told him that I admired Gene Shepard, a turn-of-the-century timber man, city planner, and storyteller out of the Wisconsin north woods. Shepard once announced that he had captured an oxlike prehistoric monster in the big-tree country near Rhinelander. He called his find a hodag and he displayed it, half hidden in a dark tent, at various county fairs. The hodag had six horns on its back, two blinking eyes of different colors, and it occasionally breathed fire. Scientists from the Smithsonian Institution traveled to Wisconsin to examine the wonderful hodag. They found a large slab of wood, carved in the shape of a cow, covered with oxhide, with bear claws for eyebrows, curved steel spikes for claws, and twelve bulls’ horns positioned along the backbone.

Mark shook his head in pained dismay. “If you really are
a writer,” he said, “then you must right cockeyed, because you’re cockeyed stupid.”

“Yeah, and if you really are a cabinetmaker,” I said—and this is rich, I have such a way with words—“you probably make cockeyed cabinets.”

“Bang.” Someone poked Mark in a mallard.

S
uddenly, it seemed, we were back in the trucks. The plan was to run five miles south, to a bar at Quinney, and to make the run off the road, on the ice. We jolted over drifts, side-slipped through the snow, and pulled in at the lights of Chuck and Sue’s bar, a large room with a horseshoe-shaped bar. There was a pool table and Foosball table and a bait shop in the back.

Mark and I continued to discuss fish relative to intelligence. This is no new subject, actually. Izaak Walton, in
The Compleat Angler
, praised the carp. Terrific fish as far as he was concerned. Great fighter, good eating, helluva all-around fish. In 1879 the Wisconsin State Fish Commission stocked lakes and streams with carp. They turned out to be prodigious breeders. The lakes are lousy with them. You bait a line with anything that stinks, drop it about a foot off the bottom anywhere, and you’ve got a carp. They like to stay on the bottom, and bringing them up is as much fun as hooking an old galosh. They are what they eat, and they eat garbage and fish shit.

Carp also like to flop around in the muck, roiling up the lake and spoiling the fishing. They take weeds off at the root and, since little fish need the protection of the weeds and the nourishment they provide, and since bigger fish need those little fish, pretty soon there is nothing but carp in the lake. The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources sometimes kills all the fish in a lake, just to get rid of the carp. They then restock the lake with good fish: bass and crappie and bluegill and perch and pike and muskie. No carp.

I am told that in England the descendants of Izaak Walton still fish for carp as if it were a noble thing. The English, however, are known to keep bulldogs—ugly, useless beasts given to slobber and involuntary flatulence in their later years. In matters of taste, there can be no disputes.
De Gustibus non disputandum
, ainta hey.

This is the case I put to Mark, the cockeyed cabinetmaker, and, by a tortuous twist of logic, I attempted to identify him with carp fanciers. The argument was coming to a bitter head when someone asked if we wanted to join the minnow-drinkers club. I am now a member of that organization. I have a card signed by Chuck Lisowe, who is identified as the Imperial Minnow, which states that I am a member in good standing and will be as long as I continue to drink my minnow annually.

Here is what you do to earn such a card. The bartender pours you a seven-ounce glass of beer. He then goes to the bait shop in the back and scoops a three-inch minnow out of the bait tank. This minnow he places in your beer. You then drink the beer rapidly, and the live minnow as well.

Mark drank his minnow first, then demanded a beer and minnow for me. Anxious to prove my intelligence, I picked up the beer and stared at the minnow. It was flopping around in the narrow confines of the bottom of the glass. I can tell you that there is no joy in chugging a beer with a minnow in it, and it took me two tries to get it down. I erred in my original approach. Certainly no one would try to swallow a three-inch minnow sideways, but it is equally incorrect to attempt to down one tail first. They tend to want to swim right back up. This is why your northern pike breaks its prey’s back, and turns him head first before swallowing him.

Most of the Otter Street boys downed their minnows on the first attempt, but one fellow, a big, mean-looking giant of a man in worn farmer clothes, couldn’t keep either the minnow or his dinner down. There was a big to-do made of this.

“You puked your minnow.”

“So I puked it. Nobody should eat a live thing. It ain’t right. It’s sick.”

“You puked your minnow, you puked your minnow.”

Mark and I were reconciled. Neither of us had puked his minnow, an obvious and certain measure of our intelligence. We played pool, then found ourselves back in the trucks, swerving and sliding out over the lake toward Oshkosh. We were downing green hornets at a pretty furious pace, stopping now and again to stand out in the barren, windswept night and yellow the snow.

Y
anking my hand out of my pants, I ran toward the door, scattering the two huskies, and sprinted down the hill to the tip-up flag, which was swaying in the wind over my northern hole on Lake Nagawicka. Very gently, I pulled the tip-up out of the hole. Nothing. Suddenly the line began running out at a furious pace, and this, I knew, had to be the beginning of the second run. I pulled back on the line, and the force at the other end simply pulled it from my hand. The tip-up itself slid rapidly over the snow and wedged itself sidewise into the hole. Then, a split second later, the entire device shuddered, and a crack shot up the side of the pole.

The fish had taken all the line, and set the hook itself. I grabbed the tip-up, and pulled at the line, finally getting some slack. The fish was coming back, and I pulled the line in by the yard. When he took it out again, I held tight with both hands. It burned and cut as the fish ran, but now he was beginning to tire. We worked that way, man and fish, for over half an hour, and the line was frozen red with my blood. I was alone and my hands were coated with ice. The fish, I realized in one awful moment, could kill me.

But now I had him within feet of the hole. He shot by once, twice, three times, a huge dark shadow, six, maybe seven feet long. He was diving deep, and circling, trying to cut the line on the jagged edge of the bottom of the hole. I gave him line, then worked him back. There was a moment
when he was only a foot below the ice, his massive head just below the hole. Quickly I twisted the line around my right hand, which I held to my chest, and fell back onto the snow, pulling the fish up with the whole of my weight.

This next happened in an instant, but the particulars are immensely vivid in my mind’s eye. The northern was a quarter of the way out, wedged tight to the sides of the eight-inch hole
by the very bulk of his body
. The head was above the ice to the gill line, and it was green—green in the way that only primitive things can be—and there were large white blotches at the back of the head, as if the fish were unimaginably old.

My line had snapped, and there was nothing more I could do. The wind was strong and already ice had begun to form on the fish. I moved closer, tired and hurt, and this moment lives with me. A northern pike has a long flattened mouth, and the eyes are set close together on a ridge resembling a brow. It is a fish that can look you directly in the eye. What I saw there was a hatred more palpable than time itself. But what caused me to stagger, all at once weak in the knees, was the realization that there was intelligence in those cold green eyes, that the evil of its hatred was focused on me,
that the fish recognized me
.

The great mouth gaped open, and there was a sound, not loud but high-pitched and piercing, like a siren cranking up to wail. The fish jerked once, twice, then slid slowly, very slowly back into the hole. The siren shifted in pitch, higher now, triumphant. In that last split second, I saw deep into the fish’s mouth, past the rows of inward-curving teeth to something that frightened me more than I care to think about.

It was an old ten-inch plug. There was still some white on the body of the plug, and a speck of red at the top. Three treble hooks were spaced along the bottom.

This is a true fish story and I dedicate it, respectfully, to the memory of Gene Shepard.

W
e have always depended on the kindness of rangers.

D
EATH
V
ALLEY
H
IKERS
F
OUND
S
AFE
B
UT
T
IRED
, read the front-page headline in the
Death Valley Gateway Gazette
. Since the article was about me and a good pal—and it’s the only time I’ve been front-page news, anywhere, ever—I found the unstated assumptions, uh, distressing. Even in the
Death Valley Gateway Gazette
a man tends to read his clippings compulsively, and this story, by implication, might have been titled H
ALF
-D
EAD
D
UMBSHITS IN THE
D
ESERT
.

According to the article,

I am as low as a man can get in the United States, and I am slowly sinking lower. Death Valley, 550 square miles of it below sea level—all scalding salt flats and dunes—is surrounded by mountains: by the Amargoasa, the Panamint and the Last Chance ranges, which rise from four to eleven thousand feet above the valley floor. These mountains catch what rain the westerly air current didn’t drop on the Sierras, and water rolls down the mountainsides into the valley, where it immediately evaporates, leaving the accumulated mineral residue of chlorides, sulphates, and carbonates.

Not all of the water is lost, however. Some of it skulks in a steaming, muddy bog that lies just under a brittle salt crust out toward the center of the valley. Somewhere near the lowest point in the continental United States, the salt crust refuses to support the weight of a man; it takes the boot to the ankle, then the leg to the calf, the knee. Walking becomes a crack-splash affair, and the sharp, crystalline salt crust scrapes and cuts the shins. The bog below is a musty-gray combination of hot mud and salt that clings to boots and legs like hot clay. First the valley chews up your legs, then it rubs salt in your wounds.