by Gary Paulsen
Though summer had come, always lying back hiding was the cold snap—a late killing frost that caught everybody off guard so often that it seemed people would come to expect it and not set their garden vegetables out. But they are always surprised by the frost, and have to wrap paper around the plants in small cones until the backyards of everybody in town seem to be full of buried elves with only their hats showing.
But the frost does more than kill plants. Something about it affects the fish, and where the stream comes into the river just after the frost and even during the frost the northern pike come to feed. It is perhaps that they think it is fall, or perhaps the cold makes small fish come there and the big ones follow.
And they are truly big—some of them like twenty-pound green sharks, filled with teeth and savagery.
Fishing for them was done one way and one way only—casting lures. Two lures worked the best, and everybody who came to work where the stream flows into the river used one or sometimes both of them. The best was a red-and-white daredevil—a spoon that is silver on one side with red and white stripes on the other and a single triple-hook at the bottom, or business end. The new ones didn’t seem to work very well until they were scuffed and scratched by teeth tearing at the paint on them. Most of us tried rubbing them on rocks or concrete to scuff them up a bit, but it didn’t work as well as having it done by teeth. The other lure was called a plug—a simple cylindrical piece of wood painted red in the front and white in the back with two small silver eyes and a “lip” made of stamped metal to pull the plug under when it was reeled in.
The rigs used then would not be considered usable by modern fishermen. This was all before glass or carbon rods and spinning reels or free-wheeling casting reels, and casting with them was a true art, a balance of coordination and luck. The line used was of a heavy braid—there were no monofilaments then either—rolled on a drum reel with thumb-busting side drive handles that had to spin with the drum when a cast was made.
Everything was in the thumb. The right thumb rested on the line drum, and the rod—a clunker made of spring steel and by modern standards about as flexible as casting with a tire iron—had to be whipped overhead and forward with great force at the same instant the thumb had to be lifted from the drum to allow the lure to pull the line out. But not all the way. If the thumb came up too much, the line would go too fast and cause a backlash—a tangle on the reel sometimes so hideous the line had to be cut from the drum with a pocketknife, hacked off, and replaced completely. But the thumb couldn’t be pressed too hard either, or the lure wouldn’t go anywhere.
And then, just as the lure entered the water the thumb had to act as a gentle brake and stop the line drum.
All to start just one cast.
And almost no casts produced a fish. It might take sixty or seventy casts to entice a northern to strike, and then it didn’t always pay off.
If the daredevil was used it had to be allowed to wobble down into the water no more than a foot, and then the rod had to be put in the left hand and the right hand had to grip the handles, and the line had to be reeled in as fast as the hand could move to make the spoon roll and flip and flash silver and red. Then, just before shore the daredevil had to be stopped, cold, for half a second in case there was what was called a “follow-up” to give a fish time to hit it just then.
The plug was slightly different. Because it was of wood it floated and so the cast had time to be developed correctly. The cast could be placed with more time, the plug allowed to drift into position, and then the reeling started at one’s leisure.
The lip on the front of the plug worked as a water scoop so that the faster the plug was reeled in the deeper it would dive, and the depth could be controlled that way. Some worked the tip back and forth to the right and left while reeling, but it didn’t seem to help, just as spitting or peeing on the lure—another trick used by some—also didn’t seem to help. Once somebody scrounged some blood from a butcher in a small bucket and dipped the lures in the blood, and that had some effect but made us stink for days of rotten blood and fish slime. It didn’t bother us, but in school there was a noticeable reaction.
Again, as with the daredevil, when the plug was close to shore it was stopped for half a moment to allow a possible follow-up strike, but really the cast was always everything. And though many—most—casts did not catch fish, each and every cast had to be made with art and skill and the hope, the prayer was always there that it would work; that this cast would work this time.
The problem was the cold. It was necessary to work the line in just the right place, reeling the braided line through the fingers to be able to “feel” when the first hit came, if it came. Braided line soaked up water, and this squeezed out on the finger, ran down the wrist, and dripped on the waist or legs—depending on where the reel was held.
Wet, cold hour after hour, each perfect cast followed by each perfect cast waiting for that moment, that split part of a moment when it comes.
The strike.
They are never the same. Daredevil strikes are different from plug strikes as cold-weather strikes are different from summer strikes, and every fish seemed to strike differently.
Northern pike are the barracuda of fresh water and when the mood is on them they will hit, tear at anything that moves. Mother loons keep their babies on their backs so the northerns won’t get them, and baby ducks get nailed constantly. Northerns eat anything and everything. In their guts we found bottlecaps, can openers, cigarette lighters, bits of metal, nails, wire, pieces of glass and once, complete, a pair of sunglasses that fit one of the boys perfectly.
But they’re picky. Not always, but sometimes. And they must be coerced, persuaded, into biting—begged, enticed.
A cast can be “dropped,” the lure allowed to settle, then reeled in fast, then allowed to settle again and once more reeled fast—to make it seem sick or wounded. It can be skittered across the surface, then suddenly stopped, skittered and stopped, teased and teased, looking, waiting for the moment:
The strike.
It always comes like lightning. Sometimes there is just the tiniest hint, a small grating of their teeth on the lure as they come in for the hit, but usually there is no warning. One second the reel is turning and the lure is coming in, and the next there is a slashing blow and the line stops, begins to sizzle out, cuts the finger, and the rod bends, snaps down, and in some cases, if it is a large fish and a steel rod, it stays bent in a curve.
It is impossible to judge size. Three pounds seems like six, six like twelve and over. One cold, clear morning a miracle came. A cast, one clean cast with a daredevil that slipped into the water like a knife, clean and in and halfway back, the reel spinning as fast as it would go; there was a small grating on the lure and then a tremendous slashing strike, a blow that nearly tore the rod away, and the line cut the water, sizzled off to the right so fast it left a wake.
Seventeen pounds.
A great green torpedo of a fish that tore the water into a froth, a fight that slashed back and forth until at last the fish was tired, until it nosed finally into the bank, where it could be dragged up onto the grass to lie, green and shining, the tail flapping, and a voice, a small voice notes the sadness of the fish and whispers in the mind and the words come out:
“Let it go.”
“Are you crazy?”
“Let it go—it’s too, too much fish to keep like this. Let it go.…”
“Nobody will believe it.”
“We saw it. That’s enough. Let him go.”
And so it is.
Somebody has a scale, a spring with a needle that slides, and the fish is weighed, and the lure is removed, and it is laid in the shallows. It wiggles twice, a left and right squirm, and it’s gone.
“It will learn,” somebody says. “It will never strike again.”
But he is wrong.
Four of us that day catch the same fish and release him, and each time he fights and each time he slides back into the river and
disappears like a green ghost, and there are many other springs and thousands of other casts and hundreds of fish caught and eaten when it snaps cold where the stream comes into the river, but never the same again.
Never that same slamming surge of the first large strike.
Seventeen pounds.
Fishing for Bulls
Fishing during the cold snap where the stream comes into the river is not always sure and is over in a short time, often only a day, two days, never more than a week, and is considered a small treat, a bonus for the boys who are purists.
There were other kinds of temporary fishing as well.
Just as the time for fishing starts, the panfish come into the shallows to spawn. These are not the later types of panfish to be caught in droves and bucketsful, but the first, the big ones that cannot be caught later because they stay deep, where it is impossible to get a lure or bait down to them through the clouds of small ones.
“Bulls,” we call them. Not minnows or six-inch-long worm-eaters but truly large sunfish with flashing yellow bellies, bluegills over a pound, over two pounds, panfish to fight like northerns when they take the worm, and still, even with bait, even with a worm, there is art.
Nothing is left to chance, no part of the ritual is omitted. This was before anybody thought of flyfishing for panfish, and the boys were too poor for the split-bamboo rods of that time anyway—and lures specifically for panfish (wigglers, small bugs, etc.) were far in the future. All to be had were the spring-steel casting rods and the thumb-busting early Shakespeare reels used for all fishing.
But there were ways to make the heavy gear act like lighter equipment.
A tiny hook was used and a small sinker set well above—two feet at least—a gut leader, a twist knot with the end fed through to tie the hook to the leader, many with different knots, so that there were always arguments about who had the better knot, who could hold the largest “bull” sunfish (actually females) with his knot; gear arguments that would go on all summer, go on all year, go on all of lives, though we could not see that then while we worked the shallows when the big sunfish and bluegills came in to spawn.
It is possible that the lure, the bait, the placement of it made no difference, but nobody believed that, nobody could believe it. We would put the worm on the long shank hook a certain way, thread the head and part of the body full on the hook to keep it from pulling off if nibbled, but the tease loop was more important, most important. Down the hook, where it bent around the bottom, a loop of worm would be left loose to wiggle.
The tease loop.
And then the rest of the worm on the remainder of the hook except for a half inch of tail to complement the tease loop.
The delivery was perhaps not important, as the lure or bait was perhaps not important, but we believed it to be and so worked the steel rods with our wrists, whipped them back and forth with six or eight feet of line, slammed them to get some action out of them, flipped the line forward and back and forward again to get it to land perfectly on the edge of the old weeds where the fish came to spawn.
But not like casting for northerns, this—not anything like it. When they are hitting—though the boys did not believe it—probably a bare hook would do as well as a baited one.
Sometimes they could be seen lying there and when the hook hit the water they would cut sideways, hit the hook so fast they would move the line to the side with a small hissing noise.
And fight. A two-pound sunfish, splashing gold up through the water, seemed to fight more than a five-pound northern or walleye. They would get the flat side toward the rod and run, planing off the flatness of their body, using it like a lever to fight the pull of the line, and it was never sure that they would be landed.
And one in three, perhaps only one in four, would wind up on the piece of wire used for a stringer to be brought to the pan.
Now fishermen fillet all fish as often as they can, cut the steaks off the side even when they are small, and fry them in deep fat with factory-prepared batter and factory-prepared grease and factory-prepared seasoning so that the fish all seem to be factory-processed. Like fish sticks.
But with the bulls, the water could be tasted in them, how they lived could be tasted, what they were. The fish were gutted and the egg sack saved. They were not filleted but scaled and the head cut off just in front of the hump of meat that came down to the fish’s forehead.
This hump was the “sweet meat,” along with northern tails, walleye cheeks, bullhead backs, and crawfish tails—all were special parts for the one who caught the fish to either eat as earned privilege or give away as a way to show respect, the way Inuit give away the best whale blubber.
The cooking varied, but always around a set method—frying.
The best was with bear grease. No grease, no lard nor shortening will ever equal strained bear grease for frying fish, pancakes, potatoes, or doughnuts. It is clear and stays liquid at room temperature and tastes of leaves and woods, and mixes with the taste of the fish, the water, the soft summer air.
The sunfish are fried whole in a large pan in a base of bear grease. Next to the fish the egg sack is cut open and the eggs are fried, and on the other side a pile of thinly sliced—thin as paper—raw potatoes are fried and the whole pan covered with a metal pie pan that is used as a plate so that while the food is cooking the steam carries heat and taste into the metal.
The cooking is finished when the skin lifts easily off the fish and is crunchy or when the smell has driven past where it can be tolerated or when hunger takes over.
Salt and pepper are sprinkled generously over the top, and it is eaten with the same knife used to clean the fish.
And all of this is better if done on a small fire made of dry poplar or hardwood on the shore near where the fish is caught along the edge, after snagging at the dam and spearing and casting for the big northerns, but still well before true summer fishing begins.
Sucker Hunting
When it was still cool at night but warming to hot in the days, when a jacket was too much during the day but not quite enough at night, there was a time for shooting suckers in the shallow lagoons.
Spawning was over for the suckers, the bottom feeders. They had run the ditches and streams that came in to the river and laid their eggs and in clouds of numbers they had been speared and shot and smoked and sold and eaten.
But they grew still in numbers, each female laying thousands and thousands of eggs until even the predators, the slashing northerns and schools of walleyes, couldn’t keep them down, and the rivers and lakes teemed with them, huge blankets of them, gray backs touching gray backs so that when seen in the shallows it seemed they could be walked upon.
When the nights were cold and the days were warm, sometimes, not always but sometimes, some of the suckers would come out of the rivers and lakes to lie in the shallow lagoons along the edge or in the backwater swamps where the water is rarely over one or two feet deep. Later in the summer the weeds and water lilies would grow to clog the lagoons, but early in the season the weeds weren’t there and the suckers could be seen, would show like small dark logs just beneath the surface.
They were too fast to be speared and wouldn’t take bait—and were not good to hook anyway as their mouths are too soft—but they were perfect to hunt with bows.
An old boat was used. None of us could afford a new one nor indeed afford anything but a free one so we would scrounge and dig and come up with an old bait boat made with cross-boards for a floor. Caution had to be used as the boards were simply nailed up from the bottom with common box nails, and if stood on directly their nails wouldn’t hold and we would plummet straight through the bottom. By sitting on the seats and spreading our weight, we managed to make it all hold together, and paddles were fashioned out of old boards, carved and hacked with saws and hatchets.
Turns were taken. One person sat straddling the front of the boat, the bow with the arrow and fishing line ready, while the other sat in the stern paddling. The lagoons
were entered slowly, carefully, and it was not a patched-up old bait boat with hacked paddles any longer but a slim canoe, a birchbark canoe gliding silently over the water from a time before, a time from books read and movies seen, a time before white men.
The fish seemed to think the boat was a log and moved slowly away as it approached, but even so, from a sitting position it was hard to hit them. The arrow almost invariably went high, and then came the laborious job of rewinding the line on the plastic water glass fastened to the bow, carefully laying it in rows so it would furl off evenly when the next shot was taken. If this were not done correctly sometimes the arrow would go out about twenty feet, the line would snarl and stop, and the arrow would snap back at the face of the shooter, point first; this could make for a lot of sudden activity in a boat that was about ready to fall apart, and almost all of the boys had a scar somewhere on their face from arrows hitting them.
Finally a position was found where the shooter kneels but raises up, and by shooting beneath the fish, almost as if there were another fish below the fish to aim at, it was possible to start making hits.
All of it was much slower than spearing or shooting them in a stream. If they were hit solidly near the back it was easy to boat them, but if the arrow passed through the main body, or worse, back by the tail, the fish ran and often cut back under the boat. Then it was necessary to manage the bow, the line—not stepping on the floorboards of the boat—a quiver full of homemade arrows, and the front paddle all at the same time.
It was, of course, impossible, and usually if the fish cut and ran under the boat, in the excitement somebody would step through the bottom of the boat and in moments it was full of water, floating just beneath the surface while the fight with the fish went on.
It is perhaps just as well that this type of fishing did not last long as most of the time seems to have been spent on the shore trying to get a fire going with wet matches to dry out clothes or feathers on arrows or hammering the boards back onto the bottom of the boat with a rock while the shoals and schools of suckers moved mockingly back and forth slowly across the lagoon just beneath the surface in the late spring sun.