A wolverine is eating my leg

by Tim Cahill

  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: Pervert Captured in Abandoned House: Parents Mortified.

  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.

  These 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.

  Ice 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 Stock-bridge. 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-c
epas and means "is it not so."

  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, coveied 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.

  uddenly, it seemed, we were back in the trucks. The plan was to run five miles south, to a bar at Quin-ney, 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 Gus-tibus 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 Osh-kosh. 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.

  Yanking 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 Naga-wicka. 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 s
trong 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.

  THE

  RAGGEDY ED6E

  w^>

  the continental United States, approximately 282 feet below sea level, and plan to conclude their journey to reach Mount Whitney, the highest point, at an elevation of 14,375 feet above sea level.

  [Chief Ranger Dick] Rayner considered the rescued hikers to be "extremely fortunate" and cautioned monument visitors on the hazards of summer hiking and backpacking in extreme Death Valley temperatures.