PICKEREL FISHING
I rarely know where the pickerel fishermen come from. They seem to
be a race apart and their talk is not of towns or politics, of
business or religion. Neither love nor war is their theme, but ice
and fishing through it, and what happens to a man while so doing.
If I suggest Randolph, or Framingham, Wellesley or Weymouth, they
know them, perchance, as places where such and such ponds have a
depth that is known to them and ice on which they have had
adventures which they can detail. Those things for which the towns
stand characterized in the minds of most men are nothing to them,
but rather what bait may be found in their streams or what fish
may be drawn through the ice in their territory. On days when I
talk with them Boston centres about the Quincy Market, where bait
is sold and pickerel are displayed, and the sporting goods stores,
the merits of whose tackle are known to a nicety. Thus are worlds
multiplied to infinity, each one of us having his own. But to step
into that of the pickerel fishermen of a midwinter day adds zest
to the excursion.
They are quite like the juncos, to me, these genial men of the
frozen day. They suddenly appear from I know not where, share the
joys of the day and place for a brief time, then walk off the ice
again with their traps, going I know not whither. The next day in
all probability, if it be a good one for fishing, others will come
to fish in the same places and in the same way, but not usually
the same men. Thus the winter wandering birds appear, take their
toll of the day and the earth on which it shines, give the joy of
their presence to all who seek it understandingly, then vanish. It
would seem as if the pickerel fishermen were a distinct species,
like the tree sparrows and the pine grosbeaks, winter visitors not
to be looked for in warm weather, folk who pass from pond to pond,
taking toll of all and thus learning their characteristics so
definitely, though this seems hardly probable. Probably my
pickerel fishermen of yesterday are artisans today, bookkeepers
perhaps or salesmen, so differently dressed and occupied, their
talk of such different things that I would not know them, for of
all animals man alone is able to put on or take off an individuality
at will, changing his countenance with his garment and his
mind with his occupation. The Natty Bumpo of today may be the
natty dry goods clerk of tomorrow, assuming the Bumpo with his
fishing togs and making his talk of many ponds fit the clothes.
The fishermen add a touch of picturesque geniality, of excitement
even to the pond, being as occasional in its daily life as the
crossing of a deer or an otter or the circling of an osprey in
summer. Any one of these causes a momentary stir, a local
disturbance down in the depths among the regular occupants of the
place, but after all it is but a momentary and local one, and the
great business of the place goes on just the same near by the
spots where the hand of the grim reaper is busy removing prominent
citizens. For in my pond the pickerel are surely the prominent
citizens, the aristocracy, for they are the largest and strongest
and they live directly off their fellow fishes, which constitutes
an aristocracy in any community. Minnows, perch, bream and mullet
alike are busy assimilating vegetable matter, mussels, worms,
insects and small crustacae, merely to form themselves either
directly or in their children ultimately into titbits for the
nourishing of pickerel. All the pond world knows that and its
denizens tremble in the presence of these great-jawed, hook-toothed
gobblers of small fry; and that constitutes a proletariat
the world over.
[Illustration: Pickerel from an Old Colony Pond]
In fishing time the loneliness of the empty levels of the ice is
broken at dawn by the coming of the crows, especially if there
have been fishermen the day before. Remnants of the fishermen's
noon meal are quite likely to be scattered about the spot where
they had their fire, and always the minnows which they took from
the hooks at leaving are there, frozen upon the frozen surface. It
seems a cold breakfast to us fire-worshipping mortals, but the
crows take it eagerly. Often, too, before it is fairly swallowed
fishermen appear, whereupon the crows flap silently but swiftly
away. One knows by this action that the fishermen are just men,
after all, and not a woodland variety of Peter Pan, though they
merely bob up on the pond margin, or perhaps well out on the ice,
loaded with their traps and tools. One never sees them coming
through the wood or down the street, or getting off trolley cars
or out of carryalls, these fishermen, they just bob up, which
would seem to prove a mystic origin; though of course they are
just folks and somebody knows them, as I have said.
Soon the air resounds with the xylophone music of their chopping,
the solid surf ace vibrating beneath the blows of the axe and
giving forth a clear tintinnabulation which is most delightful to
the ear. It is not all xylophonic, but there is in it, too, the
clink of musical glasses and also a certain weirdness, a goblin
withal that seems to belong with the mystery surrounding the
origin of pickerel fishermen. It is a sound to delight the ear and
linger pleasantly in the memory like the sleigh-bell tinkling of
ice crystals in a frozen wood. Stirred by this, or perhaps by the
beat of the risen sun on its surface, the pond itself begins to
caper a bit, musically, roaring in basso profundo a morning song
of its own. The result is grotesque in the extreme. I once heard a
big-chested man sing "Rocked in the Cradle of the Deep," while his
accompanist jigged out an accompaniment on the highest octave to
be found on the keyboard of the piano. The pond and the fishermen
seem to be doing something like this.
*****
To such quaint music the traps are set, bits of lath standing on
the edge of the hole and bearing attached to the line a red
flannel flag which the biting fish will strike and carry into the
depths with him when he goes off to swallow the bait. The
fishermen understand well the ways of the aristocrat pickerel when
he swallows a proletariat minnow. No lordly capitalist ever took
in a plebeian inventor with more grace--and finality. Often the
flag just drops from the support and lies on the surface of the
water while the two get acquainted. The pickerel has the minnow,
but his grip is not what he wants. He is particular about the way
he swallows a little one, as if he feared some impending Sherman
act. So, having got his fish, he waits to turn him so that the
victim may head down and seem to go of his own volition into the
interior department. Not until then does he run out the rest of
the line. If the attorney general fisherman attempts to take him
before that he simply lets go the bait and swims off, secure in
his immunity bath. After he has started to really go away with his
prize a steady pull is quite sure to result in his capture.
Two varieties of pickerel commonly inhabit our ponds. One,
technically known as Esox reticulatus, is the Eastern pickerel,
known sometimes as green pike or jack, but more often as pond
pickerel. He is a big green fish, a golden lustre on his
reticulated sides and in colonial times he was known as chain
pickerel from this dark linking on his golden green surface. I do
not hear the name now and I doubt if it is much, if any, used. The
pond pickerel waxes fat on minnows and other small fry and in the
course of a long life grows to be two feet or more in length and
specimens have been caught weighing seven pounds, perhaps more. It
is rather interesting to learn from the fishermen that certain
ponds are apt to contain pickerel of a certain size, in the main,
as if the conditions of food supply and the freshness of the water
or the amount of sunshine were only sufficient to bring the most
of them to a definite period of maturity, where they stopped. But
this is, of course, only a general rule, with many exceptions. One
of these is the big fish. Every pond contains him and every
pickerel fisherman who aspires to dignity in his class has hooked
this big fellow and lost, him and is able to tell you
circumstantially at much length just how. Most of them know the
exact location in each pond where he lurks and are confident that
this winter they will win in the encounter with him to which they
confidently look forward. Usually the fisherman hauls this monster
up to the hole in the ice but is unable to get him through because
the hole is too small. Tales like this, heard now and then about
the fire while we watch the traps, give assurance that the
fishermen are really very human after all and not of the Peter Pan
species.
*****
The other variety of pickerel is Esox americanus, the banded
pickerel, known hereabouts mainly as brook pickerel, because he
loves grassy streams. But the brook pickerel frequents the ponds
as well, loving best those of weedy bottoms and shores and slight
depth. He is a slim, little green fellow, usually not over a foot
long and his dark banded sides easily distinguish him from the
smaller specimens of his reticulated neighbor. The brook pickerel
is found only east of the Allegheny Mountains, from Massachusetts
to Florida while the pond pickerel is found from middle Maine to
Florida, and west to Louisiana and Arkansas. In spring the pond
pickerel goes up into the ready margins as far even as the brook
pickerel will and often I see him in water so shallow that his
back fin sticks up, looking like the sail of a miniature Chinese
junk. There he seeks the lovely little coppery swamp tree-frogs
that are but an inch long and look like talismans carved from
metal. These are his tidbits, but he will take most anything alive
that is small enough for him to swallow, and when in winter he
retires to the warmer layers of water next the pond bottom, his
omnivorous appetite in a large measure goes with him. Hence the
fishermen use many varieties of small fish for bait, all with some
success.
In the spring nothing else is quite so good as this tiny, swamp
tree-frog. In the winter in the majority of cases the little
silvery minnow known as "shiner" is best of all. Yet, the
fishermen will tell you, on some ponds the mummy-chogs which, I
take it, is the still surviving Indian name for the killi-fish,
are to be most esteemed as bait, and I have found fishermen
fishing with young perch and dace and other hard-scaled fish,
though I believe with indifferent success, nor did the fishermen
themselves look to be the real thing. I fancy that people had seen
these folk that fished with young perch come to the pond, perhaps
even knew them by name and where they lived, and that the bait had
been bought in a city market where they even keep young mud-fish
for sale as bait to the unsuspecting, and will assure them that
these are the young of dog-fish and are particularly alluring. But
the fishermen, the real fishermen, know better.
The mud-fish, more properly the bowfin, is a small, dark-colored,
ganoid fish which is so tough and will live under such discouraging
circumstances that it would make ideal pickerel bait if the
pickerel would have anything to do with it, but they will
not. So in some ponds it is with the mummy-chogs which are
admirably tough and live long and are lively when impaled. On the
other hook the shiner is a little, silvery, soft-scaled fellow so
gentle that he will come up to the pond side and eat cracker
crumbs out of your hand. I have had shiners so tame from
frequently feeding them in this way that I could handle them,
though not to their own good, for the shiner is as tender as he is
beautiful and just a few hard knocks, that a mummy-chog would pass
with a flip of his tail, will wreck him. Yet for pickerel fishing
through the ice the shiner is the king of bait and fortunate
indeed are those fishermen who can obtain enough shiners to afford
to use them lavishly. Properly hooked, just under the after back
fin, they survive fairly well and their silver wrigglings are hard
for a pickerel to resist.
*****
Though I have said that I never see the fishermen off the pond I
do see them sometimes fishing for bait. They cut a big hole in the
ice for this, one big enough to let that monster pickerel that is
never caught come through, and through this they drop to the
bottom a big hoop net. This they bait with cracker crumbs and now
and then pull it eagerly to the surface, often with many shiners
in it. There are small ponds that are famous for being rich in
bait alone and from these the wiser fishermen draw their supply.
Though the fisherman about his fire up under the lee of the pines
on shore loves to tell tales of the fish of other days and other
ponds he is far from garrulous when on the ice and hard at it. And
usually he is too busy to talk. If the fish are biting well he
tears from one end to the other of his long rows of traps, playing
a fish here, hauling one out there, setting a trap that has been
sprung by the wind or the too eager wriggling of the bait, and on
most fishing days, whether the fish bite well or ill, he has to
constantly make the rounds of his holes, inspecting his hooks to
see if the bait has escaped or been stolen, handling new ones in
the icy water and skimming the young ice from the holes across his
fishing. Miles a day he runs in the keen air with his bait pail
and skimmer and however many fish he catches I am quite sure he
eats them all at the next meal.
And not all his catch are sure to be pickerel. Down below there in
the twilight of the warmest water next the bottom are perch and
dace, bass and eel, and all these are likely to hunger for shiner.
The largest eel I ever saw caught came up through the ice in this
way and I have even known the clumsy and stupid sucker to come out
of the hole on the hook, making the fisherman think for a moment
that he had hold of the one big pickerel of that particular pond.
I cannot conceive of a sucker actually attempting to eat a shiner,
even when impaled, impeded and wriggling, so such must have come
by the hook in some other way, probably accidentally caught as
they came by.
As for that monster fish, there are times, even when the fishermen
are not telling me about him, that I believe he exists. Besides
the two varieties of Esox mentioned there is another which is
common to all suitable waters of North America, Europe and Asia.
That is Esox Lucius, as Linnaeus named him, the common pike. This
fish is very like the pond pickerel in appearance and he sometimes
grows to weigh forty pounds or more and to a length of four feet.
Such a one might well be too large to come up through the hole
which the fishermen have cut for his little cousins, the brook
pickerel. It is quite possible that one of these Jonah-swallowing
leviathans rules the pickerel in each pond kingdom; like a Morgan
among millionaires. Of the pike, which he loved well, Isaac Walton
has much to say and I cannot refrain from quoting a few of his
most loving phrases, which are those which tell how he should be
cooked.
*****
"Keep his liver," he says, "which you are to shred very small with
thyme, sweet marjoram and a little winter savory; to these put
some pickled oysters and some anchovies, two or three; both these
last whole, for the anchovies will melt, and the oysters should
not; to these you must add also a pound of sweet butter which you
are to mix with the herbs that are shred, and let them all be well
salted. If the pike be more than a yard long then you may
put into these herbs more than a pound, or if he be less,
then less butter will suffice. These being thus mixed, with
a blade or two of mace, must be put into the pike's belly, and
then his belly sewed up so as to keep all the butter in his belly
if it be possible; if not, then as much of it as you possibly can;
but do not take off the scales. Then you are to thrust the spit
through his mouth and out at his tail; and then take four or five
or six split sticks or very thin laths and convenient quantity of
tape or filleting; these laths are to be tied around the pike's
body from his head to his tail, and the tape tied somewhat thick
to prevent his breaking or falling from the spit. Let him be
roasted very leisurely and often basted with claret wine and
anchovies and butter mixed together, and also with what moisture
falls from him into the pan. When you have roasted him sufficiently
you are to hold under him, when you unwind or cut the tape
that ties him, such a dish as you purpose to eat him out of,
and let him fall into it with the sauce that is roasted in his
belly; and by this means the pike will be kept unbroken and
complete. Then to the sauce which was within and also that sauce
in the pan you are to add a fit quantity of the best butter and to
squeeze the juice of three or four oranges; lastly you may either
put into the pike with the oysters two cloves of garlic and take
it whole out when the pike is cut off the spit; or to give the
sauce a haut-gout, let the dish into which you let fall the pike
be rubbed with it. The using or not of this garlic is left to your
discretion."
Surely the pike is the king of fishes when he is cooked in that
fashion, and I doubt not a pond pickerel thus served becomes at
least a prince. "This dish of meat," says Walton, "is too good for
any but anglers or very honest men." I am sure it is none too good
for pickerel fishermen, and when I think of it I do not wonder
that they are fat.