My Dad

Northern pike have teeth. I know this because I’ve sat frozen in the metal seat of a rowboat looking at a northern pike’s gaping, toothy mouth, while holding him firm on the bottom of the boat with my foot and praying that he wouldn’t suddenly arch, spin around and bite through my dime store sneaker.

Sometimes the hook snagged the pike where it should have, right through its jaw, adding another barb to the already thick row of razor sharp teeth. And then it was a matter of keeping my foot firm right behind the gill and searching for the pliers in the tackle box. They were always underneath the little plastic boxes of lures and fishing line, not quickly visible, so one had to rummage in the tackle box while keeping one eye on the pike.

Meanwhile, my dad sat in the back of the boat, one hand on his reel and the other on the tiller of our little trolling motor. He didn’t say anything. He kept trolling, motoring ever so slowly along, hoping to catch a pike of his own. He watched the surface of the water for clues but, out of the corner of his eye, I knew he was watching me. He watched it all – me finding the pliers, getting the hook out, pulling the stringer of fish from over the side of the boat, and threading the end of the stringer through the pike’s mouth and out the gill to add it to the stringer. I never got good at it but I could do it.

There wasn’t any choice. If I wanted to go fishing with my dad, then I had to deal with what I caught.

I remember one day after having caught and dealt with one angry pike, I felt the tug on my line and ignored it. The line would get taut and sometimes pull off in another direction. I’d look off at the horizon, think about swimming, wish I hadn’t come because I’d already gotten a fish and wrestled a hook out of his terrible fearsome mouth.

“You got one on the line there, Janice. You better reel him in.”

Because my dad watched the taut line and my inaction for a good while before saying anything, it meant that when I finally landed the pike, pulled him close to the boat, and scooped him with the green net, the fish had swallowed the hook.

This was a terrible thing.

There was a tool in the tackle box for this – a yellow plastic stick with u-shaped head. It was called a fish degorger and the idea was to push the degorger into the fish’s mouth and down his throat until it hit the hook and then twist and pull the hook out. I’d seen my dad use it, usually on little fish with tender mouths, so light that no one knew they were hooked until it was too late.

I can still see the pike on the bottom of the boat, long, maybe a foot and half long, its one eye wild, tail flapping against the aluminum, my white shoe pressing down so hard on his flesh that he was about to burst, the degorger in my hand.

“You’re going to have to pick up that fish.”

And so my dad told me, from his seat in the back of the boat, to pull up the fish with my right hand and smooth down the back and side fins with my left hand, and then, holding tight, take the degorger in my right hand and go after the hook. I tried but the fish angled and arched. Blood oozed out of his gill and then I dropped him on the bottom of the boat where he flapped for a few more minutes and then went flat.

“Hand him over here.” My dad had reeled in his line, cut the motor, and taken his jack knife out of his pocket. He peeled back the blade. Then he held the line between his fingers and cut it right near the pike’s teeth. Just a half inch or so of filament could be seen.

“Put a new hook on that line with a couple of new weights.” He cast out his line and revved up the motor. I did what he said and we kept fishing.