Dirty Work

by Anna Maxymiw

  I lie there for a long time. My thoughts race; mostly I feel worried, a greasy knot in my gut. It’s entirely possible that I’ve made a gigantic mistake, sacrificing my privacy, my body, maybe even my sanity for these sixty-seven days. Still, the fluttering breathing of three other worried souls surrounds me, almost soothes me. Somehow, already, I feel vaguely connected to these women, we, the new ones, relegated to a falling-apart hut, sent to the woods. Already, the four of us are absorbing one another’s pheromones, idiosyncrasies, fears, and desires. Desire that the summer will give us what we need—except not all of us know what we need, and most of us have no idea what we want. But we’ve thrown our lot to the North, and all we can do now is hope that the North reciprocates.

  Eventually, I fall into a patchy, grey-tinged sleep, and in what seems like only a few minutes, I wake up to an even more grey-tinged morning, all of our alarms going off at the same time, Sydney throwing on her clothes, pale flesh flashed in clammy strips, Robin swearing across a muzzy tongue, Emma caught in her bug net as she tries to roll out of her bunk and land without clipping Robin.

  I sit straight up in my bed, panicked from confusion about where I am. I see the boys strolling by our cabin on their way to breakfast, blatantly trying to look in our front window to see our body parts as we change.

  “What time is it?” My voice is crappy with sleep; I can tell that my mouth smells like rot.

  “Six o’fucking clock,” Sydney growls, punching the air in a low jab.

  Jack stands outside our cabin, staring in, laughing at us, Pea looking over his shoulder with a grin. I watch, exhausted, as Jack picks up a handful of gravel and throws it into the air. I’m confused until the rocks hit our roof with an unholy clatter. We all shriek.

  His yell echoes as he walks down the path to breakfast: “Welcome to the summer, assholes!”

  QUEEN OF FISHES

  The morning of our first real day of work, we sit around in the dining room, feeling one another out. The standard questions are asked: How old are you? What’s your background? Where are you from? Most of the workers come from towns with interesting names—Moose Factory, Lion’s Head, Skead, Thornloe. There are a few people from places that I immediately recognize: Orangeville, Belleville, London, Guelph. And then there’s me, the only person from a metropolis.

  When it’s my turn, I mumble that metropolis under my breath.

  “What?” Jack hoots.

  “Toronto,” I repeat.

  Then Jack and Pea and Kev and Gus do this odd coordinated thing, where they all click the fat of their tongues and smile weird, predator grins.

  “Shit, girl,” Gus says. “That’s the first strike against you.”

  I know it is. This is one of those markers that make me the resident interloper. There are others: I go to writing school, not an outdoor-adventure education program. I’m older than the majority of the housekeepers, though I’m still barely an adult and definitely not yet a woman. And last year—improbably, surprisingly, wonderfully—I was a guest at the lodge. I slept in one of the beds that I’m going to make every morning; I ate the food that I’m going to be serving to impatient guests; and I got to walk down the dock, got to sling myself into a boat and jet across the lake all day, every day. Best of all, I got to hold a fishing rod in my hand and trawl the water for the great, fierce beauties that lurk beneath the surface—the treasured beasts that are northern pike.

  * * *

  My father started fishing at Kesagami fifteen years ago, and while my younger brother joined him for the occasional father-son fishing trip, I said no every time I was asked to come along. It wasn’t that I had never fished before: my father started us young in the city, my brother and I learning how to catch gleaming little sunfish and bass in Toronto’s High Park using sturdy Mickey Mouse fishing rods, goofy red-and-white bobbers, and worms that we always made Dad put on the hook because we weren’t brave enough to spear a living thing with steel. But as I got older, I wanted to spend less time sitting still on a shoreline and more time being a moody preteen, and then a moody teenager. I wanted to spend my summer weeks in backyard pools, or at illicit parents-out-of-town house parties, or lying on my bed using ICQ to see if I could chat with whoever my crush was that week. As a teenager, the idea of five or six or seven days away from the internet and my friends and the telephone and the heat of a good, sticky Toronto summer was unappealing. And then, as I got older, life got busier, and I couldn’t justify taking a week off work to float around in a boat for eight hours a day. I wanted hustle and bustle, and so the thought of Northern Ontario became more than just unappealing—it became terrifying. Why walleye guts? Why bears? Why uncomfortable beds? Why fishermen? Why silence out on the middle of a lake? I didn’t understand, and I didn’t think I ever would.

  And then, when I was in the first year of my undergraduate degree, my uncle died.

  Uncle Pete wasn’t technically my uncle. He was my father’s cousin. Pete and his wife, Sue, had two sons who were just a bit older than me and my brother, and so when all of us were younger, and we were more fun and less hampered by personality and geography, there were lots of trips back and forth across the border to Ohio where they lived. We were wild kind-of cousins wrestling, or jumping from bunk bed to bunk bed, or just lying beside one another on the floor, whispering about nothing the way children do. We were different, lived in different places, and had different points of view, different temperaments—and, as we got older, different beliefs—but when we were together, we were blood.

  Sometimes blood stays with you for a long time, thick and comforting and keeping you afloat. Sometimes we lose people before we think we will. One night, I was sitting at my desk in my university dormitory, sketching out some notes for an English essay, when I got a phone call. Uncle Pete had died of a heart attack at the age of fifty-five, and my aunt had found his body on the bathroom floor.

  I remember crying at my desk. And I remember, a few months later, my father coming up with an idea: sometime in the future, we were going to go on a family fishing trip to celebrate Pete. Our two families grew close, grew apart, came back together again, caught and fissured and held in the sheer grief of losing a patriarch, a cousin, an uncle. A loved one.

  And that’s how, only a year ago, four years after Uncle Pete had died, I found myself wedged into a minivan with my cousins, starting on the drive to the tiny Cochrane air base to go up to Kesagami. Seven of us went all in; we fell. I spent my mornings slotted into one of the distinctive green boats with some combination of cousins, uncle, father, brother, as hours trickled by in amiable silence; we spent our afternoons eating fresh-fried fish, weathering the rain, speeding back to shore to curl up around the fireplaces.

  When we went out fishing, ghosts tagged along. It was hard not to believe in spirits while witnessing the formidable nature of our environment, while skimming across the surface of the lake, while trying to outrun a huge thunderstorm, motor gunned and guide laughing, swigging cans of beer and opening our mouths to the coming rain. It wasn’t hard to believe that Uncle Pete was there with us, large and jolly, propped up in the back of the boat, cheering us on with his giant, jocular laugh. I’m sure he watched his sons. And he made sure that we caught what we needed to catch.

  One morning, I was out with my father and my brother, trawling for walleye. It was a grey-velour day: the water and the sky and the clouds were all the same colour, and the air was so still that the surface of the lake was like concrete-coloured glass. So still that I could hear the giggled conversations going on in the other family boats. So still that I didn’t notice at first that there was something tugging truculently on the other end of my line.

  That weight. I had never felt a weight like that. All of my fish up until that point had been walleye, smaller and wriggly. But this was a ballast, this was an unseen thing, something maw-mouthed dragging idly on my pink twister jig. “Stickfish,” my father said—a stick hooked to my line, a result of my tendency to jig too deep because of a lack of
experience. But I knew it wasn’t a stick. This wasn’t flora. It felt thicker; there was a ripple of awareness on the other end of the line. An opponent. A presence. An intelligence.

  The longest time in the world is from when you have a fish on until when you manage to get that fish into the boat. I wasn’t jigging with a leader, a piece of wire that people use to prevent toothy fish from biting off a hook, so I knew that if it was a pike I had on the other end, it could easily snap my line off. I stood and I reeled, one rotation at a time, a novice in all regards but so focused on this one task that the gentle hoots and catcalls of my family teasing me sounded as if they were coming from far away. I thought about the way the horizon and lake were bleeding into each other, listened to the slap of the water against the side of the boat. Felt the heaviness. Two beasts facing off from opposite ends of a thin thread, each wondering about the other, each unsure of the other end of the line. I called on all my spirits in that one moment, praying to any god, to the crows, to the bears, to the lake itself, to my future, to anyone and anything that would take pity on me. Praying to my uncle. Praying to my family.

  And something—someone—listened, because I brought that pike to the surface.

  * * *

  Pike: otherwise known as northerns, jackfish, slough sharks, hammer handles, dragons, torpedoes, toothies, snot rockets, slime darts, snake pickerel, slimers, slime snakes, leader shredders, junk fish. When you’re fishing for bass and get your line bit off: “Those fucking pike,” the refrain hissed by fishermen throughout the centuries, and members of my family more than once or twice. When you’ve travelled across the continent to Northern Ontario to fish specifically for these cranky beauties: “Those fucking pike,” murmured in awe at their slyness, their gravitas.

  At Kesagami, pike are the main feature, the beast that everyone chases. Worthy opponents; watchful predators; sneaky bastards. Esox lucius: water wolves.

  But fishing for these cranky beauties isn’t a chore; nobody really swears under their breath if they hook into a big one by accident. Up here, fishing for pike becomes a kind of meditation. There’s a moment of spirituality in being alone on a lake as silent and giant as this. There’s something sacred about staring into water that is deep and dark and quiet—our original font, the ooze from which we all crawled at one point—without knowing what exactly is staring back at you.

  At the same time, pike are beautiful. It might seem odd to call one of Canada’s most prolific carnivorous fish pretty, but they are. Pike are most often olive green, with a pearlescent, pale belly and gold stripes or spots marking their flanks. Add in reddish fins, and a bright northern sun, and pulling a pike from the water can be prismatic, a peacocky experience.

  Elsewhere, pike have been identified as pests. Conservation efforts for these fish don’t always catch on: the bigger the teeth, the less human empathy a species garners, and pike aren’t what anyone would deem “cute”—after all, when it comes down to it, wolves don’t make good pets. Some experts deem pike an invasive species—if pike manage to make it into a body of water they’re not natural to, they tend to cause destruction by eating all the other fish (and even each other).

  I had never really thought about pike before. I had heard my father talk about them in reverent tones; I had seen photos of his biggest catches; I knew that they existed, that they were fighters, that people seemed to either love or hate them. How could I revere the predators on land, the animals that continue to hook artists’ imaginations and create space for themselves in people’s consciousnesses, and yet ignore the ancients that, cloaked in lake, went under the radar? Pike are ancient fish. For a while, it was believed that E. lucius got its start in northern Eurasia, and that it evolved from Palaeoesox fritschei, back in 60 million BCE. A 1980 discovery of a sixty-million-year-old pike skeleton in Western Canada, however, put the boots to that theory. Now scientists believe that pike in North America evolved separately from Eurasia—that the Eurasian variety was a warm-water pike, and that the North American pike were of two types: first, the muskellunge, commonly abbreviated as the muskie, and then the cold-water pike. But you don’t really need a scientist to tell you about how primordial these fish are; you only have to pull a pike out of the water, its thick body writhing and thrashing, to see its heritage; you only have to look at the dinosaur-snouted faces, the wicked-eyed stares, the bodies the colour of foliage to understand why fishermen—like my father, who has two four-foot fibreglass trophy-pike replicas mounted in our family home—deem them such worthy challengers.

  Throughout history, these fish have evoked divisive feelings; this is a creature with a complicated, rich mythology, and examining its written history shows that. The first reference to pike—Lucius—comes from fourth-century Roman poet Decimus Magnus Ausonius in “Mosella,” his poem written about the river Moselle: “Lucius besieges the complaining frogs / in obscure holes among sedges and mud. / His meat is not for the dining table / but sold at cheap shops smoky with its reeking stink.” Another early reference to pike comes from a poem by Geoffrey Chaucer. He mentions it in one of his love poems, “To Rosemounde”—“Nas neuer pyk walwed in galauntyne (Never was pike so imbued in galantine [sauce]) / As I in love am walwed and ywounde (As I in love, am imbued and wounded)”—romance at its finest. The Compleat Angler, a treatise on the joys of fishing, by Izaak Walton, was published in 1653, and then added to and edited by the writer for the next twenty-five years. The pike “is to be taken the tyrant, as the Salmon is the king, of the fresh water…the fresh-water wolf, by reason of his bold, greedy, devouring disposition….A man going to a pond…to water his mule, had a Pike bit his mule by the lips, to which the Pike hung fast.”

  It’s rare that pike are described as fish to be admired or revered: instead, they’re eaten, feared, avoided. They’re lurking in ponds and waiting for unwitting prey; they’re on tables as a second thought. And all of this seems unfair to me, as someone who’s grappled with these fish and prayed to be able to catch one. Other predators have been given respect throughout history. Why not this one?

  I look to the folklore to figure it out. The stories that surround the northern pike give a glimpse into the dichotomous beliefs that these fish evoke. Russian mythology dictates that the pike can be a bad water-spirit, or a wise old wish-fulfiller. A piece of apocrypha has Theodoric the Great, an Ostrogoth king, dying of shock and grief in 526 AD when the markings on the head of a large fish—reportedly a pike—served at his dinner table resembled the face of an enemy he had recently killed. In The Once and Future King, an Arthurian fantasy novel, young King Arthur narrowly avoids being eaten by a giant moat pike. And while fish such as sturgeon and salmon play important roles in Anishinaabe legends, the pike doesn’t appear too often; if it does, it’s cast as a bogeyman or a lake monster, or a fish that someone has turned into only to avoid the fate of drowning. Some general mythology even has pike eating hapless fishermen, becoming the “king of the fishes” in this ultimate act of domination.

  A pike’s frightening features and personality only add to its allure for fishermen. Pike have good vision, and their eyeballs are mobile; they can easily track speed and judge depth and distance. Their jaws click when they close; their teeth are designed to hold and destroy: sharp dentary teeth on the bottom jaw to pierce the skin of prey, and tooth pads on the roof of the mouth to trap that prey and keep it from escaping. Esocid teeth are extremely sharp, which accounts for why pike can roll their big heads and snap off that fishing line—“leader shredders.” It also means that pike bites bleed but good; some fishermen will tell you it’s rumoured that pike have an anticoagulant in their saliva, so if you’re out on a lake and get nailed by one of these fish, your day is probably done.

  And, of course, size factors into it. While nowhere near as large as a grouper or a marlin, a catfish or a sturgeon, the pike’s dimensions are nothing to sniff at. A three-year-old northern pike has an average length of about nineteen inches, while adults can grow to four feet or more. The heaviest pike o
n record weighed 55.1 pounds, and was caught in Germany in 1986; the Ontario record for a northern pike is 42.12 pounds, caught near Kenora in 1946. But weight is not the only measure of a pike: a skinnier pike that is long and strong can still wreak havoc on a fishing line, and while length seems to be less important in the annals of pike-fishing history, some of the biggest northerns at Kesagami clock in at about fifty inches, with the longest being rumoured at fifty-five inches.

  Pike are even more impressive in action. To strike, they lie in wait and then burst toward their prey at maximum acceleration—they form an S-shape with their thick bodies, and then snap forward by quickly straightening out, keeping their mouths closed until the last possible moment in order to build up a vacuum and suck unwitting targets into their gullets. Their aim is not always true, but the action of a pike strike is daunting and dynamic, and can be seen on the surface of the water in what is called the swirl. From where you stand in a boat, hunched over and staring into the water, beseeching, the swirl almost looks like a boiling sign of infinity, a perfect taunt: I’ve been here for years, and I’ll be here for years more. This is why so many people fish for pike: to see the strike adds to the excitement and the fear.

  And then there’s the fight. It seems fitting that pike get their name from the resemblance they bear to the medieval pole weapon. Think about the fight that a four-foot-long fish with a wolf’s instincts might give you. First, there’s setting the hook: pike are bony. Because they’re so hard-mouthed, an angler needs to set the hook hard and properly—snapping the rod back at the exact right time once the fish hits the lure to try to bury the hook in the jawbone (ideal) or flesh (less ideal)—in order to keep the northern on the line, which, it must be said, is no easy feat. I’ve heard of pike getting hooked and then immediately adjusting course to dive back under the boat, to waste line and make it more difficult for the angler to reel them in.