Dirty Work

by Anna Maxymiw

  In this day and age, as tackle gets more and more complicated and garish, there’s something primordial and powerful about fishing with simple gear, with a single, barbless hook. The fight becomes fair; the pike get a chance. To catch the pike fairly, judiciously, and beautifully, we have to become the pike. We have to reach into that part of us that remembers. We have to tap into our ancient instincts, stare into that impenetrable water, and cast our line without knowing what will be waiting for us on the other end.

  Malevolent, bold, greedy, devouring, reeking tyrant—this is our angry lupine water hunter, the wolf that lies in wait to bite off indolent, dangling fingers or thirsty mules’ lips, to eat a stupid fisherman who makes just one misstep. No daydreaming with hands in the water where pike live and breed, if the literature is to be believed. No interloping in a pike’s domain. We can only bow to the ruler.

  * * *

  When I pulled my pike up, my brother and father hanging over the side of the boat with the cradle at the ready, I thought she was dead because she was so calm. She didn’t come up swirling or thrashing. She didn’t fight me. Instead, she floated to the boat on her side, her one visible eye focused steadily on us. The lure was hooked lightly in her cheek; one twist and that fish could have gotten away—but she didn’t. Instead, she stared at me, and I stared back. She was thirty-six inches. Not a huge pike, but not a small one either. I was awed at how she came in so slowly, lackadaisical, pulled along by my lurid bait; at the gleaming patterns on her back of sinews and slime—deep green and browns, brindled patches of gold and beige; at her pale belly; at the hazel and black irises; at the sentient gaze.

  Before we returned her to the water, holding her by the tail and letting her slowly re-aerate her gills, I put my bare hand on her back. I should have been wearing a glove, to prevent my skin from removing necessary mucus from her skin, but I couldn’t help it. This was sheer power and patience beneath my palm. My hand came away covered in slickness, and I put it to my face, smelled the brackish brown water on my skin, the life of a fish. And then my pike was lowered into the water, and my pike was gone.

  Pike break your heart. Pike make you stronger. They have sneakily, sensually captured our imaginations: “A pike dozed,” Amy Lowell writes. “Green and copper, / A darkness and a gleam.” “With one sinuous ripple,” Theodore Roethke describes in the finale of a poem, “then a rush / A thrashing up of the whole pool.” These are fish that have seen the deaths of kings, eaten lips of mules, besieged the fisherman. These are eyes that have seen the fillet knife, the faces of excited and frustrated anglers. For all of this, the pike deserves more credit than we’ve given it. Water wolf. Survivor in the fullest. This queen of fishes.

  PIN BONES

  On our second day as Kesagami staff, Alex and Tiff take the new housekeepers around camp once again, this time showing us how to clean the motel rooms, bathrooms, bathhouse, cabins—or rather, how to clean as fast as we can without putting too much elbow grease into it.

  “Here’s your secret weapon,” Alex says, slamming a spray bottle full of blue liquid onto the cheap plastic patio table in the middle of Cabin 3.

  “Windex?” Emma cranes her head to look at the label.

  “Windex,” she affirms. “Well, off-brand Windex, so it’s not as good and also might be more toxic. Make sure you dilute it. But yeah, basically Windex.”

  “Kesagami rule number one: use only what you need to use,” Tiff chimes in from across the cabin. “Windex works for pretty much everything. We even use it to clean the toilet bowls.”

  Getting the lodge ready for the guests in only a few days isn’t easy. In some previous years, the winter was so harsh that the entire dock was ripped apart and set sail across the lake during the spring thaw. Sometimes, wildlife has been found nesting in the cabins. One year, a marten destroyed Henry’s bedroom; another year, chipmunks inhabited the guideshack and had to be systematically killed throughout the summer.

  The damage this year isn’t bad. The dock is still present; no rodent has chewed the electrical wiring in the lodge to bits; the roof is intact; the shoreline hasn’t been torn up by ice. Jack and Pea, who came up a few days earlier than the rest of us to start the opening procedures, found a groundhog living in the guideshack and used chicken wire and a staple gun to pen it into Kevin’s bunk, but that seems to be the extent of the mayhem.

  Still, there’s a lot to be done before the first guests fly in. All of the linens need to be pulled out of storage and washed; dishes need to be dusted off and bleached and rinsed and stacked on their shelves; all of the rooms and cabins need to be unlocked and opened and aired. Tables need to be polished, floors vacuumed, counters wiped down, windows scrubbed, paths swept, and leaves raked. Already, we’ve been moving and stacking wood, dragging furniture around, unpacking bottles of liquor, and displaying Kesagami T-shirts to sell to guests as souvenirs, setting up mattresses and pillows and shaking out duvets, filling the fridge with the groceries that were flown in with us and continue to be delivered by plane.

  Elsewhere, the dockhands and guides are busy at the shoreline. Their main task is bringing the boats out of storage where they’ve been kept all winter in the narrows, a part of the lake about a ten-minute boat ride away where the water goes into a kind of strait. There’s more shelter there, and so it’s where Henry chooses to store the boats in the off-season. The boys have the job of towing the freight canoes back to the main shoreline and getting them into their rails, which are peeled black spruce trees nailed together along the shoreline like latticework, a structure designed to keep a boat steady and held tight and safe, out of the lake. Once the big canoes are docked and ready, the guides and dockhands set up boat seats and cushions, organize tackle boxes, chop firewood, stain cabin decks, clean chimneys, drag picnic tables to prime positions.

  The work has been constant and fast, and our learning curves have been steep. All the new staff members are covered in scratches and bruises and smudges of dirt, battered by an unfamiliar environment that we don’t quite understand. The labour is already wreaking havoc on my body, which is used to doing desk jobs and sitting on buses and subways, not lifting and hauling and scrubbing over and over again. My triceps are tight and painful; my fingertips are chapped; my lower back feels like something has popped out and needs to be smacked back in. And I’m tired. I’m so tired I feel like I could sleep twelve hours tonight and still sleep some more. Every cell in my body is crying out for more rest. Waking up this morning felt like tearing through a thick grey screen; my head has been aching all day long as a result of the 6 a.m. alarm. I have to believe this is only an adjustment, that after a few weeks my body will become tight and strong and I’ll get used to the repetitive motions that are causing me such grief, but right now, everything is tender. I’m dumb-headed and thick-brained, more of a hindrance than a help. I feel out of place and fragile, and I wonder why I ever wanted to come up here.

  Tiff leans over one of the beds, showing us how to change the sheets and master a hospital corner while dodging the spiders that live in the jute. On the other side of the cabin, Alex sweeps the hearth of the fireplace. “Just make sure that all the ashes are cold,” she says over her shoulder to us, “because we’ve had a few experiences where girls have put live coals into plastic buckets.”

  Suddenly, there’s a terrible bang, and everything goes dark. I stand stock-still, wondering what the hell has happened. I hear Tiff sigh and walk a few steps, and then the watery cabin light is flicked on and I see that the door has been slammed shut.

  “What the fuck?” The new girls start to froth, panicked, but Alex, Tiff, and Alisa lean back against the bunks, picking at their nails and their split ends.

  “It’s the guys,” Alisa says. “They do this all the time when we’re cleaning.”

  That’s when I notice low guffaws from outside the door. I run up to it and try the handle, but it’s locked: the cabin doors lock both from the inside and the outside. There’s more laughter.

  I look b
ack at the veteran housekeepers, bewildered. “So what now?”

  “It’s an excuse not to do work,” Tiff says with a smile, lying down on one of the bunks. “It’s not like we can get outside, anyway.”

  “So you let them do this?”

  “Yeah,” Alex says.

  “Are you kidding me?” I stare at them, probably looking like an idiot who thinks she knows it all. Tiff’s and Alex’s eyebrows go up.

  I hit the heel of my palm against the glass of one of the rusted, reticent windows, and slide it open, forcing the panes along their dirty tracks. Luckily, there’s a firewood box underneath the window that provides a step down, so I manage to escape, albeit in a graceless tumble. In the process, I slice my shin open on the frame. When I hit the ground, the boys hear me: they crane their heads around the edge of the cabin, while behind me, the girls poke their heads out of the window.

  I walk around to the door and unlatch it, trying to stop the flow of blood from my leg with a useless cupped hand. Jack looks at me, inscrutable. Kev grins. The girls’ faces are all white in the sunlight when the door swings open.

  “Fuck you,” I say, over my shoulder and loudly, the words juicy in my mouth, and I’m not entirely sure who I’m saying them to.

  * * *

  The work continues, non-stop, for three days. In that time, we hand-wash every pot, pan, and cooking implement in the kitchen. We scrub every toilet bowl and wipe every mirror. Every bed is made with freshly cleaned sheets, every pillow plumped, every roll of toilet paper carefully placed on the holder with the first square folded into a neat little triangle.

  We also fill the woodlots with sliced and diced chunks of black spruce. I can tell that wood is going to be our main commodity. It already seems to be in motion constantly: moving from place to place, being stacked and restacked. If Henry doesn’t like where one woodpile is, he makes us move it. If he decides he doesn’t like the change, we move it back. He’s always thinking about where is best to stack wood, how best to stack wood, where the wood will be best seasoned and protected from the elements—which seems futile to me, because our entire tract of land is at the mercy of those elements.

  We move the wood. We restack the piles. We chap our palms, bruise our elbows and knees, get splinters in our fingers. We work until we can’t carry another armful of spruce, and then we wake up the next morning and do it all over again.

  The staff fishing day is the reward for our labour. It’s a yearly tradition for the lodge employees—a day on the water to relax before the guests arrive. One day when we get to experience what the guests get to experience every day. One day when we get to scud across the lake in those big deep-green boats and try our luck at getting a bite.

  We’re grateful when our fishing morning comes clear and beautiful, a contrast to the overcast days we’ve been toiling through so far. The sky is a giant canvas of blue, ready for the paint of the sun, and I can sense the heat that will herald the start of the summer weather. We tumble down the dock in old gumboots and windbreakers borrowed from the lodge closets. The girls stand at the edge of the dock and bare our teeth at one another, mock-jostling as we line up to snag a berth in the boat we most want, cranking our heads back as we sun our necks and cheeks in focused pleasure. The guides idle and wait for us as we pile into the rocking boats. I end up with Syd, and Tiff and Jack, who are our resident couple on staff. I’m wary of Jack, but Tiff and Syd seem fun and sweet, and I trust them to make this day the best it can be. Pea’s boat has Alex, Alisa, and Aubrey; Kevin has Robin, Connor, and Emma; Pete has Aidan; and Gus, Sam, and Henry make up the boat of adults. It’s interesting to observe the divisions: obviously Tiff will pair up with Jack when she can, and Alex and Alisa are veterans, so they want to be together; Kevin has the boat of random new people; and Aidan has been shunted off with Pete because none of the younger guides wants to deal with his constant questions and odd anecdotes.

  And then we’re roaring across the lake, no care for speed or safety, no second thoughts for life jackets or tying our hair back to protect from wind-tangle. Our five boats jet out across the water like green arrows, and I think this is freedom and I know I have to drink this up, because this one morning in the shimmer of the bold northern sunlight is all I’m going to have this summer in terms of experiencing this lake in all its guts and glory and guile. After this, as Henry has made clear, the female workers are bound to the shore, stuck doing laundry and making beds and mopping floors. After this, we’re grounded.

  When we reach a respectable distance from shore, we strip down to bikini strings and bare shoulders; I collect insect bodies across my collarbones, their fragile wings snared in my sunscreen.

  “Happy birthday, Jack,” Syd says, as he picks the spot where we’re going to fish for the morning. He’s twenty-five today.

  “And what a birthday,” he says, tying a Palomar knot on Syd’s line, deftly attaching her hook to the filament. Now make me proud is the unspoken sentiment. The boats are drafted teams, whether we like it or not, and there’s an unspoken competition going on: Who can catch the most fish? Who, therefore, is the most able guide? What boy can best force his housekeepers not to fuck around?

  By midmorning, we’re in the best kind of trance. The minutes topple into each other, and they’re filled with the satisfying nips and jerks of a taut fishing line, a quiet pleasure. There’s something about being out on a body of water on a calm, warm day. There’s no panic, no thinking about chores to do, no tension between veterans and newbies. Instead, our boats quietly cheer one another on in between a joke here and there. It’s as if being away from the shore and the buildings and all the potential stresses those hold has softened our edges; I’m not on the offence, or even the defence. I’m only concentrating on the way the line feels against my right pointer finger, the way Syd is humming to herself behind me, the way the wide brim of Jack’s fisherman fedora casts a shadow over the top half of his face, the way Tiff is staring out at the horizon, eyes half-lidded and dreamy.

  It’s said that the walleye from Kesagami Lake are the sweetest, freshest fish you’ll ever taste. I’ve heard of guests who spent hours getting one walleye strike after another—bang, bang, bang—so many that they caught more than two or three hundred fish in a day. And after I catch my first walleye, I undo the hook and kiss the fish right on the cheek, a ritual for rookie fishermen. I like to think of it as thanking the lake for what I’m taking from it.

  “Nice one,” Jack says, popping the fish into a bucket.

  “Do you think we’ll catch any pike today?” I don’t look at him as I ask.

  Jack laughs as he helps Syd unspool a bird’s nest she’s created around her reel. “You think you’re gonna catch a pike?”

  I know that I’ve somehow shown too much, revealed an animal part of my mind that should have stayed hidden. I don’t tell him that I already have, I’ve already felt it, that I want more. Jack has caught hundreds of pike; Jack knows better than me. I raise one shoulder in lukewarm acquiescence, and it’s enough that he turns away, tying another knot.

  Kesagami is special in that it’s strict cruelty-free fishing: it’s all catch and release, save for the walleye the guests are allowed to eat for their daily shore lunch. There are lots of rules about how best to preserve the fish population. Guests use barbless hooks, which means that although the hook may go deeper than a barbed one, unhooking a fish is cleaner and less damaging; when handling pike, guides and guests should wear gloves to protect the mucus on the fish skin; nets aren’t allowed, only cradles, because nets bend the fish, but cradles hold them straight and safe in the water. I’ve been told that pike are a tasty fish, albeit difficult to fillet because they’re bony, but here, pike are absolutely never to be killed. I’ve never heard of a guest killing a pike; I’m sure it would result in a lifetime ban from the lodge. Kesagami is so far north—it’s very expensive and not at all convenient to visit—and it’s only open for about two months a year, so there’s less fishing pressure on the lake. All of
these factors combined mean that Kesagami’s pike have become known as some of the biggest, canniest pike in North America, if not the world. So as we squeal and joke and jig for walleye and miss setting the hook again and again, I remember that we’re fishing on a lake of legends, that somewhere, the pike can hear us, know us, are getting ready to spend the summer alongside us.

  * * *

  All of the boats head to one of the islands to set up shore lunch, a meal of deep-fried battered fish and onion rings and potato slices. Fishermen crave shore lunch. The guides have to make it every day they’re out on the water, unless their guests ask for a packed lunch in order to get another hour of fishing out of the day. But the housekeepers get to taste fresh-caught fish only this once. It’s also going to be the only time the boys will cook for the girls, so we take full advantage. We kneel in the shallows in our bathing suits to cool off as the guides fire up the propane tanks, shoving one another out of the way with their elbows and the heels of their hands.

  Jack, in a moment of rare and brilliant patience, tries to teach a few of the girls how to fillet, using the broad end of one of the boat paddles as a cutting board. I watch as Tiff and Robin turn walleye flesh into ragged streamers. When it’s my turn, I sit cross-legged on the white sand and hold the Rapala knife awkwardly in one loose-fingered hand.

  “Here,” he says, taking one of my hands, mechanically, like a shop-class instructor. “Feel here.”