by HH "Hub" Brown

Last month, I mentioned Bob's dislike of Northern Pike - which, by the way was misquoted. Instead of saying "snakes in the boat," Bob always said, "No snakes in the boat." He considered the Northern more or less a nuisance. They're a slimy fish, they have a lot of teeth, and Bob figured if you could catch Walleyes, which are rated by a lot of fish lovers to be near the top of the list of freshwater fish, why bother with Northerns?

We had talked with a game warden one time up there and he asked what kind of fish we preferred and we told him we always threw the Northerns back. He said, "That's why there's so many more Northerns."

Ag's youngest sister, Arlene, who was a nurse, had married a young doctor, Anthony Kritkausky, whose father never worried about bony fish. He came from Lithuania and he had a way of fixing Pickerel or Northerns. He would scrape them, clean them out good, take the fins and head off, then cut them in about two or three inch pieces, wrap them in clean cotton cloth with some slices of onion and whole peppercorns and boil them. When they were done, he would unwrap them and, with a fork, separate the flakes of fish and those troublesome little Y-shaped bones would be exposed and you could pick them out. Then you could use the fish in a salad, fry it a little, or make some fish chowder.

I decided I would make some chowder and show Bob that Northerns were fit for human consumption. So, I asked Jack or Don to keep a good sized one for me. They kept one out of Bob's sight and I fixed it like Tony's father did and started to make chowder. The only milk we had with us was canned evaporated, so instead of making New England, I used canned tomatoes and made New York chowder. We had lots of onions, celery, potatoes, and I used a can of corn or peas. When Bob saw it in the bowls, he said it looked like a salad that had water in it. But, both Jack and Don swore that Bob ate four bowls.

One year when it came time to go on vacation, we on the farm hadn't been able, on account of bad weather, to put up enough hay for the animals for the winter. So I had to skip and that's how Perley started to go to Canada with the fellows.

Bob said one evening after supper he and Perley got in Bob's canoe and went to where a stream flowed into the lake and started casting. Perley had a Redeyed Wriggler on that had lost one eye and because he couldn't find another red bead he had substituted a pink one. All at once he had a strike and he hooked a fish and he said it fought very little and soon had it alongside the canoe. He said to Bob, "What am I going to do with that?" Bob said he looked and there alongside the canoe was a Great Northern that looked to be four feet long - 47 1/2 inches to be exact. Perley asked, "How am I gonna land him?" To land a Northern of hat size, even if you had a net large enough , to turn a fish loose in the bottom of a canoe would be a disaster. Things would be scattered everywhere and everything would be covered with slime, so Bob handed Perley a ballpeen hammer form the kit he always kept by his feet. Perley had the fish's head almost out of the water and he struck him a sharp blow right between the eyes. That was one Pike they brought home and Perley had a different version of how he had caught him for everyone. The pink bead in place of the red one had been why the fish had taken the bait and sometimes the fish had put up a terrific fight and sometimes he had caught him on an old hook he had found and used a tree limb for a pole.