Day expeditions, when not working for walleyes but for northern pike, were similar to night-fishing trips except that more art was involved.
Fishing for walleyes took skill, but it was largely static, slow—sitting for hours in the smoke from the campfire, touching the line with the fingers, waiting for the grating of their teeth.
Northern pike were an entirely different matter.
There were three times to fish for northerns. The first was in the spring, right after the suckers ran, when the northerns took lures readily. The second time was in the middle of summer, and the last time was in the fall.
Fishing for northerns in the summer was like mounting a big-game hunt in Africa. It was very serious and focused on one thing and one thing only: using artificial lures to catch northern pike, preferably lures made by hand.
Nobody seemed to know when self-made lures started but everybody knew why—none of the boys could afford factory-made except for the red-and-white or black-and-white spoons known as daredevils. The daredevils worked well enough in the spring, and even through the summer, but usually worked only on smaller fish and were very hard to use in thick weeds or snags because they sank so quickly and the hooks were exposed so openly. Wooden plugs, made in the shape of a large minnow and painted to look like a fish or a red-and-white spark plug would float until the reeling-in phase of the cast started—when a lip would pull them under and set up the action. This meant the plug could be cast into a bad place next to a dead tree or snag—where large northerns liked to hunt for smaller fish—then pulled gently and slowly along the surface until it was clear and the fast-reeling retrieve could be started.
Plug-making went on all winter, a way to remember summer fishing when the snow was deep. Treble hooks and lip-spoons and eyelets could be ordered from sporting goods mail-order houses, and good plugs could be made for fifteen or twenty cents. They were carved of soft pine and sanded in the streamlined shape of a minnow or small fish and painted with airplane model dope, either with rib bones down the side and a dark back and green sides and bottom, or simply red and white—the front, or head, bright red and the rest of the body white.
Offbeat plugs first appeared one winter when a new boy moved in and had never fished for northerns. He painted realistic plugs like minnows, showing not just ribs but eyes and gill slits and mouths, like Flying Tiger aircraft. He also started the thought that the bigger the plug the bigger the fish, which culminated in Gene Tray making a plug nearly a foot long with five sets of treble hooks down the bottom and the end of a kitchen spoon for a diving lip under the chin. It looked good and everybody was anxious to try it, but it proved a disaster because his reel wasn’t strong enough to take the weight of the plug during a cast. The first time he tried it the line fed out about ten feet and snarled in a horrendous backlash. It hung, the plug moving close to a hundred and fifty miles an hour, and hit the end of the line, bent the rod out and down and whipped up, around and back and buried three sets of hooks in the back of Gene’s head. Four of the hooks went in well past the barb, driven in with tremendous force, some of them stuck deep in the skull itself, and the boys couldn’t get them out even with fishing pliers. It was four miles back to town on bicycles, and Gene had to pedal all the way in with that wooden fish hanging out of the back of his head and that pretty much marked the end of trying with big plugs.
Moving out for northerns usually meant something of a military operation. In the summer the big northerns seemed to hole up where it was almost impossible to get to them. There were small lakes out around town where a boat wouldn’t fit, but we could work to the shore through thick brush and we would bicycle out to them. Some lakes were ten miles away, and this was before thin-tired—what were called “English”—bicycles. We had huge steel beasts with fat balloon tires and shock-absorber front forks that weighed sixty or seventy pounds, and pedaling them ten miles on a gravel road, especially if the wind was wrong, could be a nightmare.
Northerns struck best early in the morning and in the evening, so we would leave when it was still dark, three-thirty or four in the morning, rods across the handlebars, hoping to reach the lake when it was still good for fishing.
They were very wary, so when we arrived at the lake each person would take a sector and work down to the shore through the brush carefully, quietly.
All these lakes were thick with lily pads. It was difficult to fish by casting over the pads because they would snag the plug and ruin the return. We would wade in, moving slowly, until the water was waist deep and we were at the edge of the pads, and then cast up and down the side of the pad bed, working the plug along the sides in smooth runs. The plugs would go deeper the harder they were reeled, and that gave some control of depth so the speed could be held to keep the plug two or three feet down, scooting and wobbling like an injured fish.
The northerns hid back in the pads, cruising there while they hunted panfish and minnows, and when the sun hit the lure they would come out like tanks, slashing and hitting so hard that if a boy wasn’t ready they’d take the rod out of his hands.
Not huge—up to four, five pounds—these fish. But they fought like tigers and the plugs never hooked them that securely and often they would get off. And it seemed always the big ones would get away; always it was the one to tell about, the one to hold up hands about, the one to lie about that raised its ugly green head and slashed this way and that in the sunlight and the plug was gone, shaken loose to cartwheel away while the picture, the same picture as on the cover of every Field and Stream and Outdoor Life, the picture, burned itself into the eyes and mind forever.