The Muskie Hook Re-Cast

By Peter Zachary Cohen

The muskellunge is known as literally “the fish of 10,000 casts”. People responding to surveys have reported spending well over 150 hours for one contact. At times a muskie, that could be a husky four-feet long or more, will follow a bait to the boat, just below the surface like an incoming torpedo, then will pause, seeming to make eye-contact, before waving good-by with its forked tail fins. When one is hooked it can explode heavily into the air. Going out for muskie is as often referred to as ‘hunting’ as distinct from ‘fishing’. A national magazine, two national organizations, and several websites are devoted to the challenge.
In this story three men nearing the end of a week of luckless long days reluctantly agree, on their last day, to be guided by the teenage son of their host guide who has been taken ill after a day in the rain. The son, a month short of being 18, is taking on his first solo guiding at sufferance. He’s long been embarrassed by his father’s business of taking the money of people willing to pay for such seldom results, and is anxious to reach 18 to qualify for joining a friend in the more productive work of logging. Yet he very much wants to perform well, and even better, to be able to ring the old school bell that is sounded to celebrate whenever a muskie is brought in, so that he can resign from the family business having proved himself at it.
The men are friends, though like the son, they each react differently among themselves to the different events they initiate or encounter, and in the end are caught up in a deadly situation drawn from a real experience I once had on a lake in the northern timber country.
Part of the story is told from the point of view of a large post-spawning female muskie that they manage to get into their boat.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Peter Zachary Cohen
• Release date: Feb 19, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311498274

Peter Zachary Cohen

I've lived mainly in New York State and Wyoming (with some of their horses and blizzards), with notable time on the muskie waters of N.Y. and Minnesota. After Army service I mixed my own writing with conducting writing courses at Kansas State University, while sharing a small sheep farm with my wife and two sons. Though I considered them of equal interest to adults my printed books were all published for children, receiving various reading list recognitions, two general awards, with three of them as Junior Literary Guild selections. I also conceived and wrote the scripts for two half-hour dramatic films for an Xerox series, and have created and written the book and lyrics for two produced musicals. And am continuing to be active outdoors and at a variety of folk- and other social dancing. Right now Sue and I are involved with our own Ragtime-Roaring Twenties era, choreographing steps to the Tin Pan Alley tunes of those years. I can be contacted at [e-mail].

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The Muskie Hook Re-Cast

by

Peter Zachary Cohen

Smashwords Edition

Copyright (c) 2014 Peter Zachary Cohen

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1.

"The Magic of the Muskie Inn

are the Muskies"

Such was the bold print on the Inn’s brochures, while in the main lodge room no words were necessary. Above the old fireplace’s dark polished mantelpiece, a stuffed specimen of the muskellunge, four feet long, was arched as at the height of a leap. The scales along its thick yet streamlined body had been returned by taxidermy to a life-like brightness, including the subtle green-gray-tan-silver striping along its side, and the bright red of fins in stressful action.

I am out there, it proclaimed in silent infecting challenge. If you can catch me.

And there would be--occasionally--an individual who did. Then the mounted fish above the mantelpiece would shine over a roistering of happy talk, by the one who had lived the magic and the others who felt their hopes boosted. Not this year yet. Of course, the season was only two weeks old.

Aaron Rennin went through the lodge room while putting on his slicker. There were a few guests seated there, for not everyone was willing or able to seek the Muskie Magic through a whole day of drizzling rain. He knew some of them had been out in it earlier, and would have things to say to him, but he looked neither left nor right at them, preferring to avoid contact. He was passing among them only because a few minutes earlier, just after a loon had made one of its plaintive calls, a thinner, coarser sound had begun coming through the open screened window of his room. He’d dutifully put aside what was probably the last assignment of his high school days without much regret about that, but with a familiar feeling that the task ahead would not be particularly pleasant.

The windless light rain had been falling from morning into the early twilight, slightly more penetrating than mere mist, just heavy enough, he could tell, that it would be raising uncountable tiny brief dimples from the water’s smooth surface. The bay’s dimpled surface, as he left the lodge and strode down toward the shore, was gradually changing from a cloud-reflecting gray to a brooding darkness. And amid the rain-peppered stillness the sound of the outboard motor was becoming increasingly a louder grinding growl.

It was to his ears, coming like this--not till the very tail end of a wet weather day--almost certainly the dismal announcement of another defeat. Yet he went first to the resurrected old electric-line pole that now held aloft an old schoolhouse bell. There only from the urge of family loyalty he reached for the bell’s dangling rope as he waited in the fading light.

His father’s guide boat, though growling clearly, was out of sight because a narrow spit of brush-grown ground, called Weed Island, provided a north edge to the crescent shape of what had become known as Rennin Bay. It provided a water’s edge where great blue herons were often slowly wading or motionlessly waiting like little gray men to stab a fish with their long bills. The boat would have to go unseen along the other side of that spit till it could turn into a passage through that weedy ridge and then come back eastward to the Inn’s docks. Thus the motor’s growling began growing quieter for a bit.

Then, when he could tell the boat was making its turn, and next saw the small white and green running lights appear out of the passage, he began to peer into the dimness. The white bow wave would be the next thing he’d be able to make out, then the boat’s dark hull, then if he could perceive the motions of a red-and-white flag flying from the bow he would yank the rope and at the bell’s clanging the lodge and the six cabins would be emptied, people would come converging around him at the dock to behold the sheening one-of-a-kind magic, held proudly aloft with some muscular strain by one of the someone in the boat, cheery talk and laughter filling the air.

But he held the rope lightly. He was not new to this, and experience kept telling him the boat’s appearance would signal only another day stretched to the last bit of endurance. He knew that the three customers out with his father were all older men, and he knew what they’d been going through while the rain water falling into the boat would be seeping around their feet to the low back end where the motors hung and his father would bale it out.

On the odd days when there was no guiding requested, his father would go out anyway. Storms would stop him but not mere rain or blowyness. And many times through the years Aaron had gone with him. Many of those times it was just the two of them--someone older, his brother Roger and/or his mother--had to be at the Inn.

Why don’t we go up into the woods today, Aaron had often said. Sometimes with reasons like, Nils sneaked to me where we could get buckets of blueberries (or raspberries or blackberries, depending on the season).

Just as soon as you’re old enough, we’ll get you a guide boat, maybe better than this and Roger’s, his father would promise.

Once Aaron had tried saying, Nils’ dad’s got a new horse to snake logs out of the boggy places. It’s almost big as an elephant. It’s even got a nose like one. We oughtta go see how he does it.

You never know what a muskie’s going to do or how you’ll have to play one; so the more experience you get now, the better you’ll be, his father had said, as if he hadn’t heard a word.

So for as long as he could remember, he’d gone out in the boat with food for long hours, the longer as he got older. When he was much younger he’d sit a lot, trolling a line out behind, or watching a red-and-white bobber that floated monotonously unmoving above some half-hidden weeds, mosquitoes humming about his head through half the summer, with the occasional sting of a deerfly to add variety. August and fall were better, except for those autumns when the cold came early, and rain with it.

As he got older he’d begun casting the treble-hooked baits in and out for hours. Trying to have them splash down just short of some particular spot then watching for them to reappear making wiggling darts, or sparkling with gurgling noises, as he reeled them back in.

For his were the days, in the early 1960s, of the level-wind reel that had a sensitive guide that was willing to spread your line evenly back and forth over the spool as you reeled in or tossed out, but it required that the braking pressure of your thumb on the spinning spool coordinated smoothly with every swing of the rod so as to not give too much or too little launch for the distance aimed at, or you’d spend your time disentangling tight cats-cradle snarls. And if a fish struck, an instant’s wrong thumb pressure or lift of the rod meant a too-taut line broken, or a too-loose bait shaken free.

Nine times growing up--twice in one year, blanks in others--he had seen muskies explode completely out of the water in front of him, hooked