Old Plymouth Trails

by Winthrop Packard

The fishermen add a touch of picturesque geniality, of excitement even to the pond, being as occasional in its daily life as the crossing of a deer or an otter or the circling of an osprey in summer. Any one of these causes a momentary stir, a local disturbance down in the depths among the regular occupants of the place, but after all it is but a momentary and local one, and the great business of the place goes on just the same near by the spots where the hand of the grim reaper is busy removing prominent citizens. For in my pond the pickerel are surely the prominent citizens, the aristocracy, for they are the largest and strongest and they live directly off their fellow fishes, which constitutes an aristocracy in any community. Minnows, perch, bream and mullet alike are busy assimilating vegetable matter, mussels, worms, insects and small crustacae, merely to form themselves either directly or in their children ultimately into titbits for the nourishing of pickerel. All the pond world knows that and its denizens tremble in the presence of these great-jawed, hook-toothed gobblers of small fry; and that constitutes a proletariat the world over.

Pickerel from an Old Colony Pond

In fishing time the loneliness of the empty levels of the ice is broken at dawn by the coming of the crows, especially if there have been fishermen the day before. Remnants of the fishermen's noon meal are quite likely to be scattered about the spot where they had their fire, and always the minnows which they took from the hooks at leaving are there, frozen upon the frozen surface. It seems a cold breakfast to us fire-worshipping mortals, but the crows take it eagerly. Often, too, before it is fairly swallowed fishermen appear, whereupon the crows flap silently but swiftly away. One knows by this action that the fishermen are just men, after all, and not a woodland variety of Peter Pan, though they merely bob up on the pond margin, or perhaps well out on the ice, loaded with their traps and tools. One never sees them coming through the wood or down the street, or getting off trolley cars or out of carryalls, these fishermen, they just bob up, which would seem to prove a mystic origin; though of course they are just folks and somebody knows them, as I have said.

Soon the air resounds with the xylophone music of their chopping, the solid surf ace vibrating beneath the blows of the axe and giving forth a clear tintinnabulation which is most delightful to the ear. It is not all xylophonic, but there is in it, too, the clink of musical glasses and also a certain weirdness, a goblin withal that seems to belong with the mystery surrounding the origin of pickerel fishermen. It is a sound to delight the ear and linger pleasantly in the memory like the sleigh-bell tinkling of ice crystals in a frozen wood. Stirred by this, or perhaps by the beat of the risen sun on its surface, the pond itself begins to caper a bit, musically, roaring in basso profundo a morning song of its own. The result is grotesque in the extreme. I once heard a big-chested man sing "Rocked in the Cradle of the Deep," while his accompanist jigged out an accompaniment on the highest octave to be found on the keyboard of the piano. The pond and the fishermen seem to be doing something like this.

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To such quaint music the traps are set, bits of lath standing on the edge of the hole and bearing attached to the line a red flannel flag which the biting fish will strike and carry into the depths with him when he goes off to swallow the bait. The fishermen understand well the ways of the aristocrat pickerel when he swallows a proletariat minnow. No lordly capitalist ever took in a plebeian inventor with more grace-and finality. Often the flag just drops from the support and lies on the surface of the water while the two get acquainted. The pickerel has the minnow, but his grip is not what he wants. He is particular about the way he swallows a little one, as if he feared some impending Sherman act. So, having got his fish, he waits to turn him so that the victim may head down and seem to go of his own volition into the interior department. Not until then does he run out the rest of the line. If the attorney general fisherman attempts to take him before that he simply lets go the bait and swims off, secure in his immunity bath. After he has started to really go away with his prize a steady pull is quite sure to result in his capture.

Two varieties of pickerel commonly inhabit our ponds. One, technically known as Esox reticulatus, is the Eastern pickerel, known sometimes as green pike or jack, but more often as pond pickerel. He is a big green fish, a golden lustre on his reticulated sides and in colonial times he was known as chain pickerel from this dark linking on his golden green surface. I do not hear the name now and I doubt if it is much, if any, used. The pond pickerel waxes fat on minnows and other small fry and in the course of a long life grows to be two feet or more in length and specimens have been caught weighing seven pounds, perhaps more. It is rather interesting to learn from the fishermen that certain ponds are apt to contain pickerel of a certain size, in the main, as if the conditions of food supply and the freshness of the water or the amount of sunshine were only sufficient to bring the most of them to a definite period of maturity, where they stopped. But this is, of course, only a general rule, with many exceptions. One of these is the big fish. Every pond contains him and every pickerel fisherman who aspires to dignity in his class has hooked this big fellow and lost, him and is able to tell you circumstantially at much length just how. Most of them know the exact location in each pond where he lurks and are confident that this winter they will win in the encounter with him to which they confidently look forward. Usually the fisherman hauls this monster up to the hole in the ice but is unable to get him through because the hole is too small. Tales like this, heard now and then about the fire while we watch the traps, give assurance that the fishermen are really very human after all and not of the Peter Pan species.

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