Bog Myrtle & Peat

I was frightened of the pike which followed my hook to the shore. He was more than I bargained for, and the windswept, gorgeous summer’s day was darkened when he came. He can’t have been more than two feet long, and at first he was only a shadow – but as my rig came up from the porter-brown water, he turned to sweep himself around the stem of a curled-up lily, flaring his flanks in a sickening, green-gold roll. At that moment, birds stopped singing; the flowers were soured and heads fell from the avens. I swear I was suddenly cold.

His entire mechanism was utterly poised to strike at my hook – and yet some final, indecipherable pressure was lacking. So instead of destroying my line and himself with a raucous detonation, he only watched and came behind. And there was nothing suspicious or strategic in his refusal to strike. He hadn’t been excited by the prospect of a lunge and afterwards thought better of it. He hadn’t thought at all. Whatever I had done to provoke him was enough for exactly this – and no more. 

So instead of lifting my rod, I swirled it round below me in a gentle figure of eight. The hook shone and the pike followed it, curling and coiling himself in turns like the bulge of a green silk scarf. My toes curled in horror at the sneer of his jaw and the lightless inset of his eyes – but I hadn’t caught him, and our meeting was only in passing. With no idea why he’d come this far, I could not see how to make him come further. No extra temptation sprang to mind. I was at a loss, and suddenly aware that catching him wouldn’t have brought the two of us any closer together.

I have tried to show interest in pike as they appeared to Ted Hughes. It hasn’t worked because there’s too much of the man’s own context there. Hughes’ pike are rich and “deep as England”, and of course I love his take on death in the roseate millpond – but it’s hard to shift these creatures bodily north to the bend of heather and the creep of snipe in the overhead sky. Galloway pike are peat-dwellers; bog-monsters with the cheeks and maw of Grendel. They ghost around the cracked-up skulls of crannog piles, sheathed in the myrtle rootstock like dirks. There’s more of the pagan dream in pike as I find them here in the lap of the dank freshwater; a counterargument to the hermit’s island cell and the life of a saint who kept himself a secret and was forgotten. 

Ted Hughes’ pike are something else to me. I file them alongside his crows and his cave birds; not real, but makers of room to think. That’s how I’ve spun my own more northern mythology, but I must confess that I’ve never caught a pike of my own except by tiny accident, and that a thing no longer than a pencil. I did once catch a single glimpse of a dead pike floating belly-up and bending down at either end like a bow. But even that was far away and cold – and I know that the chilling figure which rose to my lure on the loch was tiny beside the catastrophic females which I’ve heard can swallow a cow and founder the boats of unwary men… which is to say that I only know what I’ve been told – or made for myself in the habit of Hughes.

The moment passed on the loch side. The spell was broken, and the pike’s deadly, rapt expression was instantly overcome by cold indifference, just as there can only be heads or tails on the back of your hand. He sank down for the heavy darkness and was gone. That’s when I found that I had not been breathing – and I even jumped when a skylark suddenly sang behind me. But minutes later, I looked nearby and found that he was still there, suspended inexplicably at a diagonal with his head lowered and his tail spread almost to the surface like a napkin. He was lost in empty reflection; sunlight flashed around his body like knives, and nothing could have prepared me for the shocking reality of these creatures. I clutched for the missed mark of my own imagination then, desperate for something to draw my eye from the terrible truth.