Bog Myrtle & Peat

At first I thought he might’ve been weed, and I didn’t want to get my hopes up. But as I drew my line in closer to the bank, he rose in a fury of thrashing. I had my pike at last, but every bend of the rod threatened to shed him back into the darkened water. The moment hung undecided; the shape came in and then pounded away again, leaving snapshots of flung spray, rolled eyes and the sickening bend of his belly. My line hummed and winnowed between the lily-pads as he rushed out from the bank – and all the while, problems began to crowd around me; my net was too small, my footing was falling away and if he pulled much harder then surely the line would be broken.

But in a sudden lunge more familiar to the mackerel man, I turned him at a vulnerable moment and hauled him onto the moss at my feet. More by accident than design, I had him. I had been waiting for this, but the moment was bigger and more sickening that I could’ve imagined. 

Afterwards, my photographs showed a plain, apologetic fish with a shocked expression and a slab of a body like a board. Reduced to a measurement, I can tell you that he was twenty seven point five inches long – and via a helpful chart, I can use that number to surmise that he weighed about five pounds. But these photographs and measurements are nothing beside the shocking reality of my pike as he flapped and fumed in the moss at my feet. In person, he was oily and raucous; dead-eyed and loud as a bear in his silence. There never was a fish like mine, and yet the most incredible thing is that more experienced fisherman would call him tiny. I am happy to believe that there are bigger pike in the world, but I don’t need them.

On a more pragmatic tack, I had also been informed that it’s hard to remove the hook from a pike’s mouth. It’s not a problem that I’ve ever had to deal with, but I gather that all the teeth point inwards and there’s no reverse gear. Most fishermen use long-nosed forceps to recover their hooks, but of course I had forgotten that piece of advice. I never gave it a second’s thought until the moment came to need them. If I couldn’t extract the hook, I’d have to kill the fish – and while I have sometimes played with the idea of eating or stuffing a pike, I would prefer to decide when that happens. It’s no small thing to kill any animal, and a considerable downgrade from choosing to kill a pike to realising that you have no choice. 

He’d come to a lure called a Flying C – a red rubber squid with a silver coin which flickers as it moves through the water. The first job was to see how deeply he’d taken it – but even the most distant suggestion of opening his mouth turned my stomach. His bottom jaw undershot his beak by an inch, giving his mouth a brutal, thuggish scowl. I knew that I should be careful, but there was something oddly soft and alluring in the outside ledge of his mottled jaw. It appeared to be smooth and tactile as a porcelain – but then he moved and showed me a stockade of white teeth as fine and jagged as blackthorn stegs. They seemed terrible, but as my pike gaped and gnashed his gums together, I was even more alarmed by the almost invisible furze of smaller teeth which lay in ranks and panels around his tongue and his cheeks. Even at a glance, these resembled a hybrid of splintered glass and burdocks; like a cat’s tongue, every single hook was rasping backwards into the throat from which no escape could be imagined. Like Kipling’s dingo, the pike grinned at me “like a coal scuttle”… and I quailed from him.

With a flash of inspiration, it occurred to me that I could use the handle of my net as a gag. It seemed like it would be worth a shot, so I gently levered his mouth open and was hugely relieved to find my hook stuck only lightly on the roof of his mouth. Even as I pushed, the hook came loose and then caught itself again on his tongue. But despite working as carefully as I could, the tip of one finger brushed lightly against those rough, serrated teeth. I hardly even felt the graze, but there was suddenly blood dripping into his mouth and my skin pilled like a snag in polyester. The hook came out without any further fuss, but the shifting bone-white interior of a pike’s mouth has stayed with me – it belongs more to the realms of a Heironymus Bosch painting than a limpid peatland stream in the heart of a Galloway moor. 

We were similarly spent by the experience. I lowered him back into the water and held him upright by the tail for five minutes to reorient himself in the sunset. He gently weaved and stirred the river back through his gills, and words fall short of the shape of that fish as he moved beyond my sight and into deeper water.