The northern pike is predation in its most distilled form. It is the perfect weapon—cannon and cannonball, wick and flame, all in a single package, ready to detonate on anything swimming by: a duckling, a bullfrog, a Murdich minnow stripped through the gloom of a boreal spring day. To understand the pike is to understand the wild ferocity that lives in all fish. In the pike, it just lives brighter.
I’ve been chasing pike a long time, in spirit and in flesh. The pike of my earliest years were figments, fragments and phantoms. They broke the stillness of mornings in the fish stories my uncle told, they ruled the bars of middle Wisconsin, where I’d stand on cracked vinyl barstools to count the teeth on head mounts. Instead of doing schoolwork I read Indigenous stories about the “Devil Fish” of the Yukon that swallowed canoes whole; about the ancient peoples of Lake Ancylus—now the Baltic Sea—who built fires on the bows of their boats and poled in the dark, looking to spear a giant; about the Victorian era British gamblers who tied a live frog to a duck’s foot, and when a pike ate, placed bets on either the duck’s or the pike’s survival.
The smart money was always on the pike.
My in-the-flesh pike education began when I was six years old. I had raced down to the dock to make the first cast of the day, my younger brother waddling far behind with a tackle box, my father still drinking coffee in the kitchen. There below me in the clear water I saw a great, hulking fish resting in the shadows of a johnboat, mouthing a perch like a cigar.
The perch was still alive.
I ran off the pier and threw my rod in the bushes. When my father arrived I made no mention of the beast, fearing he might tell me to cast to it. I spent that day casting my bobber right onto the beach.
It took another year or two before I was brave enough to catch a pike. And then I became obsessed. My brother and I lived to drag silver spoons tipped with pork rinds through the weeds, waiting for eruptions in the lily pads. We’d churn spinnerbaits through coontail, pining to get slashed. The pike’s ambush never disappointed. They sailed over the johnboat chasing our poppers out of the water. They t-boned our bass as we fought them. They were, by several orders of magnitude, the wildest things around.