LITTLE OTTER SLIDE

We only brought one lure with us and I lost it to driftwood on my first cast. We had been canoeing and portaging through the backcountry of Algonquin Provincial Park for five days now, the last two of which had been spent happily idling on our lonely island on Little Otter Slide Lake.

“How are we going to get a fish now?” Hothslogger grumbled from where he lay, his bare chest burning in the hot August sun. All of our fresh provisions had been exhausted and we were both getting sick of oatmeal bars and instant noodles.

“I have hooks,” I said.

“What about bait?”

“Maybe they’d take a raisin. We have a few left.”

“No. I want them.”

“Do you want to help me dig for worms?”

“No.”

I fished a small hook out of the little tackle box in my rucksack, tied it to the line with a clinch knot, and clamped on an orange floater. I left the rod by the water and wandered around our campsite, lifting rocks and shaking trees for insects. Nothing.

I went back and sat with my feet in the cool water, looking out over the lake to the other shore; the tall pines shooting up like green arrows from the mixed deciduous forest; the sun high in a pale cloudless sky, glittering off the lake. I saw the flashing silver of a fish and cursed myself for losing the six dollar spinner. I watched closely for it to come back and then, behind the surface glare, I saw a thin black ribbon weaving sideways towards me. I moved and it stopped, attaching itself to the half-submerged boulder I sat on. When I stayed still, it began tentatively tiptoeing around the rock by rooting one end of its body, stretching to its full six centimeters, and then affixing itself with the free end, letting go of the other, and repeating the process. When it got close, it made a mad dash for my feet which I lurched out of the water just in time.

“Ugh!” I groaned, “A leech!”

“That’s disgusting,” Hothslogger said. “They’re goddamn bloodsucking hermaphrodites.”

With my feet gone, the leech reattached its big sucker mouth to the boulder, curled its body into a knot, and wagged its thin posterior at me. Then I had an idea.

I put my left hand in the water and the leech greedily made its way towards my flesh. After days of paddling, hard calluses had replaced the blisters on my hands and that, combined with the anesthetic the leech released, meant that I could not feel it when it latched onto my palm with its hundreds of tiny teeth. Quickly, I pulled my hand out, picked up the fishing hook with the other, and pierced the leech: the hook stretching its skin a centimeter along the blade before puncturing its resilient slimy brown mottled flesh. Instantly, it let go, leaving a small, round trickling sore—nothing compared to the mixture of yellowish-white guts and my own blood that came oozing out of its pale beige underbelly. I hooked its body again and again, my fingers slipping on its mucous-coated skin as it twisted and writhed in agony.

I picked up the rod, released the bail of the old spinning reel, peeled out a meter of line, and dropped the bait into a clearing amidst the weeds and rotting logs of the shallow water.

Within a second, I felt the sharp tug of a hit. I let the fish run with the line and then yanked back on the rod—but a little too hard—and the fish came flying out of the water, off the hook, landing with a wet thud on Hothslogger’s chest.

“Nice move,” he said, laughing. “Can we eat it?”

“Sure.”

“What kind of fish is it?”

I looked at its wide jaws, deep olive back, dark horizontal stripe, and white fleshy belly.

“I think it’s a small largemouth bass.”

“Wouldn’t that make it a smallmouth bass?”

Copyright © 2010 by Daniel Shawn Otis