Lake Champlain sits between Vermont and New York like a referee, a hundred and twenty miles long and deep enough to keep its own monster legend. In summer it belongs to bass boats and ferry traffic. In October the bass crowd thins out, the water drops into the fifties, and the northern pike that sulked in the deep weeds all August come shallow and mean. Nobody drives up for the pike. People drive up for the leaves, and the pike happen to be underneath them.
I fished a quiet bay on the Vermont side with an old college roommate I will call Marsh, who owns a green canoe older than both of our marriages. A canoe is the wrong boat for pike in every way except one, which is that it gets you to the back of the bay where the lily pads are turning brown and the bigger boats cannot follow. Marsh paddles from the stern and gives advice from there too. He handed me a red and white spoon the size of a soup ladle and a wire leader, and said the leader was not optional. A pike has about seven hundred teeth, and all of them point the wrong way.
The method is simple. You cast to the edge of the dying weeds, let the spoon flutter, and reel it back with a wobble. What nobody tells you is that a pike likes to follow. On my fourth cast a long green shape came in behind the spoon like a tailgater, eight inches back, all the way to the canoe. I stopped reeling. It stopped too. We looked at each other for a full second, and then it sank out of sight without any sign of regret. Marsh said to keep the lure moving next time, in a figure eight beside the boat. I said that sounded made up. He said most of fishing is.
The next follower came twenty minutes later. I swept the rod in a clumsy loop at the gunwale, feeling like a man stirring soup, and the fish ate the spoon three feet from my knee. A pike in shallow water does not run so much as explode. It went under the canoe, which turned us halfway around, then came up thrashing while Marsh shouted directions that contradicted each other. Thirty four inches on the paddle blade, where he keeps a ruler scratched in with a nail. We held it in the water until it kicked off, and it left with the same expression it arrived with.
We landed three more by lunch and had a dozen follows that came to nothing. On the way out a couple with cameras stood on the launch ramp shooting the maples across the bay. The woman asked if the fishing was any good this time of year. Marsh told her it was terrible, and that she should tell everyone.
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