Lake Trout

One honeymoon, I went over the border into Canada to camp and fish near Kenora on a lake called Big Silver. I was afraid to walk on the slab of ice covered with thin layer of granular snow, much less sleep on it. My husband set up our tent, with its lining, and poked the stovepipe through the metal collar of the canvas roof, and lit a fire. Late at night, wearing a cap, warm inside the down bags, I woke to strange noises. The ice beneath us was groaning, thundering, then silent only to be followed by a sharp retort. Like furniture being moved, only on a larger scale. It was an impossible sound, we were miles from anywhere, suspended on the middle of the lake, close to a small outcropping of rock, not much of an island.

"Listen," I said to him, as I shook him out of sleep. It sounded rather supernatural. He had shown me a wolf kill on our way to this spot, the hoof and ankle remains of a deer, a bloody splotch upon the brilliant surface, bits of fur.

"It's making ice."

I lay awake after he turned over and went back to sleep. I listened to the darkness. We didn't make a big deal out of things in that marriage that had started out as an affair with a married man. We were both cynics, avoiding anything smacking of the romantic. We didn't delude ourselves or promise each other things nor speak out loud any endearments. We made jokes instead. This was a sort of no-fly-zone of love: nothing ventured, nothing shot down. We were ironic instead, living together in a sort of rapprochement in the war between the sexes--walking backward in the field of love. Besides, we only married after living together for some years, after his divorce. When we found ourselves at the altar we were almost embarrassed, avoiding a ceremony of friends and family in favor of the anonymity of a courthouse in the next county, with witnesses we had never seen before and would never see again.

The next day on the ice was incredibly cold, with a brilliant sun. with an augur, he cut through the slab of ice almost three feet thick making a hole. The lake water splashed upward clear from the hole as he cleaned out the ice. About twenty feet away, he made one for me as well. He stood in front of his with a small fishing reel, slowing jigging for long periods of time. I was dressed in so many layers, hot and prickly around my shoulders, and could not bend my arms easily. Droplets of moisture around my eyes froze my lashes together.

We had been making jokes about the cold, that it got to you finally and stopped you from thinking. All of our food was frozen solid, cooking it took a long time because it had to thaw first. The bread was frozen. The ketchup and mustard was frozen. I mostly fed myself potato chips.

Then a trout hit on his line and he jerked up the fishing rod, running back ten feet. He fought as hard as he could to bring it in and finally rose out of the darkness into the hole. The roof of its mouth was ridged. It seemed prehistoric, something architectural as if we'd pulled it out of some ancestral past. My husband picked up his gaffe hook and stabbed its flesh to pull it out. It was very large, dark gray and silver and white like the ice that it came through.

"Nice fish," he said, breathlessly, kicking a bit of snow over it before he went back to stand at the hole gain, everything once again flat and uneventful. Astounded, I watched the eye of the fish slowly haze over as it froze.

When we left Kenora with our limit of fish, we folded up the gear and packed it carefully on the sled behind the snowmobile and then hitched up a second sled for me. I sat down, he started the machine and we began the trip back to shore. He drove slowly and I watched the landscape, the random islands with their ragged pines and the granite outcroppings. He slowed down a bit more for an ice ridge on our path and it was on that ridge that my sled accidentally broke from the sled in front. He didn't notice and continued as I watched him with consternation as his figure grew smaller and the noise of the snow machine receded, until I could see nothing. I got off the sled and picked up the pin that had fallen out of the coupling. I walked around, worried about the wolves. After a long time, I heard the machine again, and then saw him just like a single letter on empty white page, and then he was back, the engine loud and roaring, spewing exhaust. He was laughing, saying that when he looked back and didn't see the sled, he couldn't remember exactly if I'd come along on this trip or not. It was so cold. But he thought he better come back and check, just to be sure.

"Right," I said. "You wouldn't forget your fish."

Nothing turned out well, except the photographs. If I open the album, I can see him, the last husband, in that clear pristine sky, holding the catch. We fried the fish and ate it. But love was like a bone from its skeleton, caught in our throat.