Shooting Fish In A Barrel

•Even when they don't kill their quarry, pike shooters slogging the early spring marshes disrupt the ecosystem at its most vulnerable period. "Silt gets kicked up, eggs get trampled. So you're killing the young fish as well as the adults," says Jon Anderson, a state Fish and Wildlife biologist for the Champlain district. "But our main concern is that the shooters are in the ideal spawning areas. When people are there, the fish won't come and so they spawn in deeper water. That means a much lower survival rate for the young."

•Human activity and gunfire in the wetlands interrupt the mating and nesting of the ducks, geese, shorebirds and songbirds that throng Champlain's shallows each spring.

•Many concerned outdoorsmen worry that the image of gun-toting men blasting away at fish at near-point-blank range only adds ammunition to anti-hunting forces.

Yet for all their logic and persuasiveness, the arguments cut little ice with most native Vermonters. There's a saying in the Green Mountain State: "If you want a Vermonter to do something, just tell him he can't." Vermonters resent outside interference, even from their own state capital. "If that marsh out there were a trout stream," says Roy, "I'd have grown up a fly-fisherman. But it is a marsh, and it's all we had. So I grew up trapping muskrats, hunting ducks, fishing horned pout...and shooting pike. It's what we do here."

Roy, 49, is a second-generation dairyman whose farm is located on South Hero Island in Lake Champlain. He's also a selectman and a committee member of the Farmers Home Administration Board for the town of Essex Junction, and he has been elected chairman of the Agricultural Stabilization Conservation Committee for Grand Isle County. He once served briefly on the Vermont Fish and Game Board. He also is, as we have seen, a staunch defender of pike shooting.

"If the state hadn't made such a big deal out of this," Roy says of the pike-shooting flap, "it would probably have died of its own accord. I reckon there's only about 100 pickerel shooters on all of Champlain. At least that's all there were until the whole thing started getting all this publicity."

He places a sheaf of old newspaper and magazine clippings on the kitchen table in his farmhouse, LIKE SHOOTING FISH IN A BARREL reads a headline in the Seattle Times. THEY STILL SHOOT FISHES, DON'T THEY? asks Yankee magazine. "This one's my favorite, though," Roy says with a chuckle. He produces a front-page story from a yellowing edition of the Montgomery (Ala.) Advertiser showing him in overalls, pipe clenched between his teeth, knee-deep in a marsh with a carbine in his hands. Atop the picture runs a headline: ARGENTINE REBELS SURRENDER. But then you see that the banner goes with another story, the photo with the headline VERMONT OFFICIALS OUT TO END FISH SHOOTING. Inadvertently, the layout flub underscores the sense of siege and alienation many Vermonters feel when confronting the late-20th century.

As Roy replaces the clippings, a gunshot explodes from the edge of the nearby marsh. He yanks back the kitchen curtains and peers out. "Damn!" he says. "They just shot and drove away. Not local kids—I don't recognize the car. Let's go down and have a look-see."

Near the mouth of a culvert, a small northern pike—perhaps 15 inches, a "hammer-handle"—twitches in the water. It rights itself, fins weakly away, then goes belly-up.

"Swim bladder's busted," Roy says, shaking his head angrily. "Damn them. It almost makes you turn against it."