Shooting Fish In A Barrel

Roy crosses the road and points to the south, where the marsh extends in a seemingly endless sea of dried grass, cattails and winter-bleached tree trunks. "That was my world when I was a kid," he says. "I could get out there and stay forever, away from the cows and the chores and the real work—if my daddy would've let me."

We hike along the highway's shoulder, watching the edge of both marsh and lake for the telltale swirls and splashes of "playing"—i.e., mating—pike. "When I got out of the Navy in the early '60s, my dad was dying," Roy says. "I came up the front steps and he was sitting by the window, watching the marsh. 'John,' he said, 'they're playing down there. Get the gun.' I took the rifle and went down to the water—still in my dress blues, I remember—and shot a big pike. It made Dad happy."

That evening, while Roy is out catching a mess of horned pout with rod and reel, another Champlain native scouts the shallows for playing pickerel. Clark, who with his wife, Dorice, owns a fishing lodge on North Hero Island, gave up pickerel shooting long ago. "Old-timers used to think of pickerel and northerns as cull fish," he says. "Called them trash, said they killed more valuable fish like trout and bass and walleyes, and besides, they were too easy to catch, no fight in 'em. Well, darn it, every fish eats other fish, and a pickerel or northern on the right tackle is as sporty as darn near anything. And good eating, too.

"But the state's fish and wildlife laws go along with the old-timers. At Champlain, there's no closed fishing season on any of the pike family—not even muskellunge. But you can only take one muskie a day, and he has to be at least 30 inches. With chain pickerel and northerns, you can take up to 10 a day of any size."

Clark also learned to love pickerel shooting as a kid. "It was the first chance you got to get out on the marsh," he says. "Sure cure for cabin fever. You'd see the marsh coming back to life—spring migrants moving in, redwing blackbirds, herons, grackles, warblers, the first ospreys. And the pickerel playing. More often than not, I'd set the gun aside and just watch them chasing each other through the shallows. Sometimes they'd come right up to your feet."

We are prowling the edge of the marsh, sometimes ankle-deep in dark, icy water as Clark reminisces. Suddenly a big fish swirls near his feet, and the vee of its wake shoots out toward the cripple bushes that surround a big beaver lodge. "Wow," says Charlie, his eyes alight. "That's just what I mean!"

Before darkness chases us out of the marsh, we see at least half a dozen other big pike splashing in the shallows of this boggy point. Though he hasn't shot a pike in probably 20 years, Clark is caught by a remembered thrill of childhood. "We should have brought a gun," he says. "Why didn't we bring a gun? We could have had two or three of those big ones for sure!"

The following evening we're back in the marsh. Roy has joined us, along with Tourville, the road commissioner of South Hero for the past 25 years. Junior is a quiet, smiling man with an easy grace of movement that both belies his age and identifies a lifetime of experience in hunting and fishing.

There are other gunners in the marsh this evening, as ragged volleys of shots announce from time to time. At one point a loud, big-bore bang is followed by nine pops from a smaller-caliber piece, probably a .22 pistol. "Some guy finishing off the fish that went belly-up after his first shot," explains Clark. Just to the south of us, not more than a hundred yards, someone else is shooting—five times over the next hour. Roy comes on him in a tree-stand at the water's edge. He's got five pike, none of them huge, but all respectable fish. He's finished for the day and relinquishes his stand to Roy. But as the pike hunter starts to climb down, he slips and falls a good 10 feet, flat on his back against a beaver-chewed tree root. Roy helps him to his feet and the man, embarrassed, makes his way painfully from the marsh with his fish flopping over his back. "He'll be hurtin' good, come morning," says Roy. The hazards of pike shooting.

There are pike playing in the marsh weeds all around us, but none big enough to warrant a shot. Every time the others in the marsh shoot—some a good quarter of a mile away—shoals of minnows leap from the surface in instant synchrony with the distant bullet's impact, and the fish playing near us go quiet for 10 minutes or more. Finally, Tourville gets a shot.