Ed Ahern
It’d been gently raining all day, keeping the dog walkers and other fishermen at home suffering through football game commercials. I had the stream to myself. Fishing was slow, but every so often a little trout would chew on my nymph. As I raised my arm to cast for the some-hundredth time the water upstream.
Fish raced downstream, jostling each other. Trout, panfish, eels jumbled together. They ignored my buggy-looking fly as they swerved past. Something had spooked them so badly that they’d abandoned their lies and were rushing down into a lake they’d have to work hard to swim back out of. Something I felt like I should find out about.
I sloshed my way out of the stream, more fish bumping into me as I did. walked the riverside trail upstream in that bandy-legged gait everyone in waders has. Despite an October coolness, I began to sweat. Nothing now stirred the river, running high from the steady rain.
I had to keep shifting my eyes back and forth between the water and the rough trail. The only sound was a soft gurgling as the current wrapped around rocks. The water was still clear, so it wasn’t a mudslide that had scared off the fish. There hadn’t been a bear sighting near the Mill River in a decade. So, what was it? Something poisoning the water? That would have just killed fish where they lay. And there were no dead floaters drifting downstream. But there was a funny odor. Rusty iron maybe.
After another five minutes I came to the Cascades, the only middling large, deep water on the Mill River. It’s easy fishing and there were usually one or two shore bound bait casters at work. But I was alone.
The surface moved, but no wind blew. The bottom was always over-coated with last year’s blackened leaves that now looked to be roiled up. Across the pool, on a rocky outcrop tackle littered the ground. But no fisherman. I dropped below the pool outlet, waded across the stream, and walked up the steep hill to the outcrop. No fisherman.
And no fishing rod. But there was a creel with dead, undersized trout. My guess was that he’d been using each fish, gutted to release scents, to attract large cannibal trout. It’s illegal, but also effective.
“Hello,” I called out, and felt like an idiot. No one answered. Deep in the pool the rotted leaves swirled. Two guesses. Either he’d gone further up the hill to get cell phone reception, or he’d fallen in along with his pole and was down in the muck. “Hello,” I yelled again. Same silence.
Third option. He’d gotten drunk and wandered off with his rod to take a nap. Unlikely. He’d have nodded off right here so he wouldn’t lose his prime location. I didn’t know that anything was wrong, but I didn’t feel right about just hiking further upriver. I stared into the water. There looked to be a bulge in the leaf mass. I commandeered his twenty-pound test line, a couple of one-ounce sinkers and the biggest bait hooks I could find in his tackle box.
No way my little four weight fly rod would handle the cast, so I coiled spare line in my left hand, spun sinkers and hooks over my head, then launched them out into the pool. Seventeen casts later the hook caught on something. Something heavy. Something that didn’t move, then seems to pull back.
I gradually increased the tension on the fishing line until, just short of the breaking strain on the line, the hook tore free. I hand over handed the line back in and checked it. There was a torn patch of what looked to be a checked flannel shirt. Shit. I muttered.
I trudged further up the hill, took my cell phone out of its waterproof baggie, and called 911.
“911. What’s your Emergency?”
“I can’t be sure, but I think a guy might have drowned in the Mill River at the Cascades.”
We went back and forth for several more minutes while the operator established, I wasn’t a prank call and didn’t sound high.
“Okay, I’ll send a unit. Wait there Mr. Fielding.”
It took a half hour, probably because they had to find someone with the key to the access gate. In that interval, the rain stopped. A cop car and a fire truck showed up together. The fire truck carried a grappling hook and nylon line that they threw out and dredged the muck. They snagged a branch first try, and a body on the next.
Perched on a ledge near the action, I watched them horse the corpse up over a rock facing and onto the outcrop. The man was missing an arm and part of his face. My stomach turned, and I puked up some breakfast that hadn’t gotten far enough down. I recognized him as a poaching regular and told the cops so. Cop one, about forty pounds past beefy, just nodded, then told me to stay where I was, they had questions. It was only then that I realized I was all they had as a suspect.
Fragments of their voices drifted up to me.
“Looks like his arm and face got chewed off. Not cut.”
“No rigor mortis, so recent.”
Cop One went through the guy’s pockets while a firemen resumed casting the grappling hook, maybe hoping for an arm, but nothing more than rotted branches and leaves came out of the pool. Cop two, equally suspicious, took me over to a squad car, had me sit in the back seat, and began asking questions. The ambulance guys took over from Cop one and he switched to going through my fishing vest, then the guy’s tackle box.
“So, you’re Henry Fielding. What were you doing here?” (Duh)
“When did you get here?”
“Did you know Ira Wiskind?”
The first of the fair-weather dog walkers came by and stared at me through the squad car window. I half-expected her to take out her cell phone and start shooting a video for immediate posting on Instagram, but she just gaped and moved on.
Had Ira Wiskind been stabbed or shot, my interrogation would have been a lot longer and more involved, but my faux-enamel teeth were clearly incapable of biting off an arm. After another half hour, they told me not to leave town and let me go. But not before a few more dog walkers had seen and in one case recorded me. I noticed that the iron rust smell had dissipated.
I retrieved my vest and rod and shuffled back down the riverside trail, hitting myself with more questions than the cops had. The river was too small to hold anything huge, so what had done the damage? A bear or a feral dog? But there was no sign of a scuffle on the outcropping, no blood, no animal tracks in the soggy ground. A lethal game trap? Traps captured arms and legs, not sheared them off. My shock wore off, and I dry heaved a couple times, spit and kept walking down. I pushed dead Ira down from top of mind. Let the cops work it out.
The little beach at Lake Mohegan is so friendly to toddlers and young mothers that out of towners sometimes try to smuggle themselves in. November was way past the season lifeguards were on duty, but on a warm day, mothers still brought kids aged in the low single numbers to play in the sand and wet their legs. Including my niece Alison and her son Bobby.
The west to east breeze was pushing little ripples toward the shore. Alison was there with three other mothers she didn’t know, but they set up a share the juice and cookies potlatch on several blankets. She was four paces from the shore where Bobby and four other children were trying to push back ripples, her head turned to answer a question. Bobby’s scream choked and died.
Alison jerked her head around but all she could see was thrashing water moving out into the lake. She also screamed and ran into the water, wading out toward the commotion. The roiling water flattened out just past the warning ropes. Still yelling, she reached the same spot and slipped into a nine-foot drop. Her clothes dragged her down. She breast-stroked her way back into the shallows, got her footing and turned around to look at an empty surface. When she glanced back toward the other mothers, she could see pinkish water where Bobby had been playing.
She refused to wade ashore, sloshing the water with her arms, still calling out his name, until after the cops and firefighters arrived. They waded in and escorted her out of the water, then treated her for shock and hypothermia. Others interviewed the beachgoers and allowed them to leave. One of the cops named Bruce, Alison’s husband, who took an Uber to the lake. After prowling the shore of the sixteen-acre lake, he took Alison home in her car.
The cops ordered up a boat from the marine division and had it run the lake up and down, but nothing surfaced. They also trolled with grappling hooks but snagged nothing. The lake had been a gravel quarry in an earlier life, and there were depths and pockets that no one had explored since it filled with water.
I got the news a little after six pm from a cousin making the calls for Bruce.
“Bobby’s dead? How?”
“According to Bruce, Alison says something grabbed him and towed him under. But Bruce also says the cops calling it an accidental death.”
“Jesus.”
“Yeah.”
“I’m going over to see them.”
“Bruce asks that…”
“I’m coming over.”
“Okay.”
My wife had divorced me, maybe partly because I couldn’t father children, and I doted on my niece’s boy. Alison had let me share in her son, and as often as I could I read to him. And now he was gone. My chest had tightened. I was shocked that my image of him was fuzzy, a generic chubby toddler, and I dug out a picture of the two of us.
I stopped by their house about eight thirty that night. Alison had been hysterical and was doped up. Bruce was in that taciturn shock that men have when they’ve unlearned how to cry. I didn’t stay long, just doled out useless and unheeded sympathy. Their empty faces accused me. I went back to my empty house to think.
Before Lake Mohegan had become a deep gravel pit it had been meadows with a lot of spring fed water so clean it was advertised as ‘the most delightful of all table waters.’ Those springs still fed the lake, providing cold water refuge for the larger fish and crannies to hide in. I wondered if Bobby and the poacher were prey.
But for what? No way a brown or rainbow trout would get big enough to rip off an arm or drown a child. But a lake trout? The water was cold enough to sustain it. The biggest lake trout ever recorded was about a hundred pounds, and sixty to eighty pounders were verified. Lake trout spawned in fall. Had a monster fish thrashed its way upstream looking for sex and settled for an arm? And developed a taste for humans?
Maybe.
The cops would probably continue to patrol the lake for at least another week, and the lake would ice over in late December. My window to do something on my own was maybe three weeks. But what? I wanted to kill this thing, but wasn’t even sure it existed and if so, didn’t know what it was.
The access gate for parking at the upper end of the lake closed at dusk, and someone patrolled the open parking lot at the lower end. But after dark I could park up a dead-end trail and walk down to the lake without being discovered. And big trout were most often nocturnal.
Blind casting into the dark water was a stupid idea. The lake was too big to rely on chance. I needed to get its attention. It would hunt where the humans were, which meant it would cruise up and down along the shore trying to sense movement. An idea oozed up. I didn’t like it, but it was the only one I had.
Starting November 23rd, I spent three hours a night wading in the lake near the mouth of the Mill River. To counter hypothermia, I had wool and Lycra on my legs under the steel shanked neoprene waders. I’d dug my old bait caster out of the cellar, re-spooled it with a fifty-pound test line, and rigged it with a large saltwater float and a suspended chunk of trout. While still on shore I cast out the bait and set the rod into a heavy-duty cradle. But that was just the trailer. The feature attraction was me.
I waded out noisily into the lake, and every several seconds shifted my stance to create wavelets and vibrations. I also pricked three fingertips on my left hand and put my hand into the water so the blood could dissipate. My odds weren’t good. If the thing had fed recently, it could be dormant for a week, maybe even two in this cold water. I had to hope it was hungry.
Four sessions passed in searing boredom. I fed my focus and resolve with hate and, deep down, curiosity. The cold water and chill nights were taking a toll, and I as old as I was, doubted I could last much longer as bait. Then, on the fifth night, there was a heavy swirl about thirty yards down the shore from me. I stifled my urge to jump around to face the presence. Violent movement might spook it. I gently edged sideways about sixty degrees, still moving my fingertips in the water. My blood pressure and pulse rate had soared, but I tried to keep my mind from crashing into panic. Softly, softly, I thought. Come and get it.
I was standing in three feet of water and saw and felt nothing until something grabbed my left ankle and yanked me under the surface. The pain wiped out thought for a second, and then I realized I was being yanked out into deeper water. And then I jerked to a stop. The rope that I’d tied to a tree and under my armpits held, but I thought whatever it was would tear off my foot. I couldn’t get my good leg under me, but while underwater reached behind my back and pulled a makeshift stabbing spear from the waders. .
I couldn’t see and was being violently shaken along the stony bottom. But I knew the direction the yanks were coming from and began stabbing, trying to miss my foot. Maybe two out of three of the jabs connected with something. The water clouded, with its blood, or mine, or both.
Just when I thought I would have to inhale water it released me and thrashed by my face. Its eye, bigger than mine, seemed full of hate and hunger and cunning. And then it was gone. I braced the javelin on the bottom and on one leg lurched up through the surface. Air was my only thought and only after several breaths, I tasted air that reeked of rusty iron.
I had to get out of the water or freeze to death, and despite the agony stumped my way onto shore. The car was a half mile away, and this end of the lake was remote from any houses. I had to get treatment or be found on the trail the next morning. Luckily the combined shock and hypothermia lessened the pain a bit, but I still moaned and screamed with every step.
I got in the car, still in my waders, and drove ten minutes to an ER, where I passed out. When I came back to my left foot and ankle was in metal bracing and postop bandages. Once the drugs wore off enough for the doctors and cops to ask questions, I had thought hard about what to say and had my story ready. No one would believe in a monster fish like thing, so I said that I’d caught my foot in a muskrat trap and fallen in.
There was limited sympathy for a stupidity like night fishing alone, and people quickly forgot about the incident unless they saw me limping along with my cane. I never told Alison. Better to let her cope with a mystery than an abomination. But I relive the fight every time my leg aches, vividly recalling that huge eye, and the legs I thought I’d seen churning. Whatever it was, there have so far been no other incidents at the Mill River or Lake Mohegan. I don’t fish it anymore.