The Big Six: A Novel

  “Will it be an old pike after him?” said Bill.

  “Fare to be,” said Joe. “See if that bob again.”

  For some minutes they stood silent in the cockpit, looking away downstream at the two little floats and the big one rippling the water a yard or two out from the reeds. Joe and Bill soon tired of that.

  “Let’s scout along the rond,” said Bill.

  “Come on,” said Joe. “He say to keep anybody off.”

  “Float bobbed again,” said Pete.

  The other two, who were just going to jump ashore, thought better of it. The floats certainly did look as if something might be going to happen.

  “What do we do if an old pike take him under?” said Bill.

  “Yell like billyo,” said Joe. “Nothing else we can do.” He stopped short. “He’ll have a horn, being a motor cruiser. Here you are. Press that button and it’ll wake the dead.”

  “That’s the starter,” said Bill.

  “It might be,” said Joe. “Well, he’s bound to have a foghorn. You keep your eye on them floats, Pete.”

  Doubtfully, he opened the cabin door that the fisherman had shut to keep the mist out of the cabin. He saw the glow in the neat enamelled stove. He saw a comfortable bunk, not yet made up after the night, and breakfast things ready on the table. Then he saw what he wanted. There it hung, just inside the door, so as to be within easy reach of the steersman, a smallish brass foghorn. Joe took it from its hook and put it to his mouth.

  “Don’t you do that,” said Bill anxiously. “He’ll think something’s up.”

  Joe blew gently into the horn. Nothing happened. He blew a little harder and a sudden “yawp” started them all.

  “Float’s bobbed,” said Pete.

  “Don’t jump like that,” said Joe. “Look at the wave you make.” He put the horn carefully back on its hook and closed the cabin door.

  For some minutes he stood still, looking now at the floats and now upstream along the reedy bank, half expecting to see the fisherman coming on the run. But the floats did not stir again. It was as if they had gone to sleep. And the fisherman did not come. Joe decided that it was all right. It had sounded pretty loud in the cockpit but, after all, it had been the very shortest of “yawps”.

  “Who’s coming scouting?” he said at last.

  “I’m coming,” said Bill.

  They stepped ashore as quietly as they could.

  Pete, his eyes still on the distant floats, said, “I’m coming too.”

  “Come on then,” said Joe.

  Pete had one more look. Was that float stirring? No. The others were already moving off along the rond. Pete had another last look at the floats and joined them.

  “Knives in your teeth,” said Joe.

  “We needn’t open them,” said Bill.

  Scout knives are awkward things to hold in the teeth on a cool misty morning and it was as well that these had been well warmed in their owners’ pockets. Stooping low, and muzzled by their knives, the three set off along the bank. The reeds already hid the boat from them when Joe, the leader, stopped short and took his knife from his mouth.

  “Password’s ‘Death and Glory’,” he whispered, and then, startled, “What’s that?”

  A harsh “Krrrrrrrrr”, like the cry of a corncrake, sounded from behind them. Pete’s knife dropped from his teeth. He fumbled for it on the ground. Bill, his knife in his hand, listened, gaping.

  “Krrrrrr … Krrrrrrrrrr … Krrrrrrrrrr….”

  “Out of the way, Pete,” shouted Joe. “Look out, Bill. It’s that reel…. It’s a pike….” He rushed back the way they had come, followed by the others.

  “Krrrrrrrr … Krrrrrr … Krrrrrrrrrrr….”

  The rod was jerking. The reel spun … stopped … and spun again.

  “Krrrrrrrrrr … Krrrrrrrrr….”

  The rod straightened. The reel stopped spinning, as Joe climbed aboard.

  “Quiet,” he whispered as the others dropped into the cockpit beside him.

  “Floats have gone,” said Peter.

  “All three of ’em,” said Bill.

  “He’s off with the lot,” said Joe.

  “Look where the line is,” said Pete.

  The line no longer stretched straight down the river. It disappeared into the water a little above the Cachalot and about half way across. There could be no doubt that a pike had taken the bait, gone downstream pulling at the rod and had then turned and swum up.

  “He’s weeded it,” said Joe. “Weeded it and gone.”

  “No, he ain’t,” said Pete. “Line’s moving.”

  The line, though still slack, was pointing further and further upstream.

  “He’s still on,” said Bill.

  “There’s a pilot,” cried Pete.

  One of the small pilot floats showed well above the Cachalot, moving slowly along the surface of the water. Another showed ahead of it. The big white-topped pike float came to the surface.

  “He’s thrown it out,” groaned Joe.

  “We ought to have struck him,” said Pete.

  “Better wind in, I reckon,” said Joe.

  And then, suddenly, the floats dived again, the line pulled taut, the reel screamed and Joe, grabbing the line and rod together as the rod jerked, struck with all his might.

  THE BIG FISH

  The rod bent nearly double. The top of it slammed down into the water. The line raced out, cutting Joe’s fingers.

  “He’s on,” shouted Joe, getting the point of the rod up. “He’s on. Hi! … Hey! … Let go with that foghorn, somebody. Go on. Quick…. Keep at it Hey!”

  Bill had the cabin door open in a moment, seized the horn, blew and kept on blowing.

  “Gee whizz, he is a big ’un,” said Joe, hanging on to the bent rod, and bruising his fingers on the handles of the spinning reel.

  “Wind in,” said Pete. “He’ll have all the line out if you don’t stop him.”

  “Keep on with that horn,” panted Joe. “No. Stop it. No good. He’s gone after all.”

  “Wind in,” said Pete.

  The line had gone suddenly slack. Joe, finding it very difficult to hold the heavy rod and wind in at the same time, rested the rod on the cockpit coaming. He wound and wound And still the line was slack and came in as if there was nothing on the end of it.

  “Shut up,” said Joe. “No good hooting now…. We lost him…. And that was a big old pike too.”

  “There’s a float,” cried Pete. “There…. Under water…. It’s moving. Coming downstream. Wind in…. Wind in…. He’s still on if he ain’t broke the line.”

  Joe wound and wound. The curve of the line slowly straightened. It was cutting the water almost opposite the Cachalot. Suddenly the rod dipped, the reel screamed, and the spinning handles nearly broke Joe’s fingers. He let them spin and held the rod up.

  “Give him the horn again, Bill. He’s still on. Up on the cabin-top, Pete, and see if he’s coming. Hey! Hey!… Hey!”

  Twenty yards down the river it was as if there had been an explosion under water. Just for a moment they saw an enormous head, a broad dark back and a wide threshing tail, as the big fish broke the surface and dived again.

  Bill was blowing the horn. Joe, holding up the rod and feeling the heavy tugs of the fish, was shouting at the top of his voice. But still there was no sign of the owner of the Cachalot. The big fish turned and came upstream again. Joe, desperately winding in, saw the line cutting the water only a few yards from the boat. Again the pike rushed away upstream. The reel screamed. Joe tried to brake it with his thumb and nearly had the skin taken off.

  “Hang on to him,” said Pete.

  “Ain’t I?” panted Joe. “Why don’t that chap come. Hey! Hey! Hey!”

  The reel stopped spinning. Joe began winding in again, getting a few yards, and then having to get his fingers out of the way of the spinning handles when the pike made another rush. And then again the great fish came downstream, this time deep in the water, so that they
did not see the floats as he passed. The line tautened again. There was another sudden, long rush, on and on, as if the pike were making for Yarmouth. It stopped. The floats showed on the surface far downstream opposite a big clump of reeds, in the place where they had been lying before the pike had taken the bait. They rested there a moment, bobbed, and came up again close to the reeds.

  “He’s going back to his holt,” shouted Pete. “Stop him! Stop him! There he go….” The floats shot suddenly sideways into the reeds.

  Joe pulled. It was as if he were pulling at a haystack. He wound at the reel till the rod top was on the water. He tried to lift. The line rose, quivering and dripping. Joe let the reel spin to ease it. It was no good. Deep in the reeds the pike lay still and, for the moment, the battle was at an end.

  “Lemme have a go,” said Bill.

  “You can’t shift him,” said Joe. “No good breaking the line. We’ll lose him if you do. Gosh, I wish that chap’d come.”

  Bill tried to wind in, while Joe blew frantically on the horn. Suddenly he stopped. “We can’t let him lie there chewing and chewing till he throw the hooks. We got to get him out of that. Where’s Pete?”

  From behind the reeds, far downstream, came Pete’s voice. “Where is he? This is the place?”

  The tops of the reeds waved violently.

  “Further down,” shouted Joe. “That’s it. Hang on there whiles I bring the boathook. Here, Bill. No good winding till he come out. You keep blowing. I’ll be back as soon as we shift him.”

  Joe took the long boathook from the Cachalot and ran to join Pete behind the reeds. Just there the reeds were very thick and they could see little of the water. Joe poked this way and that with the boathook. The foghorn from the Cachalot sounded in long gasps. Suddenly there was a clang as it dropped on the floor of the cockpit.

  “He’s moved,” shouted Bill. “He give a tug just now…. No. He’s stopped again.”

  Once more the foghorn sounded its desperate call for help.

  “May be right in under the bank,” said Joe. “Come on, Pete. We got to drive him out. Make all the row you can.”

  He stabbed away with the boathook, while Pete, standing on the very edge of the solid bank, kicked at the water sending wild splashes through the reeds.

  “Touched him!” shouted Joe. “Gosh, he is a whopper.” There was a tremendous flurry in the water. Waves ran through the stems of the reeds.

  “He’s close in,” shouted Joe. “Go on, Pete. Splash! Splash!”

  Pete, in his seaboots, took a further step, stamped in the water, slipped, tried to recover himself and fell headlong. His struggles made a bigger splash than ever he had made with his boots. Reeds swayed this way and that as he fought for foothold in the soft mud, for handhold among the slimy roots.

  “You all right?” said Joe. “Take a grip of the boathook.”

  “All right,” spluttered Pete, spitting river water from his mouth. “Ouch!” he yelled suddenly, and came splashing out of the water on all fours. “Joe,” he said. “I trod on him.”

  “He’s out. Joe! Joe!” Bill yelled from the boat. Joe raced back with Pete after him.

  “What’s all this row about?”

  The fisherman, hurrying not at all, with a full milk-can in one hand and a full sack in the other, was coming back along the path. He saw Pete, muddy and dripping, on the bank beside the Cachalot.

  “Hullo,” said the fisherman. “Fallen in?”

  The foghorn sounded again. “Hey! Hey!” shouted Joe.

  “They’ve a pike on,” yelled Pete. “We just chase him out of the reeds.”

  The fisherman darted forward.

  Joe, in the cockpit, had grabbed the rod from Bill’s trembling hands. Far away, out in the middle of the river, a great tuft of reeds showed above the surface, moving slowly across the stream. Joe wound in, and the reeds came upstream, jerking now and then, as if something were tugging angrily at their roots. Bill blew and blew.

  The fisherman spoke from the bank behind them.

  “Ever caught a pike before?”

  “No,” said Bill.

  “You take him,” said Joe, looking over his shoulder.

  “How long have you had him on?” asked the fisherman.

  “Year or two,” said Joe shortly.

  “Carry on for another month then,” said the fisherman. “You’re doing very well.”

  “He’s a big ’un,” said Joe.

  “Been all over the place,” said Bill. “Most up to Kendal Dyke and back and then he go into the reeds.”

  “How did you get him out? He seems to have taken a good bunch with him.”

  “Chase him out,” said Joe. “Pete tread on him.”

  The fisherman turned to look at Pete, who was standing dripping on the bank, thinking of nothing but the fish. “Look here, you,” he said. “We don’t want to have you dying. Kick those boots off and get out of your clothes. Go into the cabin and … don’t let that line go slack! Wind in, man! Wind in!”

  The pike had turned and was coming back towards the Cachalot. Joe was winding for all he was worth. “You take it,” he said. “You take it.”

  The fisherman, who had come quietly aboard, put out his hand to take the rod, but changed his mind. “Not I,” he said. “You’ve hooked him. You’ve held him. You’ve played him. I’m not going to take the rod now. Hullo. He’s a beauty…. Go on, Pete, get into the cabin. Never mind the wet. It’ll drain into the bilge.”

  “Lemme see him caught,” said Pete.

  “He’s coming now,” said the fisherman and reached for the long gaff that lay on the top of the cabin. “Wind in a bit more, you with the rod. Now, lift him…. Gently….”

  For the first time, they could see how big the pike was. A huge fish, mottled light green and olive, rose slowly to the top of the water. He had shaken free of the reeds, which were drifting away. He opened a wide, white mouth, shook a head as big as a man’s and plunged again to the bottom of the river, making the reel whizz.

  “He’s all of twenty pounds,” said the fisherman quietly. “I was sure there was a good one about. Don’t lose him now. Bring him in again. That’s the way….”

  “There’s the float,” said Pete. “He’s coming. There he is.”

  “Keep still.”

  The fisherman leaned from the cockpit with a long gaff deep in the water. The big fish was coming to the top once more. The fisherman suddenly lifted.

  “Look out now,” he shouted, and in another moment the big fish was in the cockpit, threshing its great tail among their feet.

  “How are you going to kill him?” said Bill.

  The fisherman lifted a seat in the cockpit, took a short weighted club from the locker beneath it and brought it down heavily, once, twice, on the pike’s head. The great fish lay still.

  “He’s swallowed his last roach,” he said. “By gum, he must have been the terror of the river, that fish. Twenty pounds? He’s twenty-five if he’s an ounce.”

  Joe stood, holding the rod and feeling shaky at the knees.

  “Going to weigh him?” said Bill.

  The fisherman took a spring balance from the locker. “I doubt if this is much good,” he said. “It only weighs up to twenty-four.”

  He put the hook of the balance carefully under the pike’s jaw and lifted it. “Twenty-four anyhow,” he said. “The balance can’t go down any further. We shan’t know what he weighs till I take him to the Roaring Donkey.” He laid the fish down again on the cockpit floor. “Best fish I’ve ever seen,” he said. Then he remembered Pete. “Into the cabin with you, all of you. Go on. Take the clothes off him and roll him up in a blanket while we get them dry. We don’t want his mother to say we’ve murdered him.”

  “Come on, Pete,” said Joe. “What did he feel like when you tread on him?”

  Pete grinned, with chattering teeth.

  Five minutes later Pete, wrapped up in a red blanket, was sitting by the fisherman on the bunk at one side of the Cachalot’s cabin
, while the other two sat on the settee opposite. The fisherman had stoked up the fire, which was roaring up the chimney. Pete’s clothes were hanging round it. The fisherman had taken four bottles of ginger beer from the sack he had brought from the inn. Four mugs, now only half full, were on the table, a saucepan full of pea soup was warming on the top of the stove, and the whole story of the catching of the pike was being told from the beginning.

  “There was nothing we could do but try,” said Joe.

  “I near bust that horn hooting,” said Bill.

  “And then he go into them reeds, and he’d have been there yet if young Pete hadn’t jumped on him,” said Joe.

  Pete, of whom nothing was to be seen but his head, grinned from his red blanket. “Might have been a crocodile,” he said.

  Twice the fisherman opened the cabin door to look out into the cockpit at the huge fish, as if to make sure that it was really there. In the end he left the door open, perhaps to let out the steam from Pete’s drying clothes, perhaps to be able to go on looking at the fish.

  “Are you taking him to the Roaring Donkey to weigh him?” asked Bill.

  “I’ve another reason for that,” said the fisherman. “You’ll hear all about it if you like to come too. I’ve a little bet with the landlord. I was trying for that fish all last week. He’ll open his eyes when he sees him.”

  CHAPTER VIII

  AT THE ROARING DONKEY

  PETE’S clothes took a long time drying. The fisherman turned them inside out and all but cooked them and hung his boots close under the roof beside the hot chimney. The crew of the Death and Glory settled down in the Cachalot and heard all about her building, and how her owner meant to use her all through the winter season when the pike fishing was at its best. They heard how he had been trying again and again for the big fish, coming all the way round from Norwich because of the better fishing in the northern waters. He gave them an enormous meal of pea soup and cold roast beef and chip potatoes and jam tart. At last soon after midday he let Pete get into his clothes again, though patches of mud on his knickerbockers were still too damp to brush. They washed up, after the meal, while the fisherman sat smoking, looking at the huge pike.