Spring is around the corner, if not here already and it is time to head down the frozen Kuskokwim River highway to your favorite ice fishing spot to jig for pike fish otherwise known as Luqruuyiit, the Yup’ik word for pike fish.
Pike fish are very boney, barely have any oil or fat in the meat except a little in the liver. The fish are long and their heads appear to be smashed with slightly bulging eyes.
When I was a child I remember my late grandmother Maggie Lind had already gone fishing down to Johnson River about 20 miles below Bethel by the time I woke up to go to school
Without avail she would return home in the evening with hundreds of pike and the next day we would feast on plain boiled pike fish heads swimming in seal oil. I loved the eyes or “Iingasat” as she would call them.
Mainly pike fish are split and freeze-dried on fish racks and also eaten with seal oil. Mmmm, I can just taste them.
Anyway at that time when Grandmother had gone fishing, I had never jigged for pike fish at a dark ice hole before, in my life.
One weekend she took me along fishing to Johnson River. I should have not watched the Horror movie called “The Creature from the Black Lagoon” the night before.
As I sat at my ice hole, jigging away my mind began to wonder. I began thinking about the Gillman who I imagined was below my ice hole watching my hook going up and down as I jigged.
The Gillman was six feet tall had big bulging eyes, slits for nostrils, a long mouth with swollen lips and he had webbed hands and feet.
Opening and closing it’s mouth, breathing under water.
My jig went up and down and the Gillman down there watched it with very much interest.
I was becoming very frightened when suddenly something pulled violently on my jig line. I screamed out in horror, jumped up and ran crying to my grandmother with the jig line and stick hung over my shoulder.
“You caught your first pike!” Laughed grandmother, “Look.”
I turned and saw I had pulled out a big pike fish from my ice hole while running away from the Gillman of the Black Lagoon!
Since the beginning of April, jigger men and women have been catching hundreds and hundreds of pike fish down at Johnson River and many other favorite fishing spots.
I long to join them to sit at my ice hole and jig for pike fish, the Gillman watching my hook or not.
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