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North With Doc -- Doc Thinks Like A Fish
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"What do you suppose is going on inside this fish's mind?" Doc asked. He twisted free his jig hook, and marveled at the walleye's dark green sandpaper skin, needle-sharp teeth, and goggle eyes. In fact, if the beast weighed another 200 pounds, wore an Iowa Hawkeye cap, and was smoking a green cigar, it'd look a lot like Doc. "Do you suppose a fish sees what we see?" he asked.
"Naah. I'll bet the light is so bright up here compared to the bottom where it feeds, that it hardly sees anything at all," I said. "It's maybe like a flashbulb goes off as it comes to the surface, temporarily blinding it."
"If so, its eyes probably take some time to get accustomed to the dark again when it's released," Doc said. "Maybe it bumps into rocks, and other fish."
"Could be," I said. "If you are that concerned, you should invent little polarized, wraparound fish sunglasses to make it easier for them."
"Not a bad idea."
"What brought up this line of thought?" I asked.
"Once in a while I like to look at fish from an anthropomorphic angle," Doc said, sliding the walleye back into the coffee-colored water. "You know. Put myself in their place. Imagine them with human characteristics."
"Finding Nemo, are you? That's silly."
"Why?"
"Because it's a fish. It doesn't do laundry, use e-mail, or watch Seinfeld reruns. In fact, its only priorities are eating and breeding."
"Sounds like Aunt Lucy."
"Yes, it does, but she is a whole different kind of animal."
"I'm sure someone has done studies to see if fish react in human terms," Doc said.
"What? Like they feel anxiety and happiness, have a Monday night craving for Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders?"
"Maybe some of that."
"You know, Doc, for 51 weeks a year, the fish and I are spared your philosophical musings. And while I'm sure it doesn't bother the fish a bit, it's beginning to cause me some discomfort."
"Don't you ever think about what goes through their scaly brain pans?"
"Duh. Eat. Duh. Escape from bigger fish. Duh. Fertilize eggs. Duh. I think that about covers it."
"You don't give fish much credit for surviving 150 million years, do you?"
"Cockroaches are older than that," I said, releasing a very nice walleye that looked about as human as Carrot Top. "Do I detect a kinder and gentler Doc? You turning vegetarian on me, or what?"
"Not at all. Sometimes I just look around at this world we live in, and wonder how everything fits."
"Well, buddy, how it fits is we two-legged critters are at the tip top pointy peak of the food chain. We are hunters and gatherers with the intelligence to vote for president, listen to talk radio, and watch wrestling on TV."
"I guess we don't have a lot in common with fish, do we?"
"Doc, of all the larger animals out there, fish look and act less like people, and I think that's why they are used for both sport and food by just about all cultures on the planet."
 With the help of a light breeze, we eventually migrated from the moving water of an incoming stream to the face of a sheer rock wall. The fish finder showed a depth of 30 feet, and the bottom strewn with massive boulders, some 15 feet high. I tossed a jig and salted minnow combo, and very slowly drew it up and over the bottom bumps. Doc was working a heavy Krocodile spoon in the shallows close to the wall, and past the waterlogged branches of a big fallen tree.
While I pulled a procession of serious walleyes from the depths, he hooked and released a number of feisty pike.
"What if fish are just thinking in a different way?" Doc asked. "What if their thought processes are on a less complicated level than we can observe?"
"I believe you're confusing brain power with their natural instinct to survive."
"Let me put it another way," Doc said. "You pet a cat, it purrs. If it feels threatened, it will hiss or attack. How do you explain that?"
"In the first place, I can't understand why anyone would want to pet a cat. But what you just said is the same as why a dog comes running when it hears a whistle, or a can opener. It's a conditioned response."
"You could be right."
"I know I'm right. In the animal kingdom, mammals may have some of the same body parts and nerve endings as humans, but fish are just cold-blooded eating machines."
"Speaking of eating machines," Doc said, patting his growling paunch, "we better get back to the cabin before our compatriots inhale all the snacks."
We cranked in, stowed the rods, zipped life jackets, and motored across the mirror lake to the Northwest Ontario home we'd rented for the week.
Knobby Clark's crew from Sioux Lookout had knocked down the old, weather-ravaged cabin sometime in the early spring, well before the snowmelt, salvaged what they could and burned the rest. Building materials were brought in by air, and over the ice. The new cabin took shape on the same spot in a matter of weeks, and it was surprisingly modern, solid, and cozy. A lot better, in fact, than many hotels I'd stayed in.
"Where you guys been?" the attorney asked, one hand in a pickle jar, and the other in a potato chip bag.
"Exploring the frontiers of Darwinian hypotheses," I said.
"Oh, no," the attorney said. "Doc's not in his fish-have-feelings-too mode again, is he?"
I was surprised. "This has happened before?" I asked.
"In a boat with me last year," the banker said. "Thought I'd have to do a lobotomy with a Dardevle spoon to shut him up."
"It's been four or five years, but I got the lecture, too," the plant manager said. "It was disgusting." He then dredged up and expelled a volume of gas that could easily have run a fleet of alternate fueled city buses for a day and a half.
"Three years ago with me," the policeman said, "I had to explain to Doc why big fish eat little fish. I still get a headache thinking about it."
"What's the deal, Doc?" I asked. "Writing a thesis on pescatory psychology?"
"Let me explain," he said. "For many years I truly believed fish were here solely for my pleasure. They were incredibly fun to catch and eat. But then I killed a big pike due to poor handling, and that bothered me. If I had been quicker or used barbless hooks, I probably could have saved it, but I didn't. It gave me a guilty feeling that I maybe caused it pain, that I removed it from the breeding pool, and the feeling has lasted a long time."
"It's something we've all experienced, Doc," I said. "I can't remember ever killing a walleye that I didn't intend to eat. But once in a while a pike gets hooked deep, or I mess up its gills, or take too long to free it from the net."
"I agree," the attorney said. "Even though we've gotten a lot better at releasing them in the water instead of in the boat, I'll lose one every now and then, but we either eat it or the gulls do."
"And who's to say if dying from a human caused injury is any different than getting chomped in half by a bigger pike?" the policeman added.
We silently chewed on the topic a while, as well as on cheese and bologna sandwiches, Snickers bars, and enough mixed nuts to raise the cholesterol level of every man, woman, and child in Milwaukee by at least eight points.
"You ever gone bullhead fishing, Doc?" the banker asked.
"Of course."
"Do you have the same feelings about bullheads as pike and walleyes?"
"Not really," Doc said. "Bullheads are not the most attractive of creatures, and they don't have much of a personality."
"You want to date 'em or catch 'em?" I asked.
The banker said, "My grandfather absolutely loved to sit in a boat all day catching buckets of bullheads. I asked him why he didn't go after pike or other species. 'Too much work,' he said. 'Too hard to clean. Don't care for the flavor.' To him, bullheads were a nearly inexhaustible supply of fast food that just happened to live under water."
"Maybe some day a race of space creatures vastly more intelligent than us will hunt humans for sport," the attorney said.
"How could they be smarter than us?" the plant manager wondered aloud, eating a spoonful of pork and beans right out of the can.
"Until the aliens arrive, I am going to treat all creatures, great and small, with the utmost respect," Doc said.
"Except leeches," the banker said.
"And maybe politicians," I added. "Some of those slimedogs wouldn't even make good bait."
Back in the boats again, we trolled Rapalas and Rat-L-Traps around likely areas along weedbeds, and rocky points. We all caught our fair share, and took extra care to release each fish unharmed.
Doc held an especially chunky walleye, looked into its fishy face, turned, and asked me, "Not that I think it has the capability to do so, but what do you think this creature would say to me if it could talk?"
"Well, Doc, I think it would appreciate the way you retrieved it quickly, carefully removed the hook, and sent it back to its home."
"You suppose so?"
"Without a doubt," I said. "And as it dived back to the bottom to wait for its next meal, it might even utter a string of bubbles that translated as, 'Duh. Eat. Duh. Escape from bigger fish. Duh. Thanks, Doc.'"
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