Cousin Madge decides that she likes fishing after all
By Gregory Clark, Illustrated By Duncan Macpherson, July 16, 1949.
“Ugh!” Cousin Madge greeted me. “You’re the very man!”
I tilted my outboard motor and got out on Cousin Madge’s small wharf.
“A fish!” writhed Cousin Madge, baring her teeth in distaste. “A great, slimy fish THAT long!”
She held out her sturdy arms as far as they would reach and twiddled her fingers to indicate farther than THAT.
“Where?” I exclaimed.
“Right here!” shivered Madge, backing away from the wharf’s edge. “I came down here to wash my hair this morning; and there it was, right there, slowly sailing along…”
“Probably a pike,” I suggested.
“Pike nothing!” barked Cousin Madge. “It looked like a LOG! It was as long as a paddle.”
“Oh, come now…” I smiled.
“I tell you, I’ve never seen anything like it,” insisted Cousin Madge, taking my arm as if for protection. “It’s been hanging around here for three or four days. Last night, I heard a horrible splash, right off the little point there, by the cottage. It sounded like a human being falling in…”
“Oh, come!” I suggested.
My husky cousin is a spinster who fears neither man, horse nor devil. But she is a little unreasonable about fish.
“It was just getting dusk,” quavered Cousin Madge. “I jumped to my feet, up there on the verandah, and I was just in time to see the tail of this slimy monster slowly wave and then sink under the water. It was as big as a canoe cushion!”
I disengaged my arm from Cousin Madge’s agitated grip and faced her.
“The tail?” I checked.
“That wide!” Cousin Madge held her hands up to show the measure.
I started up the path to Cousin Madge’s little chalet. It is 20 years or more since a real good musky has been caught in these waters. Rarely, maybe four or five times a year, a musky of six or eight pounds is caught. They are the relics of at once noble race that inhabited all this country around the Point. But three generations of cottagers, and in more recent years, multitudes of tourists, have combed the waters of this small lake, taking everything that came to their trolls, their bait casting lures, their minnows, frogs and worms. That a real old sockdollager1 of a musky still survived sometimes amused the dreams of those of us who still did a little fishing around the worn and familiar rocks and bays. In fact, a year or two ago, one American angler swore he had hold of a real giant of a fish. But….
“What COLOR was this fish, Madge?” I enquired, as we sat down on her verandah.
“Ghastly,” replied Cousin Madge, sinking dangerously into a deck chair.
“But what color?” I insisted.
“A sort of,” reflected Cousin Madge, “greeny grey.”
“Oho!” I sat up. “Did it have any markings?”
“I couldn’t see,” explained Cousin Madge. “I was above it, see? On the wharf. I’d just come down to wash my hair. Ugh! I feel I will never TOUCH this water again until you get that monster out of here. I can’t bathe. I can’t even drink the water….”
“You didn’t notice if there were shadowy vertical bars down its sides?”
“No! but last night, when it made that fearful splash out there,” recalled Cousin Madge, “I saw its tail wave in the dusk. And it looked RED!”
“A kind of liver red?” I asked hoarsely.
“Ex–” cried Cousin Madge, “actly!”
I stood up, agitated.
“You’ll get it?” pleaded Cousin Madge. “You’ll catch the horrible thing…?”
“Madge,” I announced, “if you’ve only doubled what you say you saw, you may have put me onto one of the adventures of my life! Tell me where else have you seen this fish rolling or splashing?”
“Ugh!” Madge pulled herself together. “The first time was right over by those boulders. made a swirl in the water you’d think a crocodile ten feet long was in there….”
“Where next?”
“Two nights ago, just about sundown,” went on Madge, with distaste, “it came up and surged about three times, one, two, three, right out there by my point. Not 50 feet out….”
“Yes?”
“Then, last night, I told you about,” Cousin Madge checked off on her fingers. “And this morning, about ten, I went down to do my hair. And there was the brute, right under my wharf.”
“What time is it?” I demanded.
Cousin Madge leaned to look in through the cottage door.
“Just seven,” she announced.
“Put a sweater on,” I commanded. And come on. You’re going to row me out here in front of the cottage….”
Cousin Madge recoiled back in the deck chair until it swayed.
“Not ME!” she growled fervently. “I’m not going to get into any tangle with that dreadful monster. Great, slimy, greasy-looking thing!”
Cousin Madge is something of a curiosity in our family. Man and boy, grandma down to four-year- old toddler, we are all a little lunatic about fishing. We have fished all over the world. We have travelled thousands of miles, wasted all our savings, in the tireless pursuit of fish. Besides, we like to eat fish.
“Ugh!” huddled Madge, cowering in the deck chair and folding her arms around herself.
“We’ve no time to waste!” I commanded sternly. “Madge! If that fish is still hanging around here, this may be our one and only chance. Tomorrow, he may be five miles away, at the other end of the lake. Don’t you see? If he gets away, you’ll never have any peace of mind. All the rest of this summer, you’ll be haunted.”
I bent down and wheedled.2
“Put on a sweater,” I urged. “All you’ve got to do is row me quietly in my square stern skiff, see? Just take the oars. No work. I’ll do all the rest.”
“If that thing,” barked Cousin Madge, recoiling from me, “got hold of you, I’d jump clean out of the boat.”
“Look, “I hissed. “You’re normally a pretty cool customer, Madge.”
“Not with fish,” she muttered. “Fish off the rocks.”
“It would see me,” I objected.
“Go and row yourself,” urged Madge.
“If as I suspect,” I pleaded, “this is a real big musky, there has to be somebody at the oars, in case he runs under the boat or makes a long run, so that we have to follow him….”
The horror at the thought of following him contorted Cousin Madge’s broad sunburned face.
“Okay!” Madge said, weakly. “We’ll leave him free.”
I sat down. Madge sat forward. She stared out over the quiet evening water. Then she heaved two or three times and got herself free of the deck chair.
“You win,” she murmured huskily.
She went in and got a great, heavy sweater. She put on a hat. She changed from camp shoes to thick brogues and pulled her rubbers on over them. She spent two minutes sorting through drawers until she found an old pair of gloves. From the wood box in the kitchen, she selected a fat, round stick of birch. And from behind the door, she produced an umbrella.
“Okay!” she announced, like the condemned about to walk to the gibbet.3
As we walked down to the wharf, she practised stabbing with the umbrella point, and took a few premonitory swings with the stick of stove wood.
“If I faint,” she swallowed, “leave me lay until it’s over.”
When she stepped onto the wharf, she stamped her feet threateningly, until the little structure trembled.
“Pssst! Heavens!” I protested, agonized. “If we’re going after this fish, we’ve got to be as stealthy as CATS! He’s a wise, crafty old timer to have survived so long….”
Taking a long breath, Cousin Madge eased herself fearfully down into my skiff and sat in the rowing seat. I got in the stern, leaving the outboard engine tilted up out of the water. From my tackle box I selected a large surface plug armed with two sets of gang hooks, a lure that splashes and splutters on the top of the water, never pulling under. Delicately handled, it is a deadly attractor for muskies, on calm evening water.
We shoved off, and Madge adjusted the oars.
“Careful, now,” I cautioned low. “Don’t make a rattle or a squeak more than you have to. Don’t pull hard. Barely dip your oars, and slowly, slowly pull me around the point, about a hundred feet out.”
Bracing her feet, and taking a grim grip on the oars, Cousin Madge cast a fearful glance over her shoulder and started to row.
Under my repeated “shhhses”, she dibbled the blades delicately in the water, and got me, with a minimum of noise, out to the west of her point, and a hundred feet off. I signalled her to desist from rowing and to keep still.
As is so often the case with these big muskies when they do meet their doom, they meet it like a perfect dope or fat head.
My very first cast lobbed through the air, a distance of 60 or 70 feet, The plug landed with a smart splash and bobbled on the surface. I let it lie in its own little wavelets on the quiet water. When it was still, I gave the line a tiny twitch. The plug spluttered, like a dazed thing that had fallen out of the air.
There was a quiet surge; an upheaval. The water around my little plug boiled. I struck. I felt the hooks bite. I struck a second time, to send the hooks home. A dark, gleaming monstrous thing, in a sort of drunken lurch of surprise or agony, curved up out of the water, backwards, and fell…
“Got him!” yelled Cousin Madge in a bugle voice.
She grabbed the oars and made a stroke all in one motion that nearly pitched me overboard.
The fight lasted not more than ten minutes. With Cousin Madge at the oars we fairly dragged that beautiful fish to death. I could not stop her. She shuttered, squealed, screamed, cussed and rowed!
In the sunset, the white belly of the great fish rolled. I drew him alongside.
“Let me at him!” barked Cousin Madge.
When he came level, she poised the chunk of birch and socked him a terrific blow, square on the noggin. It was all over. I reached into his gill covers and dragged him over the side.
“What a monster!” gloated Cousin Madge, pushing him with her rubbered brogue. “A hundred pounds…?”
He went 32, which is a sensation in these parts.
“Come on,” shouted Cousin Madge. “Get the engine going. Let’s visit around and show the folks my fish.”
We drove to the nearest cottage, and created a sensation. We drove from cottage to cottage and then we went on two miles to a summer hotel, where 50 guests came down to the dock to view the marvel.
By this time Cousin Madge, with her gloves on, of course, was seizing hold under the gill covers, and hoisting the beauty up for inspection. Several people had cameras and took her picture, standing proudly with her fish.
“Who caught it?” everybody cried.
“I caught it,” shouted Cogan Madge, very hearty. “I saw it first. I watched it for three nights, checking its every move. Greg, here, held it while I killed it. All he did was hold it….”
She took it up to her cottage and hung it for the night on a spike in the back wall. I was commanded to be on hand at eight, in good time for the morning steamer.
I took her over to the steamer wharf, where all the community had a look at it, and took Cousin Madge’s picture, dozens of them. When the steamer came in, Cousin Madge stood forth and paraded to and fro on the dock for the deck passengers to stare and exclaim. Several American tourists ran ashore for snapshots. But Madge wouldn’t let them hold it.
After the steamer left, we paid a few more visits to remoter cottages whose occupants hadn’t been at the wharf. At long last we took it home; and Cousin Madge laid it out in state in the sawdust of the ice house.
“We’ll crate it up,” she announced, “in time to express it on to-night’s steamer. Who’s a good taxidermist in town?”
I told her.
“Okay, now,” she exulted, “come on down to my dock, here, and teach me how to throw those things.” And tossing her gloves aside, “then we’ll go fishing…”
Editor’s Notes: After Jim died, Greg continued his stories mostly illustrated by Duncan Macpherson (who later went on to become a famous editorial cartoonist from 1958 until 1993). These stories alternated between fictional neighbours and his fictional Cousin Madge as the foil for Greg. These weekly stories continued as the Montreal Standard moved to become the Weekend Picture Magazine (later Weekend Magazine) in 1951.