Kickass Talks to Fish by Bill Stokes

Attribution: Paul Nute, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

By Bill Stokes

Kickass, the doorstop dog, having no regrets about anything in his wayward life, is at a loss to understand the keeper’s ambition to balance his account with the fish that shared his bounty of years.

Those fish were mostly trout that the keeper met in the wild and wonderful valleys in solitary liaisons, often as whippoorwills and owls called the cadence of the night.

The keeper came to the trout environs as a predatory invader, unquestioning his natural right to make food of lesser species. That identity made it impossible for him to join the catch-and-release crowd of anglers who, in their desire to “share,” seemed to inject an unnecessary “playing-at-death” aspect to their predatory activity. Every trout that came to his landing net got a ride home to the keeper’s frying pan. And there were a few trophies, all very good eating! A greedy predator’s reasoning perhaps.

The predator identity fits on the keeper and his crowd like an increasingly ill-fitting uniform sewn together with the thread of money by slaughterhouses, supermarkets and restaurant chains.

The “sports” of hunting and fishing offer symbolic exercises to preserve some of the human predatory identity, and so it was with the keeper’s trout fishing. It became a passion, a thing that drew him out to the dark, wild valleys to be a lone predator seeking in some perverse way to accept and exercise his natural identity.

So, there it is, you fish–trout especially. That’s why the keeper did it to you–caught and killed you and brought you home to his “fire” to feed his family.

Trout need not take offense but should consider their own predatory identity, slurping down the delicate mayflies that come floating down the streams on early June evenings like royal wedding parties, transforming the quiet stream into splashing celebratory chaos and giving the witnessing keeper serious heart palpitations, like a lion in the middle of a wildebeest herd, perhaps.

The keeper has retired his fly rod now, which is fine with Phyllis who does not like the taste of fish, even trout. Nothing personal, she just prefers doing her predation in her garden or the produce department. Nothing like sneaking up on a tomato or fresh kale, apparently.

Predation is where you find it. Which is everywhere.