Darrell Davis: Todd isn't a fool

During the holidays, I spent an entire day ice fishing on a frozen Saskatchewan lake. It was -19 C. Windy.

Ice fishing is a sport, isn’t it? I kept thinking about Mark Twain’s description of a fishing rod having “a worm at one end and a fool at the other.”

After four of us huddled together in a tent with our lines in the water for about an hour, one of the guys went outside. A guy named Todd replaced him, put the same line back in the water and – wham! – five minutes later had caught a nice little jack. We all glared at Todd until he left.

Another hour later, I left the ice-fishing tent for a few minutes. Todd took my chair and rod and dropped his line into my fishing hole. Wham! Another nice little jack.

That was it. Six hours on the lake, most of it inside the ice-fishing tent. No more bites. One more fish hooked into one of the traps outside the tent. So we had three jack.

We called Todd lots of names. “Fish stealer” was the least nasty description we could think of. He just laughed. And he let us have his catch for a fish fry the next day. Guess he didn’t want to clean them.