Origins

Forty-Pounder Fishing

by S. D. Liddiard

By the time I arrived, the fishing hut was toasty warm. I parked my car at the shoreline and trudged across half a kilometre of frozen lake to get there. I could see John’s snowmobile parked next to it. I didn’t believe in snowmobiles, but there had been more than a few times I was glad to accept a ride on one. The walk wasn’t difficult. While there was a good three feet of snow around the edge of the lake, the wind had taken all but an inch or two off the ice.

Jimmy and John had arrived early and lit a fire in the old wood stove. There was a four-litre pot of homemade baked beans steaming on top of it. Jimmy was frying up a pan of back bacon when I walked in.

I pulled off my tuque, shook some shape back into my hair and looked at the two of them. They looked at me. "Where’s Brian?" we asked more or less simultaneously.

"He should have been here hours ago," said Jimmy.

"I thought he was supposed to get here early and come out with you two."

"We called before we left John’s place. No answer."

"He’s lost." Nods all around. Brian was notorious for losing his way. Pretty normal for him to be late too, especially since he went on pogey. It’s amazing how quickly time flies when the whole day lies empty before you.

"Probably went down Concession Road 9 instead of 10. Didn’t realize it till he hit North Bay." This provoked a gale of laughter. North Bay is a good 200 kilometres beyond the lake. Jimmy and John are best of friends. They both went to separate schools. John went to St. Joe’s and Jimmy went to Pius, but they both finished up at Fisher Park. I had met them both in grade 13. We became fast friends a year later during Frosh week at the University of Ottawa when we ended up on the same Shinerama team. That’s when we met Brian. The four of us perfected the art of collecting donations for not shining shoes.

John offered me a beer from the two-four of Blue he was sitting on. Then the three of us stuffed ourselves with bacon and beans, washed down, of course, with more beer. When we had finished, we brought the auger in from the snowmobile’s sled and drilled out the hole in the ice.

Then we set our fishing poles. For ice fishing, you don’t hold the pole in your hands, you set it in a gizmo that jerks the hook and rings a little alarm when a fish bites. That leaves you free for more serious activities like drinking and shooting the breeze. At that moment, we heard a noise outside the hut. Sounded like a car door slamming. A few seconds later, the door opened.

"Okay," said Brian, poking his head in the door, "where’s the hooch?" He stamped his feet four or five times on the mat at the door to get the snow off his boots.

Jimmy pointed a beer at him, but Brian wrinkled his nose and pulled a forty-pounder of rye out of the rucksack he was holding. He screwed off the top and flipped it at Jimmy’s head with his thumb and forefinger. It made a satisfying hollow sound as it bounced off Jimmy’s noggin and then disappeared. Brian took a long pull on the bottle and passed it to Jimmy.

"Got lost, eh?" said Jimmy.

"I don’t want to talk about it." The rest of us laughed. Then he proceeded to talk our ears off about it. "It was a bloody nightmare. I thought I’d never get here. To start with, I overslept because the hydro went out last night. My neighbour’s tree came down in the wind and brought down all power and phone lines on the block with it. Brought down half my eavestroughing too."

"Then I couldn’t get the damn car started. Had to get a boost. Drove the whole way in mortal fear that it’d stall and I’d be stuck in the middle of nowhere and then—"

"By the way," interrupted John, "You didn’t drive your car out onto the ice, did you?" Suddenly a loud crack split the night. The four of us bolted out of the hut just in time to see Brian’s much-despised 1982 Buick slowly disappear beneath the ice. We looked at Brian in horror.

He looked back at us and shrugged his shoulders. "Looks like she’s had the biscuit. Can’t say I’ll miss her. What’s say we finish that rye."

Back bacon is cured pork cut high on the side of the hog and rolled in pea meal. Americans call it Canadian bacon. It is quite similar to what the English call bacon.

A tuque is a brimless knit cap, usually made from wool or a synthetic imitation. The word, and probably the cap itself, was borrowed from the French. This kind of headwear is known to many Americans as a stocking cap.

Bi-weekly unemployment insurance cheques have been called pogey since their introduction in the late 1940s. (The Canadian government has recently changed the name of this institution to Employment Insurance.)

In medieval French, une concession was a grant of land. In New France (Canada) the term was applied to parcels of land rented to tenant farmers by a seigneur. In Ontario and Quebec, concessions are parallel lots of 200 acres each. The roads that run along the survey lines delimiting such lots are called concession roads.

In Ontario (and until recently, Quebec) the Roman Catholic Church is entitled to receive public funding for separate schools as specified in the British North America Act, the constitutional document on which Canada was founded. Until the 1970s, separate schools in Ontario were only funded from tax revenue for students under the age of 16 because after that age they were no longer required by law to attend school. For this reason, many Roman Catholic children finished high school in the public system. In the U.S., schools run by a church are called parochial schools and are not publicly funded.

Grade 13 was, until recently, the last year of high school in Ontario. Canadians in all provinces follow kindergarten with grade one, rather than first grade like their neighbours to the south.

Frosh week is a week of activities held by a university to welcome first-year students, who are called frosh by some. The terms freshman, sophomore, junior, and senior have never caught on in Canada. These terms are used in the U.S. to describe first- through fourth-year students in university and high school. Ontario is probably to blame for this term by offering, until recently, five years of high school and three-year bachelor’s degrees.

A two-four is a case of 24 beers. In Ontario and Quebec, at least, this is the most popular size of beer case.

Hooch comes from a word used by the Tlingit of British Columbia: Hutsnuwu, meaning "grizzly-bear fort." A corrupted form, Hoochinoo, came into English as the name for a group of native people living on an island in the Northwest archipelago who were known for their ability to produce potent alcohol.

Eavestroughs are generally called gutters in the U.S. In Canada, gutters run along the edges of roads to catch the run-off, not on roofs. These items are so called because they are troughs that run along the eaves of a roof. A set of eavestroughs is often called eavestroughing.

A forty-pounder is a 40-ounce bottle of liquor.

Rye whisky is called Canadian whisky in the U.S. Canadians usually just call it rye.

Hydro was originally short for "hydro-electric power." It has now come to mean any electricity distributed over the power grid, however it was produced.

Had the biscuit means finished, no longer able to function, deceased. This expression is a Protestant allusion to the sacrament of Extreme Unction delivered to the dying by Roman Catholic priests. "Biscuit" is a contemptuous reference to the host. Canada has long had a balance of Roman Catholic and Protestant populations similar to that of Northern Ireland. Though never as severe as there, tensions have, at times, existed between the two communities.

S. D. Liddiard is a proud Cannuck (not a Canadianism). Don’t ask him any questions about ice fishing.