Submitted photo The author (right) with Lincoln (left) and Gavin Schreurs of Lake Benton, with a closing pair of walleyes on a very exciting day of angling Big Detroit Lake.

There’s something almost primordial about seeing a big fish — a huge predator — with a smaller one locked in its jaws. There’s something even more primal of watching that fish not let go, even though it can. In the Darwinist, survival-of-the-fittest, kill-or-be-killed world that is still the natural food chain in the waters around us, I had the chance first-hand to watch such a scene play out this weekend. 


Meeting up with family friends on an up-and-down weekend of wind, rain, and slightly off weather, I suggested trolling for pike and muskies as a way to beat the gusty, overcast conditions and find consistent action. Our efforts picked up smaller hammerhandle pike on spoons about every 200 yards along the developing weed edges and elicited one solid hit of an oversized tinsel inline spinner on Sunday morning from a likely muskie that was off the hook in a couple seconds. However, it was the middle stretch of our topsy-turvy time on the roiled gray waters of Big Detroit Lake that brought the most excitement.


Fishing with my buddy Tory and his son, Lincoln, we cruised our way back along a steep shelf on the southeast side of the lake, and as had been the tale of the morning, a quick hit on the driver’s side rod signaled a small pike was once again on the line. I stood up and passed the rod to the younger angler and suggested that his opponent might be the smallest of the day. However, as I handed the smaller pike-appropriate combo of 20-pound Fireline and a copper spoon to him, something happened. 


“I think this fish just got bigger,” he said as the rod doubled over and the drag began to peel with each thunderous run of what apparently was no longer a little northern on the other end.


It ran hard, bulldogging in a manner that seemed to pull our fishing pontoon with each charge into the depths, though the harsh east winds likely had something to do with it. Keeping things tight, and using the drift to his advantage, Lincoln closed the gap as I readied the net, not quite expecting what I would see next through the gin-clear water as the line distance shortened. 


Up the beast came, like a surfacing mosasaurus from the depths of some Jurassic era water. It was easily the biggest muskie I had ever seen in Detroit Lakes, and I’ve seen a lot of them since they were first stocked in the late 1990s. In its mouth was a small pike, bent and battered but locked tight in the teeth of the beast which easily eclipsed 50 inches, and likely was pushing 55. As it turned, its gills flared and the back of the muskie’s head looked like a spade shovel, only it was a supersized model that Paul Bunyan would have used in those tall tales of tree cutting and trench digging. To me, it appeared the spoon had made the jump from prey to predator, and I saw the flash of bronze and orange at the corner of the monster’s face, and I thought, just for a moment, the situation was manageable, and with the right luck that’s where the lure would stay. The muskie came close to the side of the boat a couple of times, making runs that kept it just out of net’s reach. But the drag kept peeling, and the fish stayed connected, and I whispered encouragement to Lincoln as I tried to steady myself for a landing. The muskie-and-pike combination disappeared under the boat and came back up about 10 feet off the side, and with a mighty turn and an opening of its mouth — as if suddenly realizing it had that option all along of just letting go to end the battle — the rod in Lincoln’s hand snapped back. The beast lingered only for a moment before disappearing with a swing of its mighty tail as its meal floated on the surface, gashed and torn from the fight. The three of us buckled with disappointment simultaneously, and with a sad realization, I understood that the hook was never in the muskie’s mouth. Rather, its mouth was just that big to make it look that way, as the 14-inch northern had been engulfed from near its tail to just behind its eye. 


It took most of the day for me to shake the rush of the experience from my nervous system, and as we set up for some evening slip bobber fishing, I was comforted by the fast action that a few schools of nice walleyes provided for Lincoln and his brother Gavin, who joined us after the early shift and the whole predator-and-prey experience. As the day closed, I netted a pair of fish for the brothers on a double as we replayed the day’s events, and celebrated some consolation gold for our efforts in the wind, rain, and adrenaline fueled thoughts of what had happened, what could have been, and ultimately the totality of the excitement we had experienced … in our outdoors.