The Godsend Backfire: The Beginning by Harold Straugh (best e reader for academics TXT) 📗

pinkish pieces of meat, cut up into three-inch cubes. I looked at Yura and then at Mylicious.

“Yeti balls,” Mylicious said with a laugh, “the fish out here love them.”

“I do not want to know how you figured that out,” I said and laughed a little myself.

We walked out to the three torches, each marking a hole, that was three-feet by three-feet, that slightly iced over.  Mylicious and Yura, produced hatchets from their waist band and started hacking away at the ice that had formed on the holes.  Once he was done, he tossed me his hatchet and I started chipping away at the ice.  Shards of it flew up and hit me in the face.  With each blow though, the hard ice, gave way and soon, the hatchet went through the last bit of ice and I almost lost it in the water.

I watched as Mylicious took two chucks of Yeti testicle and put them through the hook.  The hook looked to be made of metal, it was thick and about four-inches long, “I made these myself,” Mylicious said as he lowered the meat into the water, “Now you want to get it to the bottom, then bring it up a little.  Each spool has enough line on it to reach the bottom. Once you bring it up a little, you’ll have to move it up and down a little, every so often.”

“How will I know when I get one?” I asked, I had never fished that way, before.

“Oh, you’ll know,” Yura said.

So, I went over to my hole, the wind was brutal over the lake, and dropped my baited hook into the water. I followed my brother’s directions.  The spool the line rested on was wood, it was hollowed out in the middle, which was lined in fur.  I looked over and both Yura and Mylicious had their hands in the center of spool, keeping their hands warm.  Mine were only slightly cold, but I liked the way the inside of the spool felt.

I put one hand on top off the spool to keep it from spinning and moved my bait up and down and done that for many of hours.  I was about to give up out of boredom, when I felt some weight on the end of the line, then my line took off and my spool started spinning. I didn’t know what to do, so I looked over at Mylicious, but Yura had her line pulled up and was headed my way.

She took the spool from me and sat it down, then slowly, one hand over the other, started pulling the line up out of the water. Every few seconds the line would race back in the water.

“You have a good one here,” she looked up at me, raised an eyebrow and smiled.

Mylicious stayed where he was at, while Yura pulled my fish in. After about five minutes, my fish surfaced. It actually came up out of the hole, it was four-feet long, it had a long, toothy mouth, four fins, two in front and two back, that it used to scurry across the ice and a large, curved dorsal fin that shot out about a foot past its tail. It didn’t have scales either, but skin like catfish or trout. Now it couldn’t gain traction, but it was scary to see it trying to go after Yura, snapping its jaws at her.  She, calmly, took out her hatchet and stuck it in the skull of the fish.

“That’ll be some good eating tonight,” she said as she removed the hook from the fish’s jaw, “Let’s try to get a few more.”

I hooked more Yeti testicles on my hook and repeated the process.  I knew what to do now when I hooked another one, so it was back to the waiting game.  Mylicious hooked one shortly after, his fish was little bigger than mine, but met the same fate.  Once the fish started biting there wasn’t a waiting game.  It was soon my turn again and this time I pulled in the fish solo. I did realize after I pulled the fish out, I didn’t have a hatchet, and with my bow and arrow, were back by the fire, I quickly just punched the fish in the head as hard as I could.  I got a strange look from the other two, but it worked, it’s brains oozed out the wound.

The fishing was good for about two hours, then after that, the biting ceased.  Mylicious wrapped his line up on the spool and looked over at me, “They’ve moved on brother, we will try again in a few days,” he said.

“Moved on?”

“There’s an inlet from the ocean, that runs through this lake, they’ve went back out or to another part of the lake.  I will say, we never know what we are going to catch here, but these are here the most.”

I had twelve fish in total, Mylicious had a few more, fifteen to be exact and Yura had only five, but it was more than enough.  I wandered at first how we were going to move them, then noticed Yura hadn’t wound up her spool. She ran her hook through the gills and mouth of each of fish about three times over, then handed me the spool.

“You caught the bigger fish, you get to haul the load,” she smiled.

She obviously didn’t know my strength, so pulling almost five-hundred-pounds of fish across the ice, wasn’t hard at all.  Once I got them to the steps, Yura unstrung the fish and simply threw them down the steps.  Once inside, we carried them down the fourth tunnel to the left of the main doorway.

That walkway led up and into basically, a large freezer, there weren’t as many torches and I could see their breath’s again.  There were rows upon rows of meat and fish.  They had the meat to