The Muskie in the Hardware Store Window

The photo stayed tacked up on the corkboard at Wendell’s. Royce got a copy printed at the drugstore and put it in a frame at the cabin. And Ingrid stopped going into the hardware store.

She did not say why. She just started waiting in the truck when I went in for parts. She would sit there with her book and tell me she was fine.

I would come back out and see her looking at the store window through the windshield, at the shelf where Wendell puts the seasonal things, and I knew she was thinking about that corkboard inside.

She still went fishing. But she stopped asking to go to Royce’s dock. She fished off the public landing instead, or from the bank at the county park.

My daughter had caught the fish of a lifetime, and she was ashamed to walk into a store. That is when I decided.

There is a man I went to school with who does taxidermy out of a shop behind his house, about fifteen miles south of town. He mostly does deer heads and the occasional bear, but he does fish replicas too, for people who release their catch.

That is how most big muskie get mounted around here now. You let the fish go, and you bring the man your length, your girth and good photos, and he builds you a fiberglass replica that looks just like the one you caught. The colors, the spots, the bars, all of it.

I drove out on a Saturday morning and showed him my pictures. The one of Ingrid with both hands on the rod, the line tight, her braid flying. The one of the fish on the bump board, nose against the stop. The one of Royce and Ingrid together with the fish between them.

He looked at them a long time.

“That’s a beautiful fish,” he said. “Forty-four by twenty?”

“Forty-four by twenty.”

“Your girl caught that?”

“Twenty minutes off a dock,” I said.

He let out a breath. “Well, I’ll be.”

He told me the price was usually about eighteen dollars an inch for a replica that size, which would have come to seven hundred and ninety-two dollars. He said he would do it for seven hundred even, because we went to school together and because of what the fish was for.

I did not have seven hundred dollars sitting around. Nobody I know does. But the county was paving a stretch of County Road B that summer and they needed a mechanic on the job site on weekends to keep the rollers running. I signed up for six Saturdays in a row.

I told Margit what I was doing. She did not try to stop me. She just put an extra sandwich in my lunch pail every Saturday morning.

The replica took about eleven weeks. He called me in early September and told me to come look. I stood in his shop and stared at it on the bench.

It was her fish. I would have known it anywhere. The green on the back, the bronze on the sides, the dark bars running down. He had matched it right down to the spots on the tail, off my photographs.