Pike

Pike appears in the memoir as a fish of the river outings shared by the narrator and his father: it is first conjured in a joke and later named among the day’s catch. These brief appearances connect the fish to a rare setting of companionship and release, though even time on the river remains vulnerable to the father’s changing temper.

A Pike in the River’s Imagined Soundscape

While the narrator held the lines and his father rowed the Tarred Boat, the father sometimes joked, “I can hear a big pike on his motorbike coming up from Moran’s Bay.” The image gives the fish an animated, comic presence: it seems to approach not through the water but with the noise of a motorbike. The remark belongs to the father’s good-humoured moments, when the river could briefly seem to free him from himself.

Pike as Part of the Catch

The narrator’s mother later asks whether he had caught big fish with his father. He recalls that they caught pike, perch, and eels. The pike is thus part of a concrete shared activity, not only the subject of the father’s joke. The outings introduced the narrator to the river, which in later years became both an escape and a deep need; their pleasure, however, could be undone by tangled lines or a slip of the tongue.