I said I was looking for ciscoes, and he said, “I am too.” He shook his head. “They’ve just kind of disappeared. I take out herring, Menominee, whitefish, and trout—but ciscoes, no.”
Next door was Tom Eckel’s cutting house, where he, too, in orange waders was preparing his morning harvest, this one primarily lake trout. He grew up on a Superior island, something harder to do these days, and he was old enough to remember the area before World War II. His Gitche Gumee pedigree was pure. I rephrased my question to reflect the sad news I was finding: “Did you ever catch a cisco?” He looked at me as if I’d asked, “Did you ever catch a cold?”
With North Country politeness he said, “A long time ago,” and returned to a big trout under his knife. Then, “I don’t think you’ll ever see the ciscoes come back—not in this area. Too many predators.” When he put the fillet knife down a moment later he said, “But then I didn’t think we’d ever see the lake trout back like this.” Halfway through the next filleting (in Minnesota, one learns conversational patience), he mused, “The lampreys are under control, I’d say, and I’ve heard ninety percent of our fish right here are natives again.”
Everyone’s commentary about ciscoes was historical, about what had been. Worse, in less than an hour, I’d just talked to two thirds of the commercial fishermen remaining in Grand Marais. As I left the cutting house, I asked about a stretched-out black sock tacked to the wall. “Found it in the belly of an eight-pound trout,” said Eckel. When I reached the door, he added, “Don’t know what happened to the rest of the guy.”
I sat on the dock in an easy lake breeze and opened my smoked-herring lunch. Two details gave me hope yet for finding a cisco: Eckel had said he preferred to go after larger species and mentioned a couple of fish stands along the southern end of the North Shore, down near Knife River, places closer to the café where I’d first tasted cisco.
After two days of wandering around Grand Marais and exploring the coast all the way to the border at the Pigeon River, I headed southwest, my hopes further raised by a growing awareness that part of the difficulty in my search might be linguistic: One person’s cisco might just be another’s chub (a name loosely applied), or blind robin, or (even more loosely) whitefish. Where was there a commercial fisherman who uses genus-species nomenclature to describe what comes up in the net?
I was looking for Coregonus artedi. I liked the Latin version because of a story attached to it: The latter term refers to a Swede, Petrus Artedi, father of ichthyology. After Artedi fell into a canal and drowned, Carl Linnaeus, coincidentally the creator of binomial taxonomy, wrote of his colleague, “Thus did the most distinguished of ichthyologists perish in the waters, having devoted his life to the discovery of their inhabitants.”
I was about to learn that a cisco is also known as a lake herring, even though it isn’t a true herring but rather a member of the salmon family, along with lake trout and various so-named “whitefish” of the Great Lakes.
Overharvesting, pollution, and the spread of foreigners like lampreys and alewives have all affected smaller fish such as ciscoes and the larger species that depend on them, so that certain fish today have declined precipitously from their populations in, say, 1949. I also began suspecting that my quest would have gone better had I arrived in the autumn, when ciscoes rise from the depths and cluster to spawn in warmer shallows. Like a fellow whose inamorata slyly eludes him, I was drawn on by the challenge of the pursuit.
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