After the purge

Walk into any supper club in northern Wisconsin and somewhere there is a walleyed pike. It might be on your plate as a fish fry staple, or it could be someone’s fish of a lifetime, a lunker mounted to swim in perpetuity above the bar.

The walleye has always been an emblem of the North Woods. No lakeside cottage is complete without vintage photos of happy anglers hoisting sagging stringers of one of Wisconsin’s most sought-after game fish. Today, the species remains high on the list of the nearly 1 million recreational anglers who ply Wisconsin’s lakes and rivers, and who spend billions annually on licenses, tackle, bait, guides, and food and lodging in their pursuit of Wisconsin game fish. Good fishing helps draw hundreds of thousands of out-of-state visitors and supports an estimated 21,500 jobs, many of them in northern Wisconsin, which boasts one of the world’s greatest concentrations of freshwater lakes. The fish also remains a traditional staple of the Ojibwe, who spear fish on 175 lakes in what is known as Wisconsin’s ceded territory, roughly the northern third of the state.