The lake froze on a Tuesday. By Saturday Willa said it would hold a heron, a beaver and a bucket, and that we were going fishing on it. I asked where the boat was. She looked at me the way she looks at a fish that has made a bad decision.

I am a beaver. I know ice from underneath. I did not know you could sit on top of it and pull fish out through a hole, like reaching into a cupboard.

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The first problem was me. My fur is built for water, not for sitting still on a frozen lake in a wind that comes straight from the mill. After twenty minutes my teeth were chattering so loud Willa said I was scaring the perch. She opened her bag and pulled out a grey jacket with bib trousers, the kind with a zip-in layer that warms up when you press a button. It was made for a person. On me it was made for two beavers. I zipped it to the nose and stopped chattering. “Dry and warm beats everything you own,” Willa said, which is the same thing she said on the dock in October, and she was right then too.

The second problem was the hole. Willa drilled it with a hand auger, two turns and a lean, and the ice came up in a neat white curl. I asked if I could try. I got the auger halfway in and then I chewed it. I don’t know why. The handle was wood. Willa did not say anything. She just took the auger back and drilled my hole next to hers.

The third problem was the rod. Willa’s ice rod is about as long as my tail, and the reel on it sits underneath, facing forward, with a little trigger. “Inline,” she said. “The line comes off straight, so the jig doesn’t spin. Perch hate a spinning jig.” She gave me the other rod, the one with a tiny ordinary spinning reel, size 500, which she said was the right first reel for a beaver on ice because it is cheap and I already know how to work it. Then she put a jig the size of a sunflower seed on the end and told me to drop it, not cast it. I cast it. It landed on the ice behind me. Willa did not move a feather.

Dropping is the whole trick. You open the bail, the jig goes down the hole, you close the bail and lift the rod tip a thumb’s width, then let it fall, then lift. Willa calls it “talking to the fish.” I called it boring for about four minutes. Then my rod tip bent, not much, a nod, and I lifted, and a yellow perch came up through the hole with ice crystals on its back and a very surprised face. I almost slapped my tail. The jacket was too thick to slap anything. Probably for the best.

We caught nine. Willa caught six, with her inline reel, one after another, like she was taking books off a shelf. I caught three, and lost one jig in the ice when I forgot which hole was mine. Willa also pulled up a pike as long as my arm, which she did not let me hold. She packed the fish in snow in the bucket I had been sitting on, and we walked back to shore with the sun going orange behind the pines.

Chef Tamás was already on the shore. He had walked down from the kitchen with a black kettle, an iron tripod and a bag of onions, and he had a fire going in the snow. He didn’t ask how many I caught. He took the bucket, cleaned the perch and the pike on a board right there with the thin bendy knife, and the heads and the bones went into the kettle first, with the onions. “The soup is in the bones,” he said. “The fillets are the reward.” Then, when the fire was down to coals and the kettle was off the heat, a whole handful of red paprika. He put the fillets in last, and he never stirred it. He held the kettle by the handle and shook it. “You stir it, you break the fish. You shake it, the fish stays whole.”

We ate it out of tin bowls, standing in the snow, with the lake going grey behind us. Willa ate hers in one go. I wrote “9 perch (3 mine) + 1 pike (not mine)” in my notebook with a pencil that had frozen a little. My paws were warm. The jacket was still too big. Willa says we go again next Saturday, and that this time I do not chew the auger.

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Sources: Outdoor Life (ice fishing reels, Cory Schmidt), Field & Stream (ice fishing reels, Derrek Sigler), Wired2Fish (Viper X test), Outdoor Life (fillet knives), Outdoor Life (thermoses), Piscifun store (sale prices checked October 25, 2026). The Piscifun picks and prices are in our Ice Fishing Sale guide. Tap a button for today’s price. Affiliate links: how we make money.

Gerzsi and Willa are made up. Chef Tamás, his fish soup, the gear, the sale and the test results are real.