At first, Les Blake had no idea what he was looking at.

"I froze for what seemed like 20 seconds or something. I was going, 'what — what IS that?'"

Turns out, it was a fish eating a fish — more specifically, a whopping 90-centimetre loche with its mouth wrapped around a whitefish, about half its size.

"He had a pretty good grip on the whitefish," Blake said.

Blake found the pair while pulling a day's catch out of his Uncle Georgie's fishing nets, which had been under the ice in the Red River near Tsiigehtchic, N.W.T. The whitefish was caught in the net by the tail.

It seems the loche — also known as burbot, or lingcod — had been just passing by, and spotted a seemingly convenient lunch.

"The loche wasn't even in the net at all. So when we pulled it out, the loche was free — he was just wagging his tail, and hanging onto the whitefish," Blake said.

"So that was really something to see."

Blake was impressed — Uncle Georgie, less so.

"Maybe 20, 30 years ago, when he first started, he used to see bigger loche, eating bigger fish," Blake said.

"That I would have loved to have seen."