by Gary Paulsen
More than a mile north, two, four, six miles up the river, it was almost literally a wilderness that seemed untouched by humans. There were wolves there, big slab-sided gray wolves that sometimes showed in the brush on the banks, and bear that worked the muddy sides of the river for clams, trying to stay ahead of the raccoons who hit the clams and crayfish like Genghis Khan hit Asia.
And fish.
Here in the north part of the river, well north of town, there were fish that had never seen a lure or a line.
Really big fish.
There were holes along the banks, muddy swirls that were ten, twelve feet deep, and down there in the dark water, just above the muddy bottom waiting for food were walleyes, their yellow eyes glowing in the murk.
Ten-, eleven-, twelve-pound walleyes.
The Cadillac of fish, according to an article Wayne had read in Sports Afield.
The difficulty was getting to them.
A walleye-fishing expedition started with finding a boat, and it was always difficult and sometimes seemed impossible and always made the trip seem more important than a fishing trip could ever be.
Willy’s uncle had a sister-in-law who owned an old beat-up cedar rowboat except that she didn’t have any oars, but Harlan’s father worked with a man who had a set of oars in his garage that he never used, but Willy’s uncle’s sister-in-law needed the boat that weekend because her nephew was coming to visit so maybe we should ask the nephew to come, except that he was a total jerkoff who had never been fishing and was from the city and thought he was something else (cool) only he wasn’t, but it didn’t matter because Steve found an old wooden bait boat that only leaked a little and we could carve paddles out of two boards.…
And finding the boat was only the beginning. The initial walleye expedition also started so many side endeavors that it was difficult to remember the true reason for it all.
When a boat was located, and oars either carved or found, there was still the gear. What rods to take, the kinds of hooks, the line, the bait …
The bait.
Walleyes almost never rose to a lure—this was before the realistic minnow lures used now. They ate food, real food, and the two kinds of bait that worked the best were night crawlers (not just plain worms) and frogs.
Both difficult to get.
Night crawlers couldn’t be dug because they were thought to be too deep. (Duane Severson used an extension cord plugged into a garage outlet and jammed two wires into the ground, trying to “shock” the night crawlers up; it might have worked, but Duane grabbed hold of the two wires just as his brother plugged the cord in and the experiment was called off rather suddenly.) But across the Ninth Street bridge in the woods near town there were old rotten logs, and during or just after a rain, if the logs were tipped quickly, the night crawlers were there and could be taken and stored in fresh dirt in a coffee can in the icebox—in those homes where this had not been tried before and the worms forgotten until a mother found them when they rotted. The smell of rotten worms in an icebox had a very dampening effect on family help for walleye expeditions.
Frogs were harder still.
There were almost no frogs in town. They had to be found in the river outside the city limits and stored to take in buckets on the trip. The difficulty lay in storing frogs. They couldn’t be kept in the icebox—at least not since Wayne had tried it and his mother opened the icebox to have about thirty of them jump out at her.
Much research had been done on storing frogs. It took a week and more to gather them, and they had to be saved in a cool, damp place, and they could get out of almost any container.
Nobody was sure but it was thought that Wayne’s dad or grandfather came up with the idea of the frog pit.
Whoever thought of it, frog pits sprang up all over the neighborhood. In back of every garage, the edges of gardens—anywhere and everywhere.
Two feet wide, three feet long, and at least three feet deep so the frogs couldn’t jump out, the pits would be covered with a piece of tin and some loose grass or straw, and the earth would keep it cool and damp. They were perfect, and in the week before a walleye expedition everybody involved in the trip would be working along the river in both directions from town gathering frogs to put in the pit.
This was very important. Walleyes hit only fresh frogs and it might take four or five frogs to get a single fish. Fishing all night could take a person dozens of frogs and a three-day trip with three or four boys.…
It took a lot of frogs.
This meant that after the week of gathering there might be four, five hundred frogs in a pit. Sometimes more than one pit was used, but frequently mothers and fathers objected and had the pits filled in and so often all the frogs would be in one pit—a deep, squirming, slimy mass of frogs crawling over each other about a foot deep.
For those of us who liked frogs and used them for bait it was a lovely sight. For others it was not always so lovely and there is probably still talk of the time Dennis Hansen’s mother was hanging clothes and stepped back from her clothesline directly into a pit full of frogs. This was long before women wore jeans or slacks very much and she had a dress on and sank with bare legs into a foot and a half of fresh frogs. The frogs immediately tried to use her legs to climb out and legend has it the sound she made—not a scream so much as a banshee wail—cracked the leaded glass windows on St. Mary’s Church nearly a block away.
Once the frogs and night crawlers were gathered, along with a can or two of regular worms in case no walleyes were found and it was necessary to fish for bullheads or panfish, it was time to turn to equipment.
It is probable that nothing is so important as equipment. Ever. Without equipment it is impossible to catch fish—the whole reason for the expedition would be lost without equipment.
Tackle boxes were not then the expensive and detailed, complete items they are now. None of us had anything new. Old rusty tackle boxes were found in the town dump with hinges gone and were fixed and sanded and painted carefully with names on them written with airplane model paint called dope for reasons that have never become clear. The tackle inside was usually limited to an extra roll of braided line, eight or nine snelled gut leaders (so called because they were then made with cat’s guts, as were tennis rackets and violin and guitar strings), and a small metal container with a rotating window for hooks in case the snelled hooks broke or were lost. There was also a scaler made by screwing three bottle caps to a wooden handle and an old pair of needle-nose pliers for getting hooks out when they went too deep. A knife might also be included except that it was usually not in the tackle box but carried in a pocket or on a belt.
There was also “secret” equipment. No matter how close the boys were, everybody had at least one secret kind of lure or bait or idea to try for the really big one.
The lunker.
These secrets often cost money, and by selling papers in bars at night, waiting for the drunks to get juiced enough to hustle them for an extra quarter, or setting pins at the bowling alley or mowing yards or even caddying at the country club for the rich fat ones, it was possible to get enough money for special lures or a scent to squirt on bait or even a new reel to be hidden until just the right moment. Maybe to drop it in a conversation.
“Yeah, I was going to try working that deep place over by the bank with some of this new stuff on the bait. I sent for it through Field and Stream.…”
And a boy would pull out a small glass bottle of scent or maybe a new lure he’d been hiding, and even if it didn’t work very well—and it seemed none of them did—it was still worth it just for the effect.
Finally it was all there.
Gear, more gear, equipment that had been cleaned and reels oiled with fine oil and knives sharpened and frogs and night crawlers put in buckets or cans, and everything had been checked and rechecked and rechecked again until it seemed things would be worn out from handling, and the boat was loaded, repacked, and reloaded, and on an early morning the expedition would at last b
e started.
Of course, it never worked like the plan.
Plans were always definite. Nights were spent sleeping over and making plans; talking until dawn about where it would be, how it would be, why it would be. Willy would actually draw pencil maps showing the whole river from where we started with detailed docks and houses along the way, every bend lined in accurately with possible holes where walleyes might be. There were drawings of these walleyes and other sketches of bullheads and northerns that looked like monsters, and the maps lost nothing because Willy had never been up the river on such an expedition before or maybe both eyes on a walleye seemed to be on the same side of the head. It was the effort that counted, and when a bend appeared on the real river that wasn’t on the map or when the map showed a dock or house that wasn’t really on the river nobody made fun of Willy. He kept a notebook and made corrections carefully, measuring distances with his eye and plotting possible good fishing locations as the boys rowed up the river.
Somehow all the boats we ever had were impossible to row easily, probably because they were old and heavy and always loaded way past good sense so there were only two or three inches of freeboard between the edge of the boat and the water. Three or four boys, what seemed tons of gear, a boat that was at best simply heavy, at worst waterlogged and just looking for an excuse to sink or capsize—all being powered by homemade paddles or old oars.
The trip was the hardest part.
Always when it started there was talk of getting far north.
“We’ve got to get up to the wild part,” someone would say. “Where there aren’t any people.”
But miles take on new meaning when you are bucking the current; and there were some bends in the river where the current gained speed on the outside edge and it was quite possible to paddle or row as hard as we could and still the boat would sit in the same place, endlessly nosing into the current.
A trip that started by measuring miles on Willy’s map ended with blisters and aching muscles not in miles but in effort, not in reaching wilderness but in reaching as far as one could reach before collapsing on the oars or paddles.
It was wild enough. Farms disappeared soon heading north, and within two miles the river closed in with thick brush and snarled wild grapevines that produced grapes so sour even Willy, who read a lot and called the grapes “Indian candy” and said Indians loved them, couldn’t eat more than one or two without puckering and throwing up.
A place to stop was found, was fallen into, was delivered by God, at the end of the day just when dusk was coming, bringing the inevitable clouds of mosquitoes. It is important to note that this was not “camping.” Camping was an art form in and of itself and had almost nothing to do with fishing.
Walleye expeditions were different from northern pike expeditions because walleyes, always bit best in the night and northerns in the day and walleyes were for food more than sport, although there were those who said walleye meat wasn’t all that good, was kind of flat, not as good as bullheads.
When a place was selected, a lean-to was erected and a fire made—the lean-to not to sleep in but for shelter in case it rained, and the fire not for cooking but to make smoke to keep mosquitoes away while the work at hand was performed, the hard work of fishing.
Frogs were hooked through the lower lip and left alive and moving, except by Willy, who stunned them by hitting them against a log before hooking them through the brain, which of course killed them. His argument was that they died anyway, drowned, but others pointed out that they moved for a while and during that time the big walleyes would go for them, and like many differences it was never resolved.
The frogs were hooked on a snelled leader, then a fairly heavy sinker was crimped on the line—this was prior to the rubber-twister sinkers and all that existed were the straight lead sinkers with fold-over tabs—about four feet above the hook, and the whole business was cast out into the middle of a hole or eddy or deep spot and left to sink on the bottom.
Walleyes were notoriously slow-mouthed and would come in the night, nose the frog, and work their mouth around it, and all of this must be felt with two fingers on the line; the different stages must be felt in the darkness with a low fire to make smoke and talking in whispers when talking at all. When the walleye first approached, when he opened his mouth and moved it over the frog, when he closed his mouth and his teeth grated gently on the line—everything about them had to be sensed through forty feet of braided nylon line and a gut leader. And when it was time, when the fish’s mouth was over the frog, when all of that was felt to be correct, the hook could be set.
The hands lowered gently from the line to the cork handle of the rod, the handle was grasped slowly, carefully, and in a sudden swooping motion the rod raised up and back to drive the hook sticking through the frog’s lip up and into the roof of the walleye’s mouth, slamming past the barbs to hook him.
Many small ones are caught. The night is long, and though they stop biting well before dawn and many small ones are caught, nobody stops fishing until there is light and it is necessary to sleep, because there is always hope; there is always the soft prayer that in the bottom of the river, in the murk, there is a fish so large, a lunker of all lunkers waiting there, waiting to take your frog and your rod and whip them, twist them, and make you fight for your very place on shore.
That it never comes, that four-, five-pounders are there but the great gray-green monsters never come through the long night, or another long night, does not matter.
It is the trying that counts.
Northerns in the Lily Pads
Day expeditions, when not working for walleyes but for northern pike, were similar to night-fishing trips except that more art was involved.
Fishing for walleyes took skill, but it was largely static, slow—sitting for hours in the smoke from the campfire, touching the line with the fingers, waiting for the grating of their teeth.
Northern pike were an entirely different matter.
There were three times to fish for northerns. The first was in the spring, right after the suckers ran, when the northerns took lures readily. The second time was in the middle of summer, and the last time was in the fall.
Fishing for northerns in the summer was like mounting a big-game hunt in Africa. It was very serious and focused on one thing and one thing only: using artificial lures to catch northern pike, preferably lures made by hand.
Nobody seemed to know when self-made lures started but everybody knew why—none of the boys could afford factory-made except for the red-and-white or black-and-white spoons known as daredevils. The daredevils worked well enough in the spring, and even through the summer, but usually worked only on smaller fish and were very hard to use in thick weeds or snags because they sank so quickly and the hooks were exposed so openly. Wooden plugs, made in the shape of a large minnow and painted to look like a fish or a red-and-white spark plug would float until the reeling-in phase of the cast started—when a lip would pull them under and set up the action. This meant the plug could be cast into a bad place next to a dead tree or snag—where large northerns liked to hunt for smaller fish—then pulled gently and slowly along the surface until it was clear and the fast-reeling retrieve could be started.
Plug-making went on all winter, a way to remember summer fishing when the snow was deep. Treble hooks and lip-spoons and eyelets could be ordered from sporting goods mail-order houses, and good plugs could be made for fifteen or twenty cents. They were carved of soft pine and sanded in the streamlined shape of a minnow or small fish and painted with airplane model dope, either with rib bones down the side and a dark back and green sides and bottom, or simply red and white—the front, or head, bright red and the rest of the body white.
Offbeat plugs first appeared one winter when a new boy moved in and had never fished for northerns. He painted realistic plugs like minnows, showing not just ribs but eyes and gill slits and mouths, like Flying Tiger aircraft. He also started the thought that the bigger the plug the
bigger the fish, which culminated in Gene Tray making a plug nearly a foot long with five sets of treble hooks down the bottom and the end of a kitchen spoon for a diving lip under the chin. It looked good and everybody was anxious to try it, but it proved a disaster because his reel wasn’t strong enough to take the weight of the plug during a cast. The first time he tried it the line fed out about ten feet and snarled in a horrendous backlash. It hung, the plug moving close to a hundred and fifty miles an hour, and hit the end of the line, bent the rod out and down and whipped up, around and back and buried three sets of hooks in the back of Gene’s head. Four of the hooks went in well past the barb, driven in with tremendous force, some of them stuck deep in the skull itself, and the boys couldn’t get them out even with fishing pliers. It was four miles back to town on bicycles, and Gene had to pedal all the way in with that wooden fish hanging out of the back of his head and that pretty much marked the end of trying with big plugs.
Moving out for northerns usually meant something of a military operation. In the summer the big northerns seemed to hole up where it was almost impossible to get to them. There were small lakes out around town where a boat wouldn’t fit, but we could work to the shore through thick brush and we would bicycle out to them. Some lakes were ten miles away, and this was before thin-tired—what were called “English”—bicycles. We had huge steel beasts with fat balloon tires and shock-absorber front forks that weighed sixty or seventy pounds, and pedaling them ten miles on a gravel road, especially if the wind was wrong, could be a nightmare.
Northerns struck best early in the morning and in the evening, so we would leave when it was still dark, three-thirty or four in the morning, rods across the handlebars, hoping to reach the lake when it was still good for fishing.
They were very wary, so when we arrived at the lake each person would take a sector and work down to the shore through the brush carefully, quietly.