“Let’s do it.” Harry grabbed a pair of fins and his face mask. “I wonder what’s hiding out down there in the cedar logs?”
“We’ll see soon enough.”
I tied off the canoe to a cedar stump and stripped to my red nylon Heldendorf racing trunks. Harry was already in the water, adjusting his fins and spitting on the glass of his face mask, spreading it in a thin film to prevent fogging. He rinsed the mask lightly in the water and slipped it on. I eased over the side, careful not to capsize the canoe, and joined him.
“Move quiet,” I said. “We don’t want to spook anything down there.”
The pool was maybe twenty feet. We dove without splashing and finned our way down, clearing our ears en route. I could see feathers of sand squirting from vents in the marl bottom, the springs at work, feeding the Firesteel. We ghosted down toward the logs.
They don’t grow cedars like that anymore. Some of them looked to be a yard through at their bases. Thirty, forty feet long. All neatly sawed and limbed, felled by the crosscut crews back in Paul Bunyan times. They must have broken loose from a logging raft during the spring breakup half a century ago or more, hung up here in the swamp, then got waterlogged over the years and sunk. Nowadays loggers take them before they mature. If you could retrieve these logs, snag them the hell out of here and dry them out, you’d make a tidy penny. Maybe after Korea . . . .
Harry pointed ahead, down toward the bottom. A pod of medium-sized brook trout gathered around the biggest spring vent, circling it as if hypnotized. They paid us no heed. I nodded to indicate that I saw them. Harry shook his head and pointed again, into a blueblack shadow cast by the thickest cedar log. I looked closer. Then I saw it, a long, dark, torpedo-shaped form, almost motionless except for the barely perceptible sideways sweep of its tail. Harry swam closer. The fish looked to be a yard long, maybe more. With the magnification provided by the face mask, they always seem bigger than they turn out to be. I glanced over at Harry and raised my eyebrows. Wow! Then gestured toward the surface.
“Either that’s the biggest brook trout in history,” he said when we’d caught our breath, “or it’s M-Moby Sturgeon.”
“I’d vote for sturgeon.”
“But I didn’t see any bony plates or whiskers and the tail seemed symmetrical. I looked pretty close.”
“You’re not wearing your glasses, Hairb.”
“At that range I don’t need ’em. I was only about six feet from him. Christ, Ben, he makes that brookie I caught in the first pool look like a minnow.” Harry swam back to the canoe. “I’m g-gonna take the spear gun and have another look.”
“Could be a giant brown,” I said. “One of those cannibals you read about. The guy in Tomahawk told me the stretch below the swamp is brown trout water. You don’t want to spear a trophy German brown. Not when we could take it on a fly.”
“I’m only bringing the spear for p-protection,” Harry said. “See you in a m-minute or two.”
“Go get ’em, Ahab,” I said.
Peering from the surface through the mask, I watched him finning slow and easy down toward the log. He was approaching it against the current, in the fish’s blind spot. When he got to the log, he ducked to the very bottom on the side away from the shadow. He pulled himself forward along the rotting bark. Big chunks of it pulled loose in his hand and spun away lazily in the stream. Clots of bark and waterbugs spiraled toward the surface. When he was opposite the darker shadow of the fish, he pulled himself up and peered over the top. Suddenly the shadow moved into the sunlight—a long, dark-flashing flick of muscle and mocha brown flecked with a galaxy of black spots, butter yellow along the vast bulge of its belly—the biggest brown trout I’d ever seen. Its jaws were hooked, its amber eye huge.
Gone in an instant, upstream . . . .
Harry burst through the surface a moment later and yanked off his mask. His eyes were sparking. “You were right! A giant brown! My God, did you ever see a t-trout like that?”
“Never. He’s got to go twenty pounds or better. A cannibal all right, and this pool’s his cafeteria. Let’s come back tonight when the moon rises and have a shot at him.”
Harry bobbed his head up and down, grinning. “You’re on!”
2
THE CANNIBAL-KILLER
We made camp on a gravel bar a few hundred yards below the swamp, under a cutbank that would protect us from the night wind. There was plenty of time until dark. While I collected water-smoothed stones for a fire ring, Harry took the ax and wandered back into the meadow of deadfalls to gather wood. I pulled the tarp off the canoe and rigged a lean-to with a couple of dead, fire-hardened pine poles to serve as end poles, trimming them to size with my handy-dandy K-Bar knife, weighting the windward edge with heavy rocks. Then hauled the sleeping bags, gun cases, and orange crates up to the shelter. I gathered sticks for kindling, pulled over a big, barkless log of beached driftwood and placed it upwind of the makeshift firepit for us to sit on. Then I went up into the field to help Harry with the firewood. I could hear him thudding away, cussing, before I got to the top of the bank.
“This ax is dull,” he said when I came up. He had a sizable pile of pine branches stacked beside the blowdown already. They looked less chopped to length than chewed.
“There’s a new invention on the market,” I said. “It’s called a file. In combination with a whetstone, it works miracles on dull steel. You might think of getting one. Maybe even both.”
“I’ve got a file somewhere in that pile of crap I brought along, but I never remember to use it.”
“This is firewood enough anyway,” I said. “Let’s haul it back to camp.”
Halfway to the river Harry veered a bit to the right and called me over. “Take a look at this,” he said. “I spotted it earlier coming up.”
In a low, wet swale was a fresh pawprint, broad at the toes, narrow at heel. As long at least as my own foot, size eleven. Three inches out from the toetips were the indentations of its claws, thick around as a No. 2 pencil.
“Black bear,” he said. “And there’s a big shit pile over there aways, full of seed hulls.” He pointed with his chin toward a thicket of blackberry bushes.
“Looks pretty recent,” I said. “He’s a big guy. Or gal. Fattening up for winter. Fuck. I just hauled the food boxes up from the canoe.” I looked around. The only trees near our campsite were a few spindly aspens a hundred yards or so downstream. “No trees tall or strong enough to cache it in, either.”
“Maybe the fire will keep him away, and we’ve got the guns if it comes to that.”
“Bird shot will only piss the bastard off.”
“I brought along a box of slugs, just in case,” he said.
“Christ,” I said.
“Maybe he’s moved on,” Harry said.
“Let’s hope so.”
There was a bit of a nip to the air now with the sun low on the pine-spiked horizon. Long cool shadows stretched across the meadows, and the wind had the taste of ice. I got the fire going. Harry rummaged around in his duffel bag and I heard the clank of glass on metal. “Ta-da!” he said, turning toward me with a triumphant grin. He held up a bottle of Johnny Walker Black Label and a couple of tin cups. “I liberated this from my dad’s liquor cabinet. For medicinal purposes only, of course. But as a member of the profession, albeit somewhat junior, I hereby officially diagnose us as suffering from incipient hypothermia, dehydration, scrofula, and, uh, d-d-dengue fever, the specific for which is Squire Black’s Peerless Elixir, such as that contained in this phial. The recommended dosage, the American Medical Association assures me, is half a cup, diluted to taste with cold, crystalline branch water. Repeat frequently if necessary.”
“Not too frequently, one hopes,” I said. “Not with that bear on the prowl, and a cannibal brown waiting for us.”
We dined that night on fried brook trout and onions, boiled potatoes with plenty of salt and black pepper, and a watercress salad fresh from the Firesteel, slathered with Hellman’s Mirac
le Whip for dressing. We shared a river-chilled can of sliced peaches for dessert. They slid down smooth in their syrup. There was, after all, something to be said for luxury. I hadn’t eaten near that good at Parris Island.
We sat beside the fire after dinner, me sipping black coffee and Harry noodling around on his saxophone while we waited for the moonrise. It occurred to me that I hadn’t thought once of Korea since we got on the river. I wasn’t scared, but I sure was nervous about it. Despite all the gung-ho crap they fed us at boot camp, I wasn’t ready yet to die for the Crotch, as the old World War II Marine vets called it. Our DI at Parris Island was a lifer from Louisiana, Staff Sergeant Beauregard Stingley, an old China hand. He’d taken a face full of Japanese grenade fragments on Peleliu and his skin was pitted like the moon. He wore a wicked little cookie duster of a mustache, jet black, and his eyes were cold as a shark’s. The foulest-mouthed man in America. “You were born from the crotch, and you’ll die for the Crotch,” he told us every day. “You’ll die for your buddies, and they’ll die for you. That’s the way it works. You’ll charge machine guns and throw yourselves on grenades and be blown to fuckin’ bits. But your buddies will collect every last little motherfuckin’ chunk they can find of your sorry butt so they can bury it with you. I’ve peeled jarhead tongues and eyeballs from the hot coral of Bloody Nose Ridge, and untangled miles of ripe jungle green guts from the mangroves at the mouth of the Tenaru, and you’ll do the same or worse in Korea. Get used to the idea, you candyass pogues. It’s your motherfuckin’ future. The loyalty of the Crotch.”
Bloody Nose Ridge, I learned later, was the Jap strongpoint called Umurbrogol on Peleliu that was supposed to be an easy walkover but turned the campaign into ten weeks of hell. That’s where S.Sgt. Beauregard Stingley, then a PFC, caught his kisser-load of steel. The Tenaru River was on Guadalcanal. Tough old Sergeant Stingley’s dead and gone now, fifty years later, but I still dream about those tongues of his.
The main post-prandial question confronting our two-man debating society was what to throw at the monster brown. We sorted through our flyboxes by the flickering light of the campfire, looking for something enticing. Dries wouldn’t work, not even our largest, nor would nymphs. Nothing buggy. This guy liked sushi, and he liked it alive and twitching.
“What we really need here is a streamer,” I said.
“None of those brookies we saw in the pool were very big,” Harry said. “He’s probably scarfed down all the good-sized ones.” He opened a flybox and pulled out a fistful of long-shanked ties—old patterns like the Gray Ghost, Yellow Butcher, and Parmachene Belle; an assortment of Muddler Minnows in various sizes; darters both gold and silver; a couple of gaudy Mickey Finns.
“The Mickey Finn’s a good attractor, all right,” I said. “And the Parmachene Belle imitates the pectoral fin of a brookie. But we need something big and meaty for this guy. A great hairy muddler, maybe a Number 2, bigger than anything we’ve got in here, or better yet a long, shaggy bucktail—something in red and white and green and a touch of yellow, like a small brook trout.”
“Wait a minute.” Harry went back to the canoe and rummaged around in the bow. He came back with a tackle box full of bait-casting hardware: silver spoons, Bass-O-Renos, Dardevles, Pikey Minnows, and such like. “I figured we might troll one of these things from that telephone pole of yours if we came to some long, dull stretches, you know, downriver aways. But I think there’s a big bucktail in here somewheres. My dad uses it for northerns and muskies.” He clanked around in there a bit, then said, “Voilà!”
He showed me a long, bushy hunk of deerhair dyed in all the aforementioned colors. It was perfect. We cannibalized the lure, discarding the heavy 4/0 hook, and then stripped a beat-up White Marabou down to its No. 4 Mustad-Viking longshank. In lieu of a fly vise, I held the hook in the firelight with a pair of needlenose pliers while Harry, who already had a surgeon’s deft hand with knots, tied it to my directions—weighting the hook first with a thin strip of hammered lead, then wrapping the shank to the bend in leftover oval silvery tinsel, winging the fly in long strands of white and red bucktail topped with green peacock herl from our bag of spare feathers, and touching it off with cheeks of jungle cock flecked in yellow. After he’d whip-finished the tie, we daubed on a hefty drop of black lacquer for a head.
“Okay,” I said as we waited for the lacquer to dry, “now what do we do about the bear? We can’t just leave this food lying around camp. He’ll smell it a mile off. But if we put it back in the canoe, it’ll be a bitch paddling upstream to the pool. Remember that stretch of rapids just when we left the swamp?”
“I think he’s gone,” Harry said. “Skedaddled. Moved on to greener pastures. He’d about cleaned out that blackberry patch, from what I could see, and they travel far and fast in the fall. He’s probably clear over to Antigo by now.”
“Well, if you say so. Most of that chow is yours, anyway. I was figuring on us living off the land on this trip. Let’s just take a light load in the canoe, the necessaries—matches, the coffee, salt and pepper, maybe that tin of lard to grease the skillet.”
“And a loaf of Wonder Bread, along with the peanut butter and strawberry jam. I might get hungry around midnight.”
The moon, waning toward its last quarter, sneaked over the horizon at about ten o’clock. Coyotes hailed it in the distance, their yelps and yips and yodels coming faint to us as the country turned cold silver, peened flat in the moonlight. We paddled back upriver by its dim glow. The canoe rode high in the water now and we made good time. There was a snag sticking up in the midstream shallows just below the rapids, shuddering in the current. We tied the canoe off to it, dropping the mushroom anchor as an extra precaution, and waded wet to the far bank, carrying our flyrods and a flashlight. I led the way with the light. Harry carried the makings of his midnight snack in a brown paper bag. The water was cold, below fifty I reckoned.
The going in the swamp was tricky. The gravel of the river-bottom quickly gave way to marl and black muck. It sucked at our sneakers and sometimes with a misstep we sank to knee depth. I eased over to the bank of the channel and tried to walk the tops of drowned sawlogs but they were slick with algae. To do it right you needed the balance of a gibbon. Mosquitoes were out in force by now, and we’d forgotten the Old Woodsman’s. Harry fell twice. With the second splash he cursed out loud. “Fuck! I think I got the Wonder Bread wet.”
“Pipe down,” I whispered. “Cannibal browns have sharp ears.
We slogged to the edge of the big pool, where we found the footing slippery but a bit firmer, then hunkered down to watch and listen. The moonlight glinted on the dead calm water and the pool’s bottom seemed to glow with a faint, dancing incandescence. The sunken cedar logs looked like submarines down there. We could see a few small shadows still circling at the spring vents but no sign of the big brown. But he could be in the shadows of the logs, which were blacker by now than Sergeant Stingley’s mustache. And twice as ominous.
Back at camp we’d flipped for first cast and Harry’d won. He had the new-tied bucktail clinch-knotted on a 2X tippet, taking extra care in lubricating the turns with saliva and drawing it tight with the pliers. We’d named our invention “The Firesteel Cannibal-Killer,” christening it with a splash of Johnny Walker.
“Give it a shot,” I whispered. “Lay it out parallel to the log where we saw him, and let it sink good and deep.”
“I know, I know. What do you think I am, a baby?”
“No. Babies eat pablum, not peanut butter and jelly. And watch your backcast in here. You don’t wanna get hung up and lose our best fly.”
“Fuck you, d-d-daddy-o,” he said.
He rolled the heavy streamer clear of the water, then loaded the rod up with two flat backcasts and threw a long, tight, forty-foot loop. The line snaked out straight and the Cannibal-Killer dropped to the surface with a hollow plop. We could see the fly sinking fast and squirrelly through the translucence. Just short of the log he checked its descent and be
gan stripping in. Short, erratic strips at first, then a long one, then three more short. The streamer looked nearly a foot long down there, pulsing back in toward us magnified by water and moonlight, the deerhair undulating and swelling, then thinning again, like the pumping of a fish’s gills.
“Looks good enough to eat,” I said.
Two of the bigger brookies agreed. They darted up from their holding pattern near the vent toward the Cannibal-Killer, slowing as they approached it, then tailed it along the log for a ways before losing interest. Harry brought the fly in. No sign of Mr. Big.
“Give it half a dozen more casts, from different angles.”
He nodded.
Harry worked the streamer every which way we could think of, varying his retrieves with each cast, fast and slow and in between, deep and shallow, short pulls and long, twitchy ones, even changing the direction of the Cannibal-Killer’s route from time to time by swinging his rod tip right or left, up and down. Nothing doing.
“There’s nobody home,” he said at last.
“He could be up in the channel or one of the other pools. You want to go have a look-see?”
“It’s your turn to throw,” he said, handing me the rod. “Have at it. I’m gonna make myself a midnight snack. This flycasting is hard work. Gives a man an appetite.” He opened the loaf of Wonder Bread and began slathering on the goop with his hunting knife.
I circled the big pool alone, wading waist- and sometimes tit-deep through marl and icewater, holding the rod high over my head with the Cannibal-Killer secured in the Payne’s keeper-ring. Mosquitoes browsed on my neck and face, batting around with frantic zings in my nostrils and earholes. Tough going. I stopped often to look and listen, careful to make as little noise and disturbance as possible when I moved, especially as I entered the upstream feeder channel. It was dark in there, kind of spooky. The marl was like quicksand, and with every forward step I worried that I might hit a sinkhole. Harry would have a hell of a time hauling me out. Just by themselves, peanut butter and jelly had a soporific effect on him, like a cup of hot cocoa and two sleeping pills before nap time. I suspected he’d smuggled a tin of sardines along—he didn’t like my kidding him about that childhood addiction—and I knew that the combination of fish oil, peanut oil, and sugared strawberries worked on him like a left hook from Sugar Ray Robinson. But I’d waded plenty of swamps before, especially on the long night marches with full field pack at Parris Island, where the sunken sawlogs had a way of turning into alligators when you stepped on them. “Gators like pogue-meat,” Sergeant Stingley said. “Nice and sweet and tender. It’s like candy to them. If one of ’em rears up and roars at you, just stick your rifle down his throat and squeeze the trigger. Give him a lead headache. That’ll cool him off.”
The Run to Gitche Gumee Page 2