The Run to Gitche Gumee

by Robert F. Jones

  A short way up the channel I heard splashing ahead. It was loud in the silence of the swamp, magnified by the darkness, it seemed. My first thought was ducks—those mergansers we spooked earlier. But the splashes sounded bigger than anything a preening duck would make, and not near as regular. I eased my way forward, bent low beneath a cedar bough, then straightened up slow and easy. The narrow, kinky waterway ahead of me was partially lit by moonlight, stronger now than an hour earlier when the moon was low on the horizon. Something was working the right-hand edge of the channel. Quick silver flurries threw water wide on the rippling flowage. It pattered like falling birdshot. Then I saw a huge shiny back break the surface—otter, I thought. But it was followed by the rise of a broad, finned, forked tail.

  The cannibal brown.

  He was only about fifty feet away. I looked up and behind me to see if I had clearance for my backcast, but the cedars were too close. If I could only move ahead about twenty feet, I’d have a chance at him. He was preoccupied, busy rooting some hapless fish or bullfrog out of the brush roots. Maybe he wouldn’t notice me. Crouching low, I snuck forward, the rod angled flat to the water. Like aquatic deer-stalking, I thought. No quick moves, no noise, move slow but steady. Then I was close enough. I unhooked the streamer from its ring and stripped off thirty feet of flyline, holding the big loops loose in my left hand. I’d only have time for one quick backcast. Again I checked overhead and behind me. Okay, this is it.

  I picked up ten feet of line and leader, snapped it out low behind me, the Payne loading up quick and heavy with the crisp, sure, elastic flexion of bamboo, then zipped the cast out tight to the water. The Cannibal-Killer splashed down with an attention-getting splat, ten feet ahead of my target and just a short way out toward the center of the channel. Right where I wanted it. Keep it shallow, I thought, so he can see it against the moonlight. I started stripping, a long, leisurely, lah-de-dah pull at first, brookie out for a midnight stroll, then picking up the pace as if the stroller sensed or saw its nemesis back there in the shadows and was scurrying to escape. Perhaps my own anxiety communicated itself up the rod and line, broadcasting a signal of panic, because in an instant the big brown turned from its hunt in the brush pile, flashed toward midstream with a visible bow wave, and slammed the streamer. Hard. The rod shuddered and I pulled back with my line hand. The No. 4 Mustad bit home.

  I raised the rod tip with a whoop.

  The channel exploded as the cannibal brown soared out full length, throwing water every which way—long and thick and dark and writhing like an irate anaconda. The hook of his kyped jaws ugly in the moonlight. Then he took off upchannel to the scream of the reel. I couldn’t hold him, couldn’t turn him, anymore than I could have held back the Midnight Special at full steam. Line whizzed off the spool as I sloshed after him up the waterway, the electric feel of him coming down the rod and up my arm like an ampule of adrenaline straight to the heart. I could hear Harry splashing behind me now, blowing hard. He’d come fast at my whoop.

  We staggered and splashed ahead, me cranking in line when I could but losing more in the next step, slipping and skidding over drowned logs, feet snagged in soggy snarls of rotting brush, then breaking free, and at last we were at the rim of the next pool. The bottom sloped off and I stopped, burying the heels of my tennis shoes into the muck.

  The cannibal brown sounded.

  Thank God.

  In the moonlight I could see the glint of bare metal at the heart of the spool. Only a few wraps of backing left.

  I could feel him shaking his head, deep in the pool. He was mightily pissed.

  Harry slogged up beside me, wet to the top of his crewcut. I raised the rod tip and dropped it, trying to pump the fish. He only shook his head harder. I tapped the rod butt with the heel of my hand. No go.

  “I can’t move him,” I said. “He’s down there and he won’t budge.” The Payne was bowed in a perfect, quivering arc. “You want to feel him?”

  “Gimme.”

  I handed the rod to Harry and he shifted angles on the hook, moving the rod tip steeply to the left, then the right. Sometimes you can tip a fish on its side that way, confuse it, addle it, and then it gives up. The danger with this tactic, of course, is that you’ll enlarge the hole in the fish’s lip and the hook might pull free. We’d learned over the years to turn fish on their backs before trying to remove the hook. A trout or bass or even a big northern pike goes almost comatose when you show its belly to the sky.

  But this guy wouldn’t tip over.

  “How was your sandwich?”

  “Delicious.”

  I could smell sardines on his breath. “Up to your old kindergarten tricks again, I see. Or whiff. What’s wrong with just plain peanut butter and jelly? It’s an American classic. Only a geek would add fish.”

  “It’s the new taste sensation,” he said. “Ambrosia. They serve it in all the best restaurants from Palm Beach to New York. Hemingway himself invented it, back when he was a poor, struggling young pederast in Paris. If you weren’t such a stodgy, unimaginative troll, you’d try it yourself. And lay offa me, why don’t you?”

  At that moment the cannibal brown said to hell with it. He took off upstream again. “Oh, fuck!” Harry yelped. The reel screamed. He leaned back against the surge, the rod bowed even steeper, the tip bounced once, twice—then snapped up straight.

  I could swear I heard the hook pull loose, a hundred and ninety feet away.

  “Shit house mouse,” Harry intoned.

  When we got back to camp, we saw that the bear—as it were—had eaten our homework.

  3

  “SERVIVERS WILL BE PERSSACUTED!”

  To give us a taste of what awaited our sorry butts in Korea, Sergeant Stingley one day marched the platoon out into the boonies and had us hunker down in a sandbagged bunker. The bunker was hopping with sand fleas. All the woods and swampgrass in the vicinity had been chewed up and pulped, pounded flat by machine-gun fire. An abandoned sharecropper’s shack still stood about two hundred yards from us, all rotting boards and swaybacked roof, the windows fanged with shards of glass. Sergeant Stingley carried an SCR-563, what the doggies call a walkie-talkie. He called in the map coordinates of the shack to a mortar pit half a mile away. Way off through the swamp we heard a whump, then a long moment of silence broken only by the whine of mosquitoes, then a whuffling high in the sky that rose in pitch to a loud throaty whistle as it descended. The sharecropper’s shack disappeared in an ear-splitting gout of orange and black. The ground shook. Wood splinters and clods of hard-baked clay bounced off our helmets. “That’s just a small fuckin’ hint of what a 81mm mortar round can fuckin’ do,” Stingley said. “We’ve got one now that’s fuckin’ 4.2 inches in fuckin’ diameter.”

  When the dirt settled and the cordite fumes cleared, the shack looked like what was left that night of our camp on the Firesteel. The bear had left by the time we crunched ashore on the gravel bar. Our fire had died down, but when we got it blazing again, we saw what was left of our gear scattered all over the place. The bear had smashed most of the orange crates to splinters, eaten all of Harry’s Wonder Bread, including the wax-paper wrappers, chewed up the cans of chili and spaghetti and spit out the mangled metal, covered the sleeping bags with a snowfall of Quaker Oats, holed the evaporated milk tins and sucked them dry, emptied Aunt Jemima on the tarp and licked up most of the pancake mix. He must have absconded with the jar of brown sugar. Harry searched through the debris with the flashlight but couldn’t find it anywhere. He did find his horn though, still safe and snug in its case. He whooped with joy, took it out, and blew a quick riff around “Yankee Doodle.”

  Then his eyes went all squirrelly. He glared at me.

  “Where are the guns?” he shouted. “I can’t find the guns!” His eyes all white at the edges, round in the dance of the firelight.

  “Don’t get your knickers in a twist,” I said. “They’re under the bug netting in the bottom of the canoe, under the ammo box. I knew this mig
ht happen and I didn’t want ’em busted up or the barrels dinged. We’ll need some firepower to keep us in meat the rest of the way downriver.”

  “Fuck downriver,” Harry said. He stepped back to the canoe and retrieved his Model 21. He sorted through the shell boxes and came up with a couple of rifled slugs. “I want revenge, right now. That big fucking b-bully made off with my sardines.”

  “Don’t be an asshole. He’s at least half a mile away by now, and even if you did catch up with him, you couldn’t be sure of hitting him in the dark. Not fatally at least, not with only two rounds in your tubes.”

  “G-g-goddamit,” he said. He sat down heavily on the driftwood log by the fire and I thought he was going to cry. “I was looking forward to oatmeal and brown sugar for breakfast.”

  “And sardines for dessert, no doubt.”

  I was examining the sleeping bags for damage. Only a few claw rips, some kapok poking out, easily mended with the USMC sewing kit, what they call a “housewife,” I’d brought along in my fieldpack. “It’s okay,” I told him. “I’ll get up early and catch us a few trout for breakfast.”

  After checking the perimeter to make sure the bear was really gone, we spread the sleeping bags on the warm, dry sand near the fire. Harry settled in while I kept the first watch. Our loaded shotguns lay beside us. I made a pot of coffee and poured me a cup. Before Parris Island, I’d always put lots of cream and sugar in it, but Sergeant Stingley caught me drinking a cup of sweet, white Java in the mess hall one day and chewed me out royally for all kinds of a pogue. “What’s that fuckin’ slop you’re drinking, Slate Head? Looks like cum mixed with fuckin’ dishwater. Has that got fuckin’ milk in it? What’s the fuckin’ problem, you miss your mommy’s titty?” The other guys in the platoon had a good laugh. Now I drank it black, and actually preferred it that way. Wonder why.

  It was nice sitting there slumped against the log in my fart-sack, owls hooting in the dark across the river, stars scattered like powdered sugar overhead. Now and then a shooting star whizzed across the sky, like a tracer round from God’s machine guns, and once a night heron squawked as it flapped upriver, wondering at the flames along the shore. Quok? I got to thinking about Lorraine. She was my steady in high school, a dark-haired girl with big tits. My first. I remembered every detail: the threadbare upholstery in the front seat of my dad’s old Plymouth, parked along the Pigeon River one fall night after a movie, her straddling me as I sat with her skirt hiked up over her hips and her skivvie shorts dangling from the gearshift. A night very much like this one, except that the car radio was humming, turned down low, and the windows were all steamed up. Teresa Brewer, I think it was—“Till I Waltz Again with You.” Or maybe that was later. But still, it sure was some waltz. I was so grateful that I pledged undying love. Fidelity forevermore. Then Korea exploded. Other passions prevailed. When I joined the Marines, I broke it off with her. It didn’t seem fair, either to Lorraine or to me. I’d be gone for four years. My fidelis from then on would have to be semper all right, but to the real Crotch, not hers, sweet as it was. And yet . . . And yet right now, and many a night at Parris Island, God knows, I missed her. Missed her bad.

  Well, there’s always tomorrow. Nothing is irrevocable, I thought. Nothing is forever. A guy can always change his mind. If this trip came off according to our time schedule, I’d still have three or four days before I had to shove off for Camp Pendleton. Maybe, if I still felt this way when we got back to town, I’d give Lorraine a call.

  When the Big Dipshit had clocked four hours around Polaris, I kicked Harry awake. Poured him a cup of joe, handed over the pump gun, and hit the rack. I slept like a poleaxed Hereford.

  A cold, dank ground fog shrouded the country when we awoke, but it burned off fast as the sun gained strength. While Harry searched the bear’s trail for more of his gear and goodies, I waded the undercut banks clear up to the swamp, throwing nymphs—a pheasant tail at first, then a gold-ribbed hare’s ear that worked its usual glittery magic in the early morning light. All Harry could find in his treasure hunt were a handful of spoons and forks, a bottle of ketchup, and the jar of Miracle Whip, with toothmarks the size of 30-caliber bulletholes through the lid. We shoved off after a breakfast of fried brook trout, black coffee, and two dry slices of toasted Wonder Bread from Harry’s remaining loaf.

  For fifteen miles below the spring pools the Firesteel runs clear and cold over beds of glacial till, through country scalped flat by loggers half a century earlier: old white pine country now sprouting thickets of popple and alder, tamarack and yellow jack-pine, studded with giant stumps that hunker amid the second growth like hobnails on the soles of Paul Bunyan’s boots. Mountains of slash decay in the woods. Deer fled at our approach, waving tall white flags of alarm. Twice we passed the ruins of old logging camps, the shacks and sheds still standing, furred in lavender lichen.

  The water was strong, smooth, broken in spots by easy riffles. Good running. For the first hour I paddled and steered from the stern while Harry threw wet flies close to the bank—cast, big upstream mend, strip, strip, strip, then pick up the line and cast again. When he got bored, he’d break out his ax and improvise tone poems around whatever pop tune came into his head—“Stardust,” “Blueberry Hill,” like that—while I tapped out a 4/4 beat on the canoe thwart ahead of me, throwing in changes every now and then with an aluminum fork for a drumstick and two empty tin cans for my cymbals.

  Every hour we switched places in the canoe. The fishing was fast at first, medium-sized browns up to fifteen inches, and a few rainbows that glittered like stainless-steel exclamation points as they cleared the water. For a while an osprey followed us, ghosting along on crooked wings, waiting for the canoe’s sudden shadow to flush trout from their lies, then stooping to hook them with its long yellow talons. Then it flew ahead to its huge, messy nest of twigs and branches with the fish still writhing in its grasp. We could see the nest in the distance, perched at the top of a dead spruce near the riverbank, and as we swept past we saw the gawky gray heads of three near-grown hatchlings clamoring to be fed. It must have been a late nesting, her first clutch wiped out in some unrecorded domestic catastrophe. Maybe a weasel or pine marten raid. Or crows dropping by for a visit while Mom was out at the fish market. Nature is full of heart-warming stories like that.

  Toward noon we spotted smoke ahead, not a wildfire with its greasy yellow-gray sprawl shot full of frantic sparks, but a single white plume as if from a stovepipe or campsite. Around the next bend we saw another decrepit old logging camp. It stood on the eastern bank. A weathered, crudely lettered sign at the landing said, “No Tresspasing, this meens You! Servivers will be Perssacuted!” A lopsided skull and crossbones underscored the message. Harry read it and frowned. “Why do people always put quotation marks on signs like that? And what’s with all the exclamation points? Like at the diner in Heldendorf. ‘Ma Metzger’s Good Eats!’ I doubt anyone ever actually said it.”

  The smoke rose from what looked to be a bunkhouse. There were other signs of habitation: a kitchen garden out back—corn, pumpkins, some fat tomatoes ripening—and a clothesline hung with wash. Faded lumberjack shirts, underwear, canvas pants, and—a bit offputting—a string of mammoth pink brassieres that would have fit Elsie, the Borden cow.

  “Let’s see if they’ll sell us some fresh groceries,” Harry said.

  “Looks like they don’t want company.”

  “I’ve got money, though, the long green. These folks are probably pretty hard up. Some corn on the cob would go good with supper.” It was time for a break anyway so we pulled ashore and walked on up to the long, low bunkhouse built of peeled pine logs. The sign had made me uneasy, though. Some of these North Woods loners can be pretty nasty. They protect their privacy. We couldn’t very well walk up to the house armed, but I strapped the sheathed K-Bar to my calf, under my khakis, just to be safe. The skinned carcass of an out-of-season deer hung next to the woodpile in the shade of the porch, fresh-killed but already glazing toward black
in the last real heat of summer. A few slabs were missing from the backstraps and haunches.

  “Anybody home?” Harry yelled as we neared the place. No answer. He looked at me and raised his eyebrows. I shrugged and pushed the door. It swung open with a muted squeal. We peeked inside, into darkness hot as a steam room. Someone was seated in a rocker facing a red hot woodstove, under a tattered shawl. The person’s back was toward us. White hair to the shoulders. A deaf old lady?

  Then a creaky voice whined, “Is that you, Curly?”

  I cleared my throat, and the chair spun around. But it was a guy, an old man with a scraggly white beard. His face was a mass of scar tissue. He had no eyes. Where they’d been were deep black tunnels, like the mouths of bottomless mineshafts. The scar tissue seemed to writhe as the outside light hit it.

  But he was only trying to smile in welcome. “Come in, come in,” he piped in his high, scratchy voice. “We don’t get much company down here on the Firesteel anymore. I’m Lawrence Hackbarth.” He grinned, strong white teeth flashing in a ruined mouth, and stood up from the crude, homemade rocking chair. He shuffled toward us, swinging a heavy knobbed cane ahead of him.