The Run to Gitche Gumee

by Robert F. Jones

  The loops of stripped-in line, coiled loosely at my feet, disappeared in a flash, and the drag skirled loud in the darkness.

  “Zowie!” Wanda yipped.

  Harry popped out again. “Shit Marengo!” he yelled. “You’ve got him!”

  “Or vice versa,” I said. Line spun off the reel in a blur and the sound of the drag sang out over the water, loud enough it seemed to wake roosting birds along the shore. I raised the rod tip, then tipped it sideways to try and turn the fish before he reached the sanctuary of the weeds. If he got in there and tangled the leader with gunk, it would be adios. The tippet behind the wire leader was a hefty IX—but that gave less than ten pounds of breaking strength. This guy, by the feel of him, went at least twice that weight, maybe as much as thirty pounds.

  But the maneuver turned the trick. The muskie ran parallel to the weeds for a bit, then sheered off toward deeper water, toward the middle of Twodoggone Lake. If he didn’t head down to the bottom and wrap the leader around a sunken sawlog, maybe I had a chance.

  Harry was up now and standing beside me. I caught a glimpse of Cora in the moonlight, sitting up from the blanket with her breasts exposed. She looked miffed then glanced down at her chest and went back undercover.

  It was then that lights went on in the lodge, on the far side of the lake. “Uh-oh,” Harry said. “Looks like we may have disturbed someone’s beauty rest.”

  “Oh, shit,” Wanda said. “If old man Stoat catches us out here . . . .”

  “Our asses are like unto the grasses.” Cora was up again, fully dressed this time. “Not only does he disapprove of what he calls ‘daughterly hanky-panky,’ he goes positively apoplectic if anyone other than business clients messes with his precious muskies. He lets Sailor and Francis take pot shots at poachers.”

  “Keep an eye on the lodge,” I told the girls. “Maybe he just got up to take a leak.”

  Cora sniffed. “My daddy doesn’t do anything so plebian as ‘take a leak,’ as you call it. He micturates.”

  College boys.

  The muskie was down on the bottom now, lying doggo. I tried to pump and reel on him, but all I did was stress the drag some more. He wouldn’t even shake his head. I tried Harry’s trick of jarring the rod butt with the heel of my hand. No response. “Maybe he’s wrapped around something,” I said.

  We heard a loud, hollow roar from the lodge. The Gar Wood lighting off? Sounded like it. Maybe the vibes of the engine did the trick, but suddenly the muskie moved. He was off the bottom and running again, back toward the weedbed. I had to reel fast to take up the slack as he closed with the skiff. I kept my eye on his wake. No, he was headed our way on a collision course!

  “Oh, fuck,” Harry said. “Now it’s Moby Muskie. If he rams us, we’ll sink like stone. That’ll be the second boat on the bottom since we got here.”

  But the muskie dove under the skiff and kept on going, spinning me around and tangling my legs in the process.

  “Here they come,” Wanda said.

  I looked over my shoulder and saw the speedboat roaring our way, a spotlight scanning the water ahead of it in wide sweeps. “Break the fucker off,” Harry said. I did. Then we rowed like hell for the near shore.

  8

  COYOTE NOWHERE

  We bade swift but heartfelt adieus to Cora and Wanda, promising to write. Then we ran for the woods. Once we’d found cover, we flopped down and peered back through the brush toward the lake. The Gar Wood pulled up close to where the girls sat in the skiff. Stoat was at the wheel. Sailor and Captain Dobbs stood on the bow with shotguns. We couldn’t make out their voices clearly over the rumble of the engine, but Cora kept shrugging her shoulders and shaking her head. Wanda pointed into the woods, well away from where she’d seen us run. Dobbs raised his weapon and fired three 12-gauge rounds into the shrubbery. We could hear the heavy loads rip through leaves and rattle off tree trunks. Stoat eased the Gar Wood alongside the skiff and Dobbs leaned over to pull the girls into the speedboat. You could tell from the stiffness of his posture and the muscle he exerted to pull them aboard that he was very angry.

  “Goddamn that brute,” Harry muttered. “He can’t treat my girl that way.” He rolled over and crawled quickly toward a nearby honeysuckle. I recognized it as the one where we’d cached the gear that morning. He came back with the Thompson cradled in his forearms. Before I could do anything to stop him, he had the gun to his shoulder and squeezed off a ratding burst—aimed high over their heads.

  “Christ, you asshole!” I said. “The muzzle flash will give away our position!”

  Sure enough, both shotguns blazed away in our direction. Leaves and twigs rained down on our heads. I heard pellets ping on steel, Harry yelped, and a sting like that of a yellowjacket numbed my right hand.

  “Make like a sand crab!” I said, and we scuttled back deeper into the woods while they were reloading. We hid there, dead quiet, for what felt like an hour while Sailor and the flyboy pounded the shoreline cover for us. Finally they gave up and the Gar Wood headed back across the lake with the skiff in tow.

  “Are you hurt?” I asked Harry.

  “T-two dings,” he said. “One on the forehead, another on my wrist. I think some shot hit the drum of the T-tommy gun, too.”

  “I’ve got one in the hand. We’ll have to dig them out when it gets light enough to see.”

  We went back to the honeysuckle, retrieved the rest of our gear including the BAR, and made our way down the outlet stream, back toward the canoe.

  “I wonder what’s going to happen to the girls?” Harry said.

  “They’ll be okay. Cora’s got her daddy wrapped around her little finger, and Wanda plays the innocent maiden like Shirley Temple.”

  “She didn’t sound so innocent back there in the skiff with you.”

  “I never kiss and tell. And you’re one to talk. You seemed to be making out all right yourself under that blanket.”

  We both laughed. It was an adventure, all right.

  Daylight came on swiftly, cloudless again, and we made good time through the woods, heading downhill. Back at our campsite beside the Stony, Harry built a small, hot, smokeless fire while I fetched the supplies Flo and I had hidden in the cave. He was heating the tip of his jackknife in the flames when I got back. A pan of water steamed on the fire. “Let’s see your mitt,” he said.

  The shotgun pellet bulged blueblack under the skin on the top of my hand. Harry worked the redhot tip of the Schrade blade into the hole, worked it around, and the pellet popped free.

  “Ouch! Go easy!”

  “‘R-r-ruff,’ said the dog as he wiped his ass with sandpaper.” Harry chuckled. “Don’t be a wimp.”

  He squeezed the puncture wound to get out the dirty blood and rinsed it with hot water from the pan. I picked up the pellet with my free hand. “Looks like a Number 2,” I said. “Goose shot.”

  “Ah, yes,” Harry said. “They knew what they were gunning for. We were saps to piss Stoat off that way, after we’d finally got in his good graces. Now he’ll probably report us to the sheriff after all.”

  He found the first aid kit in our baggage, daubed iodine over the wound with a Q-tip, then peeled a Band-Aid to slap on it. He reheated the knife blade, gritted his teeth, and dug out the shot in his wrist.

  “You’ll have to do my f-f-forehead,” he said. “I don’t have a m-mirror.”

  I examined the shiny blue knot above his eyebrow. It was the size of an acorn. “I think the pellet must have bounced off,” I said. “I don’t see anything inside there. Just the lump where it hit. Not even any blood showing.”

  “Thank G-God I’ve got a hard head.”

  We brewed up a pot of Flo’s coffee and ate some more of her jerky for breakfast. Harry pissed and moaned about the two boxes of goodies we’d left behind at stoat’s place. Then we dragged the canoe out from its hiding place, reloaded it, and pushed off down the brook.

  “I wonder if we’ve given Doc and Curly enough time,” I said as we neared the
Firesteel. “Could they have come through, gotten tired of looking for us, and gone back upriver already?”

  “Maybe they never came after us,” Harry said. “After all, we outgun them. They might have decided to cut their losses, clear out before we could turn them in to the cops.”

  “Curly’s a Marine,” I said. “One of the Old Breed. They don’t quit easy.”

  Still, we stopped at the juncture of the two streams and hid the canoe again in the bankside brush. Then we snuck out to the edge of the Firesteel and looked carefully, upriver and down. Nothing in sight but a tall, gaunt heron, fishing for his breakfast. The roar of the Bonebreaker was muted here, but the ground shook to its violence. We were about to put the canoe in the water when a different noise hit my ears.

  “What’s that?”

  Harry listened. “A m-m-motor?”

  It got louder quickly, and then both our heads snapped around, looking downstream. The Beaver! The big, bulb-nosed red and black float plane came banking around a bend at treetop level and raced toward us, heading upriver. The right hand door was off.

  “Hit the deck!”

  We ate dirt as it bellowed overhead, disappearing fast in the direction of Doc and Curly’s camp.

  “Oh, shit,” Harry said. “Now we’ve got two different sets of bad asses after us. Sailor was sitting in there with a deer rifle between his knees. It had a scope.”

  Well, we couldn’t very well stay where we were. Even if Flo didn’t tell him, Stoat would soon realize that we’d left the canoe on Stony Creek, and his pal the sheriff might arrive any minute with a posse. Doc and Curly could be upstream or down. It was good enough flying weather for Dobbs to keep up his aerial hunt all day. The only thing left to do, we decided, was continue downstream with extreme caution, sticking as close to the Firesteel’s wooded banks as we could manage. The Old Town was painted green, thank God, and the riverside canopy would give us some cover from the air. But we’d have to be careful rounding each bend in the river, in case we met Doc and Curly coming back upstream.

  We shoved off. Harry had the Tommy gun leaning beside him in the bow, muzzle up. I laid the BAR, locked and loaded, on the duffle in front of me while I paddled in the stern. We didn’t even bother with the flyrods, which were repacked in their tubes with the dunnage.

  Twice as we paddled that morning the Beaver flew overhead. But we heard it coming and had plenty of time to take cover. Finally it headed downriver toward the north, maybe to Duluth or Superior where they’d probably gas up for their return to Milwaukee. I’d overheard Dobbs tell Stoat last night that the fuel storage tank at the lodge had sprung a leak and there was water in the avgas.

  Toward noon we came to another small feeder stream, this one entering the Firesteel from the right. We pulled into it and lay up under some willows while we ate more jerky. This diet was getting old fast. We were both dog tired, not having slept since the night before last, and then uneasily. Harry proposed that we catch some shut-eye after lunch, trading off with the watch. We flipped for it, and he won. “Wake me up in an hour, then you can snooze,” he said. He unrolled his sleeping bag on the riverbank, under the boughs of a willow, and soon was sawing logs.

  I jointed the Payne and rigged it with a lighter leader. Some trout were rising in a shady pool upstream and I figured on catching a few for supper. No more jerky for me, not for a while if I could help it. I saw caddis flies dapping on the water so I tied on a no. 14 Henryville Special, then eased into the creek and waded upstream, knee-deep under the shadow of the cutbank. The bottom was pea gravel, good footing.

  The firefight with Sailor and Dobbs had left me more shaken than I’d realized. When those shotgun loads were ripping through the branches over our heads, I felt like pissing my pants. Sergeant Stingley would have grabbed the Tommy gun away from Harry and charged the bastards flat out, yelling obscenities and firing from the hip. All I’d wanted to do was burrow my way to China. Could I possibly handle Korea, when it was commie burp-gun bullets zipping toward me instead of birdshot? T-34 tanks and MIG-17s hunting me rather than a civilian float plane and a swabbie with a deer rifle? I’d thought that Parris Island had toughened me, erased my imagination along with my civilian personality. That’s what it was meant to do. Stingley and all the other instructors told us again and again about young Marines in the Pacific island campaigns who’d thrown themselves on grenades to save their buddies. Gotten their guts blown out for the Corps. Okay, maybe it was sheer reflex, or a boy’s inability to visualize his own death, but would I even be able to face enemy fire without crying momma? I could never admit these doubts to Harry or anyone else, not even Lorraine—least of all Lorraine. But I had to admit them to myself.

  They were rainbow trout, chunky little guys no more than nine inches long, but game as hell, jumping clear of the water on the hookup, their red sides flashing in the sunlight. I picked them off one after another as I worked my way up the bank, and when I’d killed six, I stopped. Three each for supper was enough. Pan-fried along with thin slices of Flo’s potatoes and a slivered onion. It wouldn’t be Evangeline’s ribs, but it would be wonderful.

  Back at the canoe I picked some ostrich ferns, wet them down with cold water from the creek, packed the trout in layers, and laid them in the shade. Then I woke Harry up and grabbed forty winks for myself.

  By late afternoon we were well downriver. No sign of the Beaver and none of Doc and Curly. The Firesteel widened here into a stretch of broad, slow meanders, broken up with long sandy islands grown dark and tall with aspens. A good place to stop for supper, while it was still light and no one could see the gleam of a cookfire from the river. We pulled over to one of the bigger islands and hid the canoe in the brush, then explored inland. There was an old cellar hole on the high ground. It was filled with fire-blackened timbers and shards of old-fashioned windowglass, wavy and darkened by heat and time. We wondered who’d lived there and when, what was their story, did they all die in the fire, or did it happen after they’d pulled stakes? Most of the old timers who settled up here, after the loggers had finished with the country, quickly learned that this wasn’t farmland. The soil was all sand and stones and glacial muck. You could grow spuds and that was about it. Maybe a milch cow or two could sustain themselves on a quarter section, but the grass was poor if you could grow it at all. No big dairy herds of fat, glossy Holsteins and Guernseys like the Dutchmen raised in the southern half of the state. The would-be farmers soon moved on to better lands in the Dakotas and points west, leaving “Up North” to the tourists and weekend fishermen.

  We made camp near the river where we’d landed, behind a low dune and well away from the cellar hole. It was too damned depressing there. I think we were both feeling kind of blue by then. The trip wasn’t working out the way we’d imagined it. Doc and Curly were downright frightening, and apart from the girls, the Stoat interlude was no fun either.

  “He’s going to make trouble when we get back to town,” Harry said. “You can hop a train west and the Marine Corps will take care of you, but Stoat sure as hell’s gonna bitch to my dad and I’ll be in the shithouse. Or j-j-jail, more likely.”

  “Tell him I fired the Tommy gun,” I said. “That’s the only chargeable act we committed, Hairball, and they shot first. We’ve got the wounds to prove it. Stoat can’t run us in for something as laughable as fishing without permission. We didn’t catch anything anyway, and the girls won’t fink us out. Just taking a boat ride with his daughter and her friend is hardly a federal offense.”

  He laughed. “Yeah. And when you stop and think about it, they seduced us, d-didn’t they?”

  “College girls,” I said. “They learn it all at school.”

  I dug a firepit in the sand, lined it with dry rocks from the shore, and built a cookfire of pine sticks and hunks of charred wood from the burnt-out house. The aroma of frying trout, spuds, and onions cheered us some. Our coffeepot burbled on the grate. When the fish and potatoes were crisp and brown, we dug in.

  Night
came on quick. For a while, all you could hear over the whisper of the Firesteel was chomping teeth and the clink of aluminum forks and plates. After we ate, Harry played quietly on the horn—quick, light little phrases, with subtle changes in inflection to counterpoint the sound of the tinkling rapids. The Firesteel Bop . . .

  Then I heard something rustle in the bushes nearby. Harry froze in midnote. I eased my hand over to where the BAR stood leaning against a craggy aspen trunk. A black, wet muzzle loomed out of the dusk, nostrils twitching in the firelight. A pair of hungry eyes gleamed above them.

  “Fuck!” Harry said. “Another bear!”

  But as I grabbed the BAR, I heard a tinny rattle, and a big, ungainly mutt emerged from the underbrush, grinning merrily, wagging its stubby tail. It had a studded collar around its neck, from which license tags jingled. The dog—it looked like a cross between an Airedale and a Labrador—slunk into the circle of firelight. Its paws were huge.

  “He’s just a puppy,” Harry said. “And hungry, too. Look at his ribs.” He reached his plate out toward the dog and put it on the sand. Then he took the frying pan and slid the last remaining trout onto it—my trout, I might add. I’d been saving it for dessert.

  With one swipe of his long wide tongue the dog slurped it down, all gone in an instant, then looked up for more. Eyes gleaming with joy. Harry reached into Flo’s food box and pulled out a handful of jerky sticks. The dog settled down on his elbows and haunches and started chewing, growling with contentment and flailing his stubby tail like a runaway metronome.

  “I wonder what his name is?” Harry leaned over and looked at the brass plate on the dog’s collar. “Gayelord Schnauzer? What kind of m-monicker is that for any self-respecting m-m-mutt?”