The Run to Gitche Gumee

by Robert F. Jones

  Gayelord and I were running full tilt back around the inlet. Harry called the dog and made a throwing gesture out into the Firesteel. He wanted those river-killed birds first, before they were swept downstream on the current. Gayelord must have spotted them, maybe even marked them down when they fell, because he hit the water running. I was breathing hard when I came up beside Harry, and the dog already had dropped the two birds at his feet.

  He fetched five more while I caught my breath. Seven ducks in all, five mallards and two blacks. We’d eat well tonight.

  “Good shooting,” I said.

  “I t-tripled up on that first shot,” Harry said. He was beaming. “N-never done that before. Two of them flew smack into the same pattern, and I got the other one on the second barrel. Then it all happened so fast I can’t remember. All I saw was flying brass, more birds, and the muzzles bucking.” He ran his hand over the tubes. “The b-b-barrels are still hot. Feel ’em.” They were.

  “What do we do now with Gayelord?” I asked.

  He looked at me, dubious. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

  “Traveling around America with a bunch of dope fiends is no life for a dog. Not as good a guy as this one.”

  “Well,” Harry said, “we beat up a b-blind man, stole a couple of machine guns and fired them at people, sank a rich man’s b-boat, c-committed statutory rape—or d-damn near that. Do you know how old the girls are? Oh, and I almost forgot. We v-violated a ‘no fishing’ regulation and smoked marijuana, not to mention that we’re both too young to be drinking. I think d-dognapping would be one of our 1-1-lesser offenses.”

  “Let’s go,” I said. I clapped my hands. “Come along, Gayelord.”

  “Wh-what the hell,” Harry said, picking up two of the ducks and his gun. “It’s all in the great American outdoor tradition.”

  10

  MARLOWS LEAP

  The rest of that day reeled off without incident. At least not the sort we’d come to expect of the Firesteel. Rather it played out into a waterborne idyll, the kind of trip we’d hoped for all along. The weather could not have been better: clear sunny skies dotted here and there with bright, fat cumulus clouds that ambled across our track at a walking pace from west to east; the air cool and dry, scented with pine needles, old wood ash from ancient fires, and rotting apples from the occasional abandoned orchards along the river. The river ran fast but smooth, with a few easy stretches of riffle and whitewater inserted here and there by the Canoe God to keep us alert.

  Wherever the going was easy, Harry reached for his horn and blew appropriate tone poems, tossing kisses at the passing scene. They were lyric riffs, gutsy and dissonant by turn. I could feel him reading the country. There was a rhythm to the water, but it wasn’t a 4/4 beat, more like 5/4 shifting to 7/5 and back again, then uncountable changes as we hit whitewater, easing out smooth and sweet when we’d cleared the run.

  Gayelord proved a natural in a boat, stretching himself out on top of the duffel bags with his head on his paws, watching the landscape pass by. He sat up now and then to raise his head and test the breeze, nostrils working like a wine connoisseur wrapping his tongue around an interesting new vintage. We had the flyrods rigged, and when a productive piece of cutbank presented itself, we’d move in close to it while either Harry or I cast to the pocket water with a muddler, a hopper imitation, or a woolly worm. Gayelord stood up and whined when the first trout hit. A rainbow, it vaulted high from the water and set the drag screaming. The dog growled and was about to dive in and retrieve it when Harry grabbed him by the collar. It was a small trout, maybe ten inches, and when I’d brought it alongside and unhooked, I let him have a sniff before I released it. He gave me a puzzled look, but then settled back down on the duffel.

  “They taste better cooked,” I told him. “We’ll catch you a couple for lunch.”

  He was alert to every bird that flew past. Flocks of migrant redwings and grackles and cowbirds; crows and raucous ravens; a red-tailed hawk swinging high overhead on a thermal. Fast-moving strings of ducks traded up and down the river, and Gayelord whined at their passage. When a great blue heron transformed itself from a bedraggled, upright snag along the riverbank by unfolding its impossibly long wings and flapping away ahead of us, slow and clumsy with his long legs trailing behind, the pup’s eyes popped and his glance flashed from Harry to the shotgun case and back again. He barked his frustration that no one was blasting such an easy target.

  We caught a few more trout, killed them, and started looking for a good place to land. At about midday Harry pointed to the left bank. “Good spot for lunch,” he said.

  We put ashore at another of those old apple orchards. They dated back to the period just before and after World War I when farmers were still trying to hack a hardscrabble life out of this sour, sandy, glacier-scrubbed country. Many of the old trees still survived, thick trunked and gnarled, but in some cases bearing fruit. You never knew from one apple to the next if they would taste any good. The trees were of old varieties rarely grown anymore in this age of long-keeping but sawdust-flavored supermarket Delicious—varieties like Red Spy, Blue Pearmain, Macoun, and Wolf River. These antique varieties had cross-pollinated over the course of time. The apples they now produced were unique, a melange of flavors not to be found in any arbor but their own. Harry and I had discovered how good some of them could taste from hunting grouse in the old orchards around home. Nothing tastes more refreshing on a hot, sweaty October afternoon, after a day of pounding the briers for partridges, than one of these cool, white-fleshed, winy-flavored mutants, even if it has a few wormholes in it. We hoped to find some tasty ones here to stuff our ducks with for dinner that night.

  “Let’s bring the shotgun,” Harry said. “Could be some grouse in the trees.”

  “I don’t know. We’ve got ducks enough for the next couple days. And anyway, why advertise our presence?”

  “Right.” But both he and Gayelord looked crestfallen.

  “Oh, fuck, bring it along,” I said. “We can always smoke some of the birds. We might need ’em later the way this trip is going. You never know what lies ahead on the Firesteel.”

  “Yeah, maybe a blizzard will snow us in before we reach the lake. Then you wouldn’t have to go to Korea.”

  But I wanted to go to Korea. Little did I know . . .

  I emptied a canvas tote bag to carry the apples in. Hornets buzzed underfoot, feeding on the apples that nearly paved the ground and made walking under the trees a hazardous business. It was like trying to balance on loose, lopsided ball bearings. The air smelled like hard cider, sweet with apple rot. Gayelord ranged ahead, quartering among the trees but always checking back on us. When he got too far out, Harry whistled him in, then sent him out again with a hand signal. This dog was born to hunt.

  I’d filled about half the bag with crisp apples—they looked and tasted almost like Winesaps—when Harry said, “Look!”

  Gayelord had stopped on what looked like a flash point, then he tiptoed forward with his head low, as if treading on eggs.

  “Get. . .”

  “R-ready. Yeah, I know.”

  Gayelord crept forward, one step, another . . . . A grouse roared up and out from beneath the tree, in two wingbeats placing the thick, gnarled trunk between itself and the gun. Harry leaped to one side, raised the Winchester, and fired. The grouse tumbled in a gray puff of plumage. Gayelord was on it in a flash, picked it up still flapping, and trotted in to us, head high. He was grinning around the mouthful of hot meat and feathers, a few of which trailed away from the bird like falling autumn leaves. He dropped the grouse at Harry’s feet. Harry picked it up and spread the tailfan. “Cock bird,” he said. He pointed to the unbroken dark band near the end of the tailfeathers. Hens’ tailbands are mottled in the middle of the fan.

  “He’ll eat good, fat with apple seeds.”

  Harry gave me the gun and returned to the canoe with the bag of apples, now much heavier with the added weight of the partridge. I hunted
on with Gayelord. At the far end of the orchard, where it tailed off into a thick stand of young quaking aspens, the dog started acting birdy again. “Get ’em up, boy,” I whispered. He nosed into the popple whips, and a pair of woodcock flushed on twittering wings, one beside the other like two ascending helicopters. I waited until they’d cleared the tops of the aspens and shifted to horizontal flight. At the pause they were lined up perfectly for a Scotch double—one shell, two birds. Pow! It worked.

  Gayelord was reluctant to pick them up. Woodcock have a strong, musky smell that most dogs dislike at first. But I picked one up and pressed it to my face, inhaling deeply. “Mmm-mmm, good,” I said. He wasn’t about to be outdone and mouthed the other with wrinkled lips, though very carefully. “That’s not so bad, is it, Gayelord?” He wagged his tail, then spat the bird down at my feet.

  When we got back to Harry, the trout, dusted in flour, were frying in a dollop of clarified deer marrow from one of Florinda Wakerobin’s mason jars. He’d sliced some of the apples to sizzle alongside. I cleaned and wrapped the birds while our shore lunch browned to perfection. Gayelord approved. He polished off his trout and apples in short order, devouring the paper plate for dessert. Harry and I were a little slower, if only because of fastidiousness over the fishbones. Then we were back on the river.

  The rest of that day remains a blurred memory of utter satisfaction. Clear light on green, fast water; whispering currents and the pull of paddle blades and the warm, supple stretch of limber muscles; full bellies and the subconscious knowledge that we had enough food and strength in reserve for the future, the near one at least. We were young animals working together, two men in a boat not to mention the dog, immersed in action and movement, with the scenery changing at every bend of the Firesteel. The paddling itself was pleasantly hypnotic, the canoe leaping ahead with a faint hiss at each synchronized pull and follow-through. Behind us spun the whirlpools of our strokes. We were one with the flow of the current. For the moment at least, all was well with the world. We’d outwitted or outrun our foes, made love to a pair of nubile maidens, rescued a prisoner who’d since proved to be a valuable ally, and now we were headed home.

  In late afternoon we came to a place where the Firesteel flowed between low limestone cliffs. The river narrowed and increased its speed. We thought these buttes must be the remains of a preglacial mountain range. Here the water was clear as the air. We could see fish swimming among the boulders thirty, maybe forty feet down in the deepest pools. It was hot between the cliffs, which masked the slight breeze that had cooled us during the hours of nonstop paddling since our lunch stop.

  “We’ve made good time already today,” I said. “How’s about we stop for a swim?”

  Harry was ready for a break. We tied the canoe to a juniper growing at the base of the western scarp, then put on our fins and face masks and slid in. The water was cool but not chilling. We dove again and again down the limestone walls of the chasm, working our way deeper with each dive, peering into pockets and crevices, feeling cold seeps spilling out of some of them, then dropping to the bouldered bottom, where we chased big trout around big white smooth-polished rocks and through the cracks between them. After we’d had enough, we dried on a rock ledge across from the canoe, where the sun was still hitting. The shelf was wide and deep, with a vaulted roof that glowed like marble. There was driftwood piled by the current, stacked against the corner where the ledge met the cliff face.

  Harry looked up at the overhang that bulged above the ledge. “This might be a good place to spend the night,” he said. “There’s plenty of firewood, protection from wind and weather, and no one’s likely to spot us here before we spot them. Unlikely that any b-b-bear’s gonna disturb our beauty sleep.”

  He was right. I swam across to the canoe and retrieved the map. We spread it in the sun and looked at it. The cliffs were marked there, sure enough. “Marlow’s Leap,” the legend read.

  “Who’s Marlow?” Harry asked.

  I turned the map over. On the reverse side was a list of place names.

  “‘Marlow’s Leap,’” I read. ‘“Roger Marie de Merlons (1688-1771) was a French-Canadian voyageur and coureur du bois who explored the Firesteel in the wake of Sieur du Lhut (see entry above) and established a fur trading post at Heartbreak Rapids, near an Indian village called Chechemanguego (“Place of the Muskrat”). In the winter of 1724, pursued by a hostile raiding party of Santee Sioux, perennial enemies of the Chippewa with whom he was trading, de Merlons (or Marlow, as he was later known to the English who followed him into the region) ran a purported “sixty leagues” on snowshoes through the frigid forest, but was finally brought to bay, surrounded on the cliffs that mark the river here. Shedding his heavy pack, musket, snowshoes, and even his wolverine overcoat, retaining only his knife and a tomahawk, Marlow took a long running start and cleared the river in a single bound. Or so say the Indians. After “thumbing his nose” at his frustrated pursuers, Marlow threw the tomahawk and split the skull of the Sioux chieftain. Thus runs the legend. A pleasant view of the river here, though difficult to reach nowadays.’ ”

  Harry looked up at the gap overhead, the band of sky above it going already from blue to lavender.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’d make it about forty feet. A world’s record in the broad jump that’ll never be beat.”

  “Some guy, that Marlow.”

  “I guess.”

  We pulled the canoe up onto the ledge for the night; there was plenty of room. Harry rigged a reflector oven with tinfoil and roasted three of our ducks for supper that night—two black ducks, blood rare, for Harry and me, and a mallard (ditto) for Gayelord, who we figured wouldn’t notice the difference. Our birds were stuffed with tart slivers of the apples I’d picked, and a double scoop of the wild rice Florinda had included in her care package. Then we rolled into our sleeping bags, leaving them unzipped because the heat of the sun and our cookfire had saturated the limestone ledge on which we slept and would have kept us warm enough without covers. But the bags were soft, the rock was hard. Before dossing down for the night, we wrapped the grouse and woodcock, stuffed with apples, in riverbottom clay and placed them in the hot ashes of the cook-fire to bake overnight. Harry blew taps on his ax. From somewhere far to the north, coyotes chorused a mournful answer.

  It was the first full night’s sleep we’d had since we started. I dreamed of Lady Day, her sad, hoarse, sweet voice echoing down the lonely ashcan alleys of the night. Strange fruit, indeed . . . . We relied on Gayelord’s ears, nose, and menacing growls to alert us to any prospective danger. The dark cloud that loomed in the back of my mind was a small one, and it lay low on the horizon: How long could all of this good fortune last? Through that night it held, and well into the following day.

  Not until then did the weather change.

  11

  AFTER THE STORM

  In the morning we shoved off at the first wink of daylight. We ate in the canoe. Not even time for coffee. Instead we ripped chunks from the baked gamebirds, alternating mouthfuls of tender meat with the still warm apple stuffing, which had absorbed the birds’ juices while they cooked. We scooped river water between paddle strokes to wash it down. Gayelord ate the picked bones when we were finished. We’d left plenty of meat on them.

  The reason for our haste was the tautening bind between time and distance. According to the map, Lake Superior was fifteen river miles to the north, an easy day’s paddle flat out. But the map didn’t show all the kinks in the river. And we might have to portage around a rapids. A two-lane state highway crossed the Firesteel just above its mouth. Our arrangement with Mr. Taggart’s truck driver was for him to meet us at the trestle bridge near sundown of the 20th. That was today. He might wait around for us a few hours, but knowing the man, we had our doubts. So we’d have to paddle hard if we were going to make the rendezvous and still have time to fish for the big, bright steelhead that entered the Firesteel at this time of year to spawn. Steelhead are rainbow trout that grow up in d
eep water, either the ocean or a sea-sized lake like Superior. Their colors are oceanic as well—chromed mirrors, hence the name.

  It’s a hard, vigorous, fish-eat-fish life out there in the fathomless blue, and as a consequence steelhead have to get much larger and stronger than river trout. And they have to get that way quick; otherwise, they’re chum for their fellow predators. Big fish, little fish, that’s the menu in steelhead water. Neither of us had ever fished for them.

  According to our source in the Tomahawk tackle shop, the steelhead didn’t often spawn above Heartbreak Rapids, a rugged, Class IV run about five miles upstream of the outlet. The old Indian village and trading post were long gone. For a while a thriving sawmill town named Chemango (pop. 1,000) had stood on the spot, but it burned out in the big fires of 1923 and no one bothered to rebuild it. The Tomahawk guy said that even the two-pump gas station and general store had closed down after the state decided not to pave the county road that once terminated there. That was about eight months ago. There was talk in the state legislature every year of building a bridge across the rapids, but nothing ever came of it. If we could get to Heartbreak by noon, we’d have the afternoon to mess around with steelhead, so we put our backs into it.

  By midmorning I noticed the sky overhead growing streaked with high, lacy fingers that sparkled in the sun. Stratocirrus—a sure sign that a front was approaching. To the west some ominous blueblack clouds were just showing their ice-plumed domes over the horizon. Thunderheads? What else? We were overdue for a storm. Harry noticed the weather signs too, and now we really dug in. Half an hour later the cumulonimbus covered a quarter of the sky to the west. We could see lightning bolts flashing between the anvils, and Gayelord’s ears perked to the boom of distant thunder.