The Run to Gitche Gumee

by Robert F. Jones

  We swam, faster than we ever had on the Heldendorf swim team, looking back over our shoulders at every other stroke. We skidded down the rapids on our bellies, caroming off boulders, displacing sheets of gravel, and then we were clear. We regrouped in the deeper water at the bottom of the rapids, both of us puffing hard.

  “I couldn’t see it very well,” Ben said, treading water and raising his mask to his forehead. “There were swirls of marl all around you, but that thing—it looked like it had legs.”

  “Yeah, short, stubby ones,” I said. “With toes on them but no claws. He was covered with warts. When I hauled him out, he was all kind of brown and wrinkled and slimy, like an unhealthy turd—but a turd as long as a man.”

  “Are you hurt?” he asked. “Let’s see your wrist.”

  “I thought you’d never ask.”

  I peeled off what was left of the glove and held out my hand. Ben played the spotlight across it, up and down.

  “Bruises but no blood,” he said. “No toothmarks even, but it’s sure as hell swollen.”

  “The glove must have protected me,” I said. “The bastard sure gummed me hard, like an old man working a chicken bone. And he had a helluva pair of jaws on him, a grip like a bear trap.”

  Ben shuddered. “Let’s haul ass back to camp and stoke up that fire. I could use a slug or two of Cuervo, and you could too I reckon.”

  Jake had stood a taut watch. No ursine raiders this time. He growled once, low in his throat, as we emerged from the river but quickly recognized us. He came over to check me out with his lie-detector nose, just to be sure, but when he whiffed the slime on my wet suit, he wrinkled a lip and the ruff rose down his back.

  “Easy, boy. I swear it’s really me.”

  He kept a wary eye on me for the next few minutes anyway.

  Ben threw more wood on the coals. We stripped out of our wet diving gear, got into our sweats, then poured ourselves a slug of Cuervo. I was still shaking. Delayed shock, I guess. Even the flames felt cold. You never know how sweet life is until the moment it starts slipping away from you. I know it’s a cliché to say that, but the truism never felt truer.

  “It couldn’t have been a gator or a croc,” Ben said. “Not in water as cold as this. But it had legs so it wasn’t a fish of some sort.” He clipped a King of the World, moistened it, annealed the wrapper for a moment over the flames, and lit up with a flaming stick. “Some kind of outsized otter or muskrat, maybe?”

  “No fur,” I said. “Its skin was covered with tubercles and slime. And it had a laterally compressed tail—narrow side to side but broad up and down, like an eel. Until I saw its legs I was thinking moray or conger eel.”

  “Did it have nostrils?”

  “Not that I could see with all those warts. And it didn’t seem to have any eyes either.”

  “Sounds like the Gollum in Tolkien. I used to read him to my kids when they were little.” He frowned and took a pop of Cuervo.

  “I’ll tell you this, pal, I could have used a Hobbit to help me when that thing glommed on to my hand.”

  He laughed. “Well, if it wasn’t a fish, a reptile, or an aquatic mammal,” he said, “then it had to be an amphibian.”

  “What? The biggest bullfrog in the world? Some kind of giant newt or eft? Wait—I’ve got it! A mutant, man-eating toad created by radioactivity—A-bomb tests, illegally dumped nuclear waste? We’re venturing into Godzilla Country here, my friend.”

  “Not really,” he said. “Did you ever hear of a hellbender?”

  “Can’t say as I have. Unless you mean the kind I’ve been known to tie on every now and then.”

  “I’m serious, Hairball. Guys I knew in the Marine Corps, southerners mostly, used to talk about them. They’re giant aquatic salamanders that live under river rocks in the Ozarks. They’ll scarf down anything in the water—bugs, bass, craw-dads, ducklings, low-flying bats, water snakes, even muskrats and nutria. They never come out in the daylight, but if you’re fishing at night—for catfish, say—and you happen to hook one of these bastards, you’re up the creek in more ways than one. They grow big, up to a yard long, and fight like hell. The hillbillies were scared shitless of ’em, used to shudder when they’d talk about the dread hellbender. Poisonous, they said. All covered with warts and deadly slime. They’d cut the line, or even throw away the rod when they saw they’d hooked one.”

  “Sounds like a tall tale to me. Those good old boys were funnin’ ya, podner.”

  “Sergeant Stingley—you remember him, don’t you, my DI at Parris Island?—he showed us a snapshot of one once. Carried it in his wallet right along with a picture of his girlfriend. Looked like a Gila monster, only uglier.”

  “The hellbender or the girlfriend?”

  He didn’t deign to answer.

  “Old Stingley,” he said, staring off into the dark for a moment, his expression almost dreamy. “Did I tell you? He showed up in Korea shortly after I got there. We fought through the Chosin thing together. One tough Marine . . . ”

  “Well, a snapshot doesn’t prove a thing,” I said. “Pictures can be faked. Remember those old stereopticon slides of Mississippi mudcats as long as a freight car?”

  He finished his drink, got up and stretched. “I’m dead beat,” he said. “Time to hit the rack.”

  “I’ll stay up awhile,” I told him. “Don’t know if it’s jet lag or too much adrenaline. You mind if I play the horn for a bit? Nothing loud, just some sleepybye music.”

  “Be my guest,” he said, yawning. “Come on, Jake. It’s bedtime.” They went into the tent and I heard them shifting around awhile. Soon they were both sawing wood.

  I took the horn and walked downstream aways. The moon was up now, filling to full, and the light on the water danced silver. Some trout were rising to spent spinners in the quiet water. I thought of getting my flyrod. But I blew some old riffs instead, on blues themes half remembered, quiet as the Firesteel in the moonlight, playing in the upper registers, letting the river set the beat.

  “Death come a-creepin’ in my room . . . ”

  5

  THE CRYPTOBRANCHS

  The sun was well up when I woke the next morning. Ben was busy over the fire, fried trout and eggs from the smell of it, and the aroma of fresh coffee wafted into the tent. My right hand still felt stiff from the hellbender’s love nip, and slightly swollen. I could flex my fingers though, and that meant I could work the flyrod. I crawled out of the tent and went down to the river to perform my ablutions. The water was cold and sweet on my face. I’d slept through the night, no sudden wake-up calls from my bladder. The pills were doing their stuff.

  The sound of an outboard motor interrupted our breakfast. It was coming upstream. A blue, high-bowed Boston Whaler appeared around the bend below camp, spotted our tent and fire, and pulled in to shore. A Wisconsin game warden was at the tiller, and a woman sat up in the bow. She smiled and waved.

  The warden was a short, blond kid with a cookie duster mustache and a fat blue Magnum on his hip. He didn’t smile. He didn’t wave. Instead, he marched up to us like something military, frowning, and for a moment I thought he was going to salute. But he only tilted the stiff brim of his trooper hat down over his eyebrows. He had cold, close-set gray eyes.

  “Could I see your licenses, gentlemen?”

  Just like that. No “Good morning, fellas,” no “Nice day, isn’t it?”

  “Driver’s, hunting, or fishing?” Ben asked him.

  “Sir?”

  “What kind of licenses?”

  The game cop had to think for a moment. “All three,” he said.

  “Sure ’nough.”

  We broke out the paperwork. The kid studied it. His left eye was amblyopic—lazy—and kept slewing in toward the bridge of his nose.

  “We were going to offer you and your companion a cup of coffee,” I said. “Maybe she’d like one.”

  “I would,” the woman said, smiling. She seemed embarrassed by the baby game cop’s rudeness. “Cream and
one sugar, if you please.”

  I poured it for her and walked down to the boat. She looked to be in her early forties, with sandy hair cut short and threaded with the first touches of barely visible gray. The boat was full of gear. I saw scuba tanks, coils of insulated wire, electrodes, a generator, and what looked like one of those bang-sticks they kill sharks with.

  “You’ll have to excuse Ned,” she said in a quiet voice. “He’s new to the job and takes himself a bit seriously. My name’s Molly Bellefont, by the way. I’m a fisheries biologist with the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources.” She offered her hand, a strong one.

  “Harold Taggart. Pleased to meet you.”

  “Did you know that this area is technically off limits? ‘Posted,’ as they say?”

  “No,” I said. “We didn’t see any signs.”

  “Maybe they haven’t put them up yet, but we’re conducting a study on this stretch of the river. A biological survey of sorts. Er . . . habitat changes, that kind of thing.”

  “As in, no brook trout left in the spring holes?”

  She looked up at me, surprised, but then spotted the rod cases and nodded. She was a handsome woman, with wide-set blue-green eyes and a trim figure, an outdoors type from her suntan. She wore a khaki work shirt and no-nonsense canvas brush pants, only a hint of makeup, and well-scuffed green rubber Wellingtons.

  “Have you figured it out yet?” I asked her.

  “No,” she said. “The water tested the same as it did five years ago, the last time we checked it for pollution and acidity. The pH is perfect for trout. There’s an abundance of lesser biota—ephemerids, trichoptera, and the like.”

  “You mean mayflies, caddis, and stoneflies,” I said.

  “Oh, you’re a scientist?”

  “No, just a doctor. A medical doctor, that is. But I’m also a fly fisherman, and those terms come with the territory.”

  She smiled.

  “I think we may have found the answer to your problem last night,” I told her. I showed her my swollen hand.

  “What happened?”

  I told her.

  She didn’t seem surprised.

  “My partner thinks it’s a ‘hellbender’,” I said, “some sort of giant fish-eating newt from the Ozarks who wandered up here by mistake.”

  “No,” Molly Bellefont said, flipping through a fat reference book she pulled from her backpack. “It’s worse than that, I’m afraid. The hellbender’s only about two and a half feet long. You say the animal you encountered was twice that size?”

  I nodded. “At least.”

  She sighed.

  She showed me a photograph from the book.

  It was Rico, all right. I’d know that mug anywhere.

  “It’s Andrias,” she said . . .

  At that moment Jake growled. I looked over to the tent. The baby game cop was rifling through our gear—“tossing it,” as they say on the cop shows—like we were a couple of dopers from the Inner City. I could see Ben was steamed. Jake snarled again, low in his throat. Ned stood up straight and put his hand on the Magnum.

  “Don’t even think about it,” Ben said. He had the cruising ax in his hands, murder in his eyes.

  “Then call him off,” Ned said. His voice had gone squeaky. “I’m only performing my official duties and if he interferes I have every right to shoot him.”

  “Mister,” Ben said, “if you so much as unsnap that holster, you’ll be parting your hair down the middle.”

  “Enough of this,” Molly Bellefont said. She vaulted out of the Whaler and strode up to the campfire. “Warden Maronski, get away from that dog. Behave yourself or I’ll make you sit in the boat. You’re here only to ensure my safety and he’s no threat to me.” She had steel in her voice.

  Now she turned to Ben, all sweetness and reason. “Could I have another cup of this delicious coffee, please?”

  Over the next half hour we learned a lot. Molly was a good teacher, though a bit pedantic. First things first, for instance . . .

  Salmanders, she began, belong to the oldest order of terrestrial vertebrates, Caudata, which dates back more than 350 million years. There are 320 different species worldwide, all of them living in the temperate zone of the Northern Hemisphere. Most get no bigger than six inches long, but three species are giants—a “relict” or primitive group called the Cryptobranchidae—to wit, the Chinese giant salamander (Andrias davidianus), the Japanese variant (A. japonicus), and Ben’s old pal the Ozark hellbender (Cryptobranchus alleganiensis).

  The first giant salamander skeleton known to science was dug up in 1725, somewhere in Germany, and was believed to be a fossilized victim of Noah’s flood. But the bones weren’t human. They belonged to an extinct cryptobranchid named Andrias scheuchzeri. Since then, fossils of other giant salamanders have been found in Europe, Asia, Africa, and North America—every continent but South America and Australia.

  Giant salamanders can live a long time, Molly said, up to fifty-five years in the case of one Japanese specimen.

  Hellbenders are the most abundant species, but the Chinese giants are more widely distributed. They prefer fast, cold mountain streams in the tributaries of the Yangtze, Yellow, and Pearl rivers, spanning more than a dozen provinces and regions of China. They’ll grow up to five or six feet long, sometimes reaching a weight of sixty pounds. They spend their daylight hours hidden under boulders or in rocky crevices along the riverbanks, facing outward for self-defense or to grab off a snack when some unwitting victim paddles past. They come out only at night, to hunt aquatic insects, frogs, crabs, fish, snakes, water rats, and turtles—almost anything that swims. They’ve even been known to gobble small dogs.

  “The zoo in Cincinnati has some cryptobranchs, the Japanese species,” Molly said. “They’re breeding them using techniques perfected at the Asayama Zoo in Hiroshima. I’ve watched them feed. It’s quite impressive.”

  According to Molly, the water literally erupts when a salamander dines. Depending on the position of its prey, the animal can open and close one side of its mouth independently—fast as lightning—and bend its jaw by as much as forty degrees. “You’ve got to look out when you’re feeding them—you could lose a couple of fingers,” she added.

  I massaged my hand. Maybe I’d been lucky . . .

  But like everything else that walks, crawls, flies, or swims in Asia, Molly continued, the big cryptobranchs often end up on slabs in the meat markets. “Stir-fried cryptobranch is considered a delicacy,” she said, “and their body parts are used in traditional medicines. Both the Chinese and Japanese species are endangered and supposedly protected under international law, like rhinos and elephants, but as we know that usually doesn’t mean much.”

  Unlike most amphibians, giant salamanders lay their eggs in early autumn. A small breeding migration begins in late August when “herds” move toward their nesting sites. A dominant male prepares and occupies each spawning pit, a submerged, sandy chamber at the end of a three-foot-long tunnel dug in marl or mud. “You can imagine the fights that take place between males over access to this scarce resource. Some of them lose toes and even legs in the battles. Some are mangled so severely about their heads and necks that they expire down there in the muddy dark.”

  “And some die of heartbreak?” Ben said. “The ones that are driven away?”

  “That too, I suppose,” Molly said doubtfully. Then she brightened. “But their sex lives are spectacular, when they get around to it—an elaborate ritual that takes place when a gravid female visits that carefully built cavern to lay her eggs. She swims in and looks it over for neatness, paying no attention to the waiting male. When she’s good and ready, the female starts to turn and spin—it’s a kind of mating dance, I guess you could say. The male joins her, almost hypnotized. Then other males ooze back into the nest to join the twirling couple. After a while she arches her back and squirts out a string of eggs—yellow beadlike things suspended in transparent jelly—for the males to, well, fertilize. Just picture i
t!”

  Her eyes were fervid, her cheeks almost flushed.

  “A huge spinning ball of amphibians that speeds up until all the eggs are spawned, and then slows as the males cover them with milt. This goes on and on, until she’s deposited all of her eggs—four or five hundred of them. Then she swims away and leaves the rest to daddy.”

  “Wow,” Ned said. “She’s got it all.” His left eye was doing that dance again. I could fix it for him in ten minutes with a scalpel, some fine gut, and a decent magnifier for the close work. Hell, it would be fun.

  Molly frowned. “The eggs of several females may be deposited in the same nest,” she said, “which the dominant male has to guard until they hatch out and larvae leave the nest in February . . . ”

  “So that guy who glommed me last night was probably a bull newt,” I said, “guarding his kids?”

  “Yes, Doctor, more than likely. Though he’s not a newt, he’s a . . . ”

  “Could he have eaten all the trout in those spring holes?”

  “Not unless he’d been there for many years. Giant salamanders are like snakes; they have a slow metabolism and only have to eat once every couple of weeks. According to the most recent DNR survey of the Firesteel, there were thousands of trout in the swamp only five years ago.”

  “Then maybe there’s more than one.”

  “That’s what I’m here to find out,” Molly said.

  6

  THEORY & PRACTICE OF RIVERS

  How did this trout-scarfing resident of mainland China happen to fetch up on the headwaters of a river in northern Wisconsin? Molly, ever the scientist, wouldn’t even risk a speculation. But I sure could imagine some scenarios.

  Theory #1: Both the U.S. and Canada trade with China. Perhaps some cryptobranch larvae had been pumped into the ballast tanks of a freighter when it was moored in the upper Yangtze, or any of those other big rivers, then pumped out again when the ship reached the St. Lawrence Seaway. That’s the way sea lampreys, zebra mussels, and God knows what else found their way to America’s Heartland. Once the larvae had grown to full size, they could easily have migrated up the Seaway into the Great Lakes, the way alewives did back in the ’50s and early ’60s. (I could still recall the stench of rotting alewives on Milwaukee beaches during their big summer die-offs, a problem that wasn’t cleared up until the 1960s, when Howard Tanner of the Michigan Department of Natural Resources began planting Pacific salmon in Lake Michigan: the so-called Coho Miracle.)