The Family Business

 

My “baby” brother, Vernon, once fished for rainbow trout in a swimming pool in Japan. It was the only fishing water available on the Navy base where he, my other two brothers, Mom and Dad, lived at the time. Desperation calls for extreme measures.

The fishing was good, close to being the legendary “fish in a barrel”, and the rainbows fought like other rainbows the world ‘round. These, maybe a little off-flavor on the table. There are no picky eaters in the Vollertsen family, nor slow ones.

Anyway, Vernon’s request this past winter for me to organize a fishing trip for the two of us in Canada in September was the second such family request I had received this year, the first being from Pam to celebrate our fiftieth wedding anniversary in July. Vernon had fished with me growing up Key West to New England, Virginia to California, but never Canada and he wanted to go.

Organizing family fishing trips to faraway places might be a dirty business, but somebody has got to do it. Sign me up.

Where the float plane dropped us off on Lake Kenoji, Ontario was a two-hour flight from Mike Henry’s end-of-the-road base camp north of Emo, Ontario (catchfish@pfo.net). The country as seen from the air is filled with water interspersed with countless islands and rock-solid peninsulas. So much water and fishy habitat, the whole of it has never been fished and never will be.

There are bears, moose, and wolves swarming the country. You will never see them but by accident, so dense is the country’s cover, “the bush” as the natives call it, unless one wanders through camp or steps out onto one of those rocky peninsulas to take a look around.

We had one, what looked to be about a five-hundred pound black bear, nosing around about fifty feet from the front door of the cabin when I got up the first morning to put on the coffee. When I mentioned the fact, quietly, to Vernon, he was able to rise up in his bunk, look out the window there, and see all the bear he wanted to up close and personal.

He came wide awake in an instant. My guess was he had never seen a bear next to that swimming pool filled with trout, let alone out his front door. We fish because of the places it takes us, maybe.

Kenoji Lake is choked with walleye. There, you are allowed to keep two apiece up to eighteen inches long. You cannot eat two of them that big at one sitting. You can if you force yourself along with the hashbrowns and canned greens.

Think in terms of eighteen-inch crappie you might catch back here, home, in Lake Keystone. Could you eat one that big? One? Now, try two. Have you ever even seen a crappie that big? Get your tape measure out if you think you have, and report back to me.

We culled our stringer three different fish-eating days last week on Kenoji to fat, eighteen-inchers, then fried them up with all the trimmings and onions, and Bush’s baked beans. Those fillets we couldn’t finish off, we zip-locked and refrigerated and ate cold the next day for lunch. I used bottled tartar sauce to make some of the best fish sandwiches I have ever eaten.

Like I said, it was a hard and dirty business all told. I may never do it again. Maybe.

We had great fall weather. The birch were just beginning to turn gold, the low bush cranberries vermilion. Four or five days in a row of powder blue skies. On the last day in camp, the thermometer on the porch, where the bear had been the first morning, registered thirty-eight degrees.

We caught walleye and small northern pike almost everywhere we fished, typically the walleye thronging wherever peninsulas pinched together to concentrate current, or wherever rapids and riffles were found. Walleye love moving water; northerns the fringes of the same water.

The next to last day found us fishing those places in a passing cold front, a sky ragged with torn, grey clouds dropping a moderate rain. What I call perfect fall fishing weather, particularly for walleye which we were due to eat again, and finally, that night. Dirty business.

We were catching nice fat walleyes with practically every cast in the narrows close to camp when I heard the weird, primitive croaking of a flock of sandhill cranes right over my head. I looked up to see a veed-up flock of maybe sixty or seventy birds, not a hundred yards high, all pointed due southwest by my reckoning.

“What in the world are those things?” Vernon wanted to know.

“Sandhill cranes,” I said.

“What are they doin’?”

“Gone to Texas, as they used to say. It’s where I hunt them in the Panhandle every chance I get. You saw that thirty-eight degrees on the front porch, right?”

“Yep.”

“Well, they’ll take their time doin’ it, but they’ll be there by the middle of October, maybe a week later. They know it’s time to leave.”

“Us, too. I don’t want to get caught up here in the snow. Looks and feels like it could snow right now.”

“What, and miss out on a whole winter eating walleye, and staring at me?”

“I want a big, hot pizza. Right now,” Vernon said grinning right through a hard driving rain that felt like it could turn to sleet at any moment.

I first saw that big grin at feeding time before he was one year old. He couldn’t have known that’s why I was grinning back at him right now. Big brother, little brother. Goin’ way back. Family business.

Don’t tell him I told you that.

Copyright © 2013 Conrad M. Vollertsen