North with Doc: Doc Goes Bonkers

Doc sat in his size XXXL Spiderman pajamas at the kitchen table in the remote cabin on Kezik North, rolling a chilled can of V-8 juice back and forth across his throbbing temple. The previous day’s 12 hours on the water were followed by a massive walleye feast, then Doc downed a martini he mixed in a Tupperware lettuce keeper, and afterwards engaged in an especially vicious game of Pass the Ace with more adult refreshments until even the Northern Lights had called it a night.

After finishing his vitamin-rich picker upper, he did a wobbly shuffle toward the kitchen sink. He opened the tap, bent to put his head under the cold lake water, and the sudden swoop must have made him swoon, as he bonked his forehead severely on the back of the cast iron sink.

Doc swayed dangerously like Aunt Lucy does when she attempts the Watusi, and before he went down, the policeman and kid grabbed him from both sides.

“You okay, Doc?” the policeman said. He held on tight until Doc regained full consciousness.

“That was a major knock,” the kid said.

 Still a bit unsteady, Doc said, “Give me a few minutes, and I’ll be good as new.”

The kid said, “I don’t know that new would be an improvement.”

Only the day before we arrived at Knobby’s in Sioux Lookout, and I consulted with Lars about fishing reports and the weather forecast. Both sounded promising.

“How many times is this you’ve been to Kezik?” Lars said.

“Counting the years both you and Knobby ran the fly-in business? Must be a dozen,” I said. “Half at the north cabin.”

“Had a last-second cancellation so I won’t have another party in the west cabin until next week,” Lars said. “You’ll have that whole lake to yourself.”

“Hardly ever see anyone else, anyway,” I said.

“That’s a lot of water to cover, for sure,” Lars said.

“Don’t I know it,” I said.

Ten minutes later we were in the air. An hour after that, the floatplane touched down and taxied to the cabin. Twenty-four hours passed and Doc appeared to be surprisingly recuperated from the double damage of overindulgence and head injury, and we were hard at work with hook and line.

I freed yet another walleye and watched as its tail propelled it back into the cold dark water of one of the most consistently productive honey holes in Northwest Ontario. The other two boats were nearby.

“How do these fish numbers stay so steady?” the attorney said.

“About 30 below zero every winter, under ice a few feet thick, and yet they keep coming back,” the banker said.

“Is that Fahrenheit?” Doc said.

“What?”

“The 30 below.”

“Of course it is,” the banker said.

“Canada went metric something like 50 years ago,” Doc said. “So instead of minus 30 Fahrenheit, it should be minus, um, 34 point-four-four-four Celsius. Approximately.”

“You just made that up.”

“That is a possibility,” Doc said.

“I read somewhere that it takes a walleye something like six or seven years to get to two pounds,” the policeman said.

“So it has to survive not only predators, but this ridiculously harsh environment,” I said.

The kid pulled in another nice specimen, and said, “I wonder how old this fish is?”

“Opercole bone,” Doc said.

“Say what?” the kid said.

“It’s a bone-like structure of the operculum,” Doc said. “Called a gill flap for those less erudite.”

“What about that so-called gill flap?” the banker said, laying down his rod, his grin expanding as he anxiously awaited another of Doc’s flirtations with Bizarreville.

“It may be reliably used to determine the age of a fish,” Doc said. “In this case, however, it pertains only to the Percidae family that includes walleye, sauger, and perch.”

“How do you know that?” I said.

“It must be knowledge gleaned from my deep experience in these matters,” Doc said.

“Only thing deep here is the bull hockey,” the attorney said.

“Aging a walleye is a simple process,” Doc said. “It involves removing said gill flap with a sharp implement.”

“A filet knife?” I said.

“That will suffice,” Doc said. “Then eradicate remnants of attached flesh, and desiccate the flap for an extended period.”

“What’d he just say?” the kid said.

“Scrape off the skin and let the thing dry out,” I said. “At least that’s what I think he said.”

“Then simply count the lines on the gill flap,” Doc said. “Each line is a year of growth. Ergo, four lines would indicate the fish in question was entering its fifth year of existence.”

“Where did you learn that?” the policeman asked.

“Just came to me,” Doc said. “Must have read it somewhere.”

At noon, or thereabouts, the plan was to rendezvous at an ice-scoured slab of rock on the southeast shore. It faced a pretty little bay like that seen on ancient cartoony ads advertising a brew from The Land of Sky Blue Waters. As a youngster gawking in front of the TV, I thought there could not possibly be such an idyllic place. Boy, was I wrong.

As our tiny flotilla motored shoreward, the kid said, “I always thought shorelunches meant a walleye cookout.”

“We used to do that a lot,” the banker said.

“The freshest fish we ever ate,” the policeman said.

“What happened?” the kid said.

“Lots of things involved,” the attorney said. “A big skillet. Oil, spatula, forks, plates, salt and pepper, cans of beans, sometimes a beer batter for the fish.”

“Then someone had to gather wood and get a fire going,” I said. “Heating a cast iron skillet as big as a manhole cover took a while.”

“And it took almost as long to make sure the fire was out,” the policeman said. “Then we cleaned up our mess, and left the area better than we found it.”

“So you got tired of doing all that, and no more walleye shorelunches?” the kid said.

“Oh, we get the fever every now and then,” the policeman said. “Especially on really nice days when it’s warm and calm.”

I powered the little Lund’s bow onto higher ground as the rest of the guys unpacked our feast featuring bologna doubles. For the uninitiated, that’s a towering sandwich built by layering multiple slices of processed meat and cheese amidst three slices of bread adorned with butter, mustard, mayo and sweet pickle slices. While looking like something Dagwood Bumstead would concoct, it is a lot less complex than it sounds, and it fits a quart Ziploc bag like a glove.

The kid dug into his lunch, and said, “I’ve eaten balogna sandwiches all my life, but never knew what was in the stuff. Some kinda mystery meat, huh?”

“Mortadella,” Doc said.

“Here we go again,” the attorney said.

“Morta what?” the banker said.

“Mortadella. It’s a high-quality sausage made in Bologna, pronounced bo-lohn-ya. That’s a major city in northern Italy,” Doc said.“ It is generally assumed that Americans who enjoyed the tasty Italian sausage renamed it for its city of origin, yet mispronounced it and called it bologna, sounding like bo-log-na, which morphed into baloney.”

“Perhaps that etymology is baloney as well,” I said, enjoying my second sandwich.

“Furthermore,” Doc said, “there is little to no mystery about bologna. It includes mechanically separated meat, cooked with an array of spices, and the ingredients are typically listed right on the package.”

We finished eating, policed the area, and were ready to load our supper stringer, but Doc was nowhere in sight.

“He must have slipped away into the Bush,” the attorney said.

“I’m concerned that bump on his head was more serious than we thought,” the banker said.

“We better go find him,” the policeman said.

Our search party was less than 50 yards into the tangle of trees and thorny undergrowth when we spotted our fishing friend poking something with a stick.

“Whatcha got there, Doc?” the kid said.

“Easily identifiable scat,” Doc said.

The kid looked over Doc’s shoulder. Sure enough, there were two piles of poop.

The rest of us arrived, and Doc said, “A bear and a moose left these droppings. Do you know which is which?”

“If there’s poodle hair in it, I’m thinking that’s the bear’s,” the attorney said.

“Good observation,” Doc said. “While moose are ruminants, bears are not.”

“Explain?” the policeman said.

“Ruminants are like cows. They chew their food, regurgitate it, and chew it again,” Doc said. “So when they defecate, it is uniform in color and texture. On the other hand, a bear is like a human, and undigested food, like berries and grass, passes right through.”

“I could stand some berries and grass about now,” the attorney said.

“Doc, I don’t really need a lecture on nature,” the kid said.

“Not a lecture,” Doc said. “Just things that pop into my head. And look at this,” he said, pointing his stick at the trunk of a tree.

“I think they call that a tree, Doc,” the banker said.

“Specifically Betula papyrifera,” Doc said. “But more commonly known as a paper birch or canoe birch.”

The policeman said, “Doc, back home you can’t tell a robin from a rooster. How come you know so much about stuff up here?”

“No idea,” Doc said. “But see where this moss is growing?” He poked the tree trunk with his stick.

“That would be always on the north side of the tree, right?” I said.

“Part truth, part myth,” Doc said. “Moss is a delicate plant that grows where there is more shade. In the northern hemisphere, that would be the north side of a tree or a rock. But in the southern hemisphere it grows on the south side. And often it grows where there is the most water, and that may be neither north nor south.”

“So I probably shouldn’t use moss as an indicator of north?” I said.

“Before you get lost in the woods,” Doc said, “a compass would be much more reliable, although a GPS device would be my first choice.” With that, he tossed his stick into the bushes, and minutes later we were fishing again.   

That night the rest of us whooped it up a bit less than the night before. Doc, with a still receding lump on his forehead, didn’t have any whoop left, and he crashed soon after sundown.

The policeman and I were the last men standing. We did a safety check of the stove and made sure the refrigerator door was closed. Before I turned off the main room light, I said, “You suppose that bang on the head turned Doc into a walking Wikipedia?”

“You mean like an idiot savant? Normally not so bright, but an absolute expert when it comes to math and other things?”

“Is that possible?”

“I’ve seen a lot of physical trauma in my work that caused dramatic mental changes,” the policeman said. “So, yes, I think it’s possible.”

The next morning Doc was up early. I listened to him noisily preparing coffee, and then rummaging in the fridge and cupboards where we kept our dry goods.

I walked in as he was lining up 36 slices of bread on the kitchen table.

“What are you doing, Doc?”

“Thought I’d make bologna doubles for shorelunch.”

“But we did that yesterday.”

“Sure we did.”

“Really, Doc,” I said, my concern possibly showing too much. “That’s what we had yesterday, Doc. Don’t you remember?”

“All I remember about yesterday is hitting my head...”

“Then we fished all morning, had bologna doubles, and baked walleye last night.”

“You’re kidding,” Doc said.

I grabbed a flashlight, shined it into Doc’s eyes. Normal pupil reaction. I gripped his hands and squeezed. He squeezed back. I stuck a fork into his ankle.

“Ow!” Doc said.

I said, “What’s the capital of Vermont?”

“That would be a V,” Doc said.

“I’m thinking that head bonk wiped your memory for a day, but you seem back to normal now,” I said.

“Then what was I like yesterday?”

“You were smarter than all of us combined.”

“Maybe I should hit my head more often.”

“Promise me you won’t do it on purpose?”

“I promise.”

“Thanks, Doc.”

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North with Doc columnist Greg Knowles lives in Green Valley, Arizona. A 5-­volume set of the first 20 years of North with Doc is available in e-reader form at amazon.com.

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