North with Doc: The Kid Catches Up

Lars walked around the boxes and suitcases and duffels and rod holders we’d

randomly stacked in the loading area at Knobby’s. The float plane would soon arrive to whisk us from Sioux Lookout to a remote lake where we would fish and fish and fish some more. Oh, boy.

Lars said, “I looked at the schedule. You signed up for six nights this year.”

“That is correct,” Doc said.

“This is June. You brought enough stuff to last you through September.”

“You think?”

Lars did an up-down scan of Doc’s bountiful belly, and said, “Okay, maybe only until August.”

“We like to be well fed,” Doc said.

“I can see that,” Lars said. “And I can also see two-dozen cases of various soft and not-so-soft drinks, so you must like to be well hydrated, too.”

“It’s supposed to be an uncommonly warm week,” Doc said. “Can’t be too careful.”

“Since the drinks are the heaviest part the load, besides present company, how about I fly in half with you now and the other half during the mid-week check flight?”

“Agreed,” Doc said. “We may have to cut rations for a day or so, but we will somehow manage, as we always have.”

Mere minutes later the plane arrived, and was packed with enough provisions to sustain Hannibal, his army, and 37 elephants when they crossed the Alps in 218 BC. The turboprop did its thing, and less than a half hour after touchdown, the first fish on the line was just as exciting as it was 40 years ago in this very same lake.

After several hours skipping back and forth between weedbeds and walleye honey holes, rocky points, and island drop-offs, Doc watched as I used a mouth spreader to retrieve a Five of Diamonds from the gaping throat of an unhappy pike. The spreader and longnose pliers worked great. The treble came out easily, virtually bloodlessly, and the pike was off  on its predatory patrol again. “How long have you had that mouth spreader?” Doc said.

It was one of those spring things with opposing sharp points that unlocks when squeezed, then expands to hold a fish’s jaws open. “This one? Probably 35 years,” I said. “The first four or five trips I lost four or five over the side or they swam away with a fish. That’s before I attached a line that I could hook to an oar pin hole.”

“And though it’s crusted with rust and pike slime, it still works,” Doc said.

“It does when I can muster enough strength in these arthritic hands to squeeze it open,” I said.

“Not much has changed over the years, has it?”

“Better planes, better accommodations, drier boats, better engines, better fishing tackle, but everything else is pretty much the same,” I said.

“Do I look any different than on the first fly-in?”

Doc said.

“Well, let me see,” I said. “If I squint this right eye tight and kind of half close the left and peer through a small gap in my fingers? You look just the same, Doc.”

“I thought you’d say that, because

that’s just what I would say about you.”

“You mean my inner essence is timeless, but my outward appearance is unrecognizable?”

“I couldn’t have said it better.”

“I know.”

The rest of the guys arrived, and we rafted up to discuss for the umpteenth time why in the world we would do this same old same old thing year after year. The sun shone brightly through the crystal-clear skies. The tea-colored water lapped lazily at the sides of the boats. We’d all SPF-ed up, but we’d still get a decent sunburn from a long day on the water, and we didn’t much care.

“This is my number six with you guys,” the kid said, “and every year is better than the last.”

“You think so?” the attorney said.

“Well, without keeping a minute-by-minute tally, it’s hard to compare numbers of fish and laughs,” the kid said, “but it seems better to me.”

We smiled knowingly, humored by the kid’s relatively short term in our midst.

“I can hardly remember what I ate for breakfast,” Doc said, “let alone anything about years long gone.”

“What’s that old saying about the past?” the policeman said.

I said, “It’s a quote from philosopher George Santayana. ‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.’”

“How’d you dredge up that one?” the banker said.

“I minored in Philosophy.”

“About as marketable as a major in English,” Doc said.

“I know,” I said. “I have one of those, too.”

We were mum for a moment, except for the hum of the idling engines, and an occasional rush of treetop wind that made leaves rattle and hiss, and brought us the invigorating aroma of pine woods as far as the nose could smell and the eye could see.

Doc unwrapped one of his tubular tobacco products, but chose to leave it unlit as we inhaled the cool, clean air. Every so often we’d get an equally stimulating snort of two-cycle engine exhaust. Ahh, Paradise.

“You know,” the attorney said, “I bet not many people, outside of a tight family unit, stay linked by a common bond as we have for so many years.”

“Common bond being a universal disgust of Doc’s cigars?” the kid said.

“That’s part of it,” the banker said. “And setting aside a whole week once a year to get reacquainted and rehash events so far fetched nobody would believe they actually happened.”

“Sometimes there’s another improbable chapter tacked onto our fishing saga, but not often,” the attorney said.

“Is that because we’ve already been there, done that?” the policeman said.

“After all these years, I’m thinking there is still a lot we haven’t experienced up here,” I said.

A combination of current and breeze pushed our flotilla toward a sheer rock wall. When in casting range, I bounced my decades old Ruby Eye off the wall, let it sink a few beats, and retrieved. Nothing.

“Need to get it down deeper,” Doc said. “I bet the bottom is at least 20 feet.”

On the next cast I let it drop a 10 count, and was rewarded with a walleye that was barely longer than the lure.

Naturally, all the rest had to have a go at the spot. Although it went unsaid, my comrades catching a larger fish would be proof positive what a poor fisherman I was. At least for that moment in time.

For a few minutes the splash and roil of our lures smacking the water’s surface reminded me of a flock of brown pelicans diving for balls of baitfish in the Sea of Cortés, but then the frenzy of our fishing turned to light lines, jigs, small spinners, and a good deal of finesse.

 Doc set fire to a cigar the size of a road flare, and the other two boats hastily moved out of sniff range. However, we were close enough to be heard, so in between freeing hooks from fish and snags, we visited about friends and family, but left unspoken the diverse careers that financed our trips.

Hours passed. Doc and I joined the kid and policeman where a slow-moving current snaked through a deep, narrow gash separating two islands. It was perfect for bouncing jigs along the rocky bottom.

On the third or fourth pass the kid caught his biggest walleye of the day, a 22-incher. “Do you ever get bored catching fish?” he said.

“Not with the catching part,” Doc said. “Sometimes the fishing can be a chore. And so much that can go wrong.”

“Like what?” the kid said.

“You set the hook and reel in 30 feet of impossibly thin mono, and trust it not to break,” I said.

“And trust the drag to work when the fish pulls back,” Doc said, “and the gears in the reel to mesh and spin the bail or the spool.”

“And trust the rod will flex to help you maintain control,” the policeman said.

“And if everything works right, you boat and unhook the fish and do it all over again,” I said.

The banker and attorney arrived to join the fun, and the banker said, “You know, we oughta bring Aunt Lucy some time.”

“She’d win the annual belching contest trophy, that’s for sure,” I said.

“Wait,” the kid said. “There’s a belching trophy?” 

“That was back when we were young and foolish,” I said. “About your age now.”

“Doc won it so many years in a row, we stopped competing,” the banker said. 

The attorney said, “Doc, do you still have that trophy?”

“On a shelf in my man cave,” Doc said. “Right next to my bowling awards and my framed 1987 Time magazine Man of the Year cover.”

 The kid said, “You guys have told me dozens of tales about bizarre stuff that happens up here, but in six years all I have seen is fish.”

“It’s not like every trip has an extreme element to it,” the attorney said. “Just be patient.”

Our final drift betwixt the islands didn’t produce a bite, so we motored north and west to an incoming rapids from the next lake in the Cat River chain.

Walleyes were hitting salted minnows hard in the pool adjacent to the fast water, and every now and then we’d pick up a small pike. The sun was beginning to play peek-a-boo through the tops of the tallest trees, so we made our long way south to the cabin.

Halfway home, the kid, who had been complaining about a tummy bug, requested a bit of shore leave to answer Nature’s not-so-gentle call. The kid’s boatmate and helmsman, the policeman, pulled into a small bay with an unlikely stretch of sugar sand beach at the end. The rest of the party remained in the lake a couple hundred feet away casting spoons into the unknown.

The kid had been in the woods for maybe five minutes when we heard a “Yeeooowww!” and he sprinted for the boat, one hand holding up his jeans, and the other holding an unspooling roll of Charmin’s finest.

“Bear! Bear!” the kid yelled at the policeman, grabbing the bow, shoving the boat into deeper water, feet splashing a few steps, then leaping on board. The engine screamed in reverse, then stirred up a cloud of silt as the policeman jammed it into forward and did a shallow-water U-turn.

Not 10 seconds passed when a black bear came crashing onto the beach at a dead run. Twenty feet behind was a moose. Maybe they heard the boat engines. Maybe not. But they stopped suddenly, breathing hard, looked at each other. The moose pawed the ground. The bear made a low moaning sound. And they were off again like someone fired a starter’s pistol. Maintaining the 20-foot separation, they disappeared into the impossible tangle of trees and brambles. We sat stunned until we could no longer hear their thundering progress through the underbrush.

The kid and policeman motored to where the rest of us sat, all of us pondering what we just witnessed.

Still out of breath, the kid said, “I was barely on my feet when I heard them, then saw the bear coming right at me.”

“Sounded like a D12 Caterpillar running through there,” the banker said.

“Or like someone tossed a couple ceiling fans into a wood chipper,” the attorney said.

The kid said, “The moose had no antlers.”

 “A cow,” Doc said. “Maybe a yearling. A three-quarter-ton bull wouldn’t waste its time with a bear of any size.”

“A moose chasing a potential predator?” I said. “Something’s mighty strange about that.”

“The bear didn’t look that old, though,” the attorney said.

“I don’t know much about young animals in the wild,” the policeman said, “but do you suppose they were just having fun?”

Wearing a grin big as a crescent moon, the kid said, “That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.”

“Well,” the banker said, “you wanted crazy, you got it.”

“So we can add one more impossible episode to your Bush tales?” the kid said.

“Those tales belong to you now, too,” the banker said.

“And next year I’ll bring the belching trophy,” Doc said, “to give you a chance at the incredible fame and fortune I have enjoyed for so long.”

The kid, utterly exhilarated by the bear and moose encounter, and feeling suddenly and fully established as one of the guys, said, “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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