Fish Lake Manitoba Narrows

ce fishing really is like no other American distraction. I grew up on Lake Michigan and as a kid in winter I fished out of a shack my dad built. The frame was wooden and sheets of printer’s tin covered the outside and inside. We made our own rattle wheels and inside the shack we tied rubber bands to our lines, gathering about 4 inches of slack as we did.

When a fish bit, the rubber bands expanded, delicately allowing a walleye or northern to hook itself while signaling simultaneously that we should pay attention.

Fishing this way is a variation on a theme born centuries ago.

In the far north of Canada, natives for generations have fished beneath the ice using nets. Ingenious methodology is required to accomplish this feat. So, too, grit.

In northern Saskatchewan a few years back I knocked on the door of a trapper’s shack where I knew three Cree friends were spending January and February, fishing. A dead wolf lay stiff outside the shack, a victim of my friends’ ancillary leghold hijinks.

When Huey, my friend, opened the door, I asked how fishing was. Nets were strung in a corner of the makeshift log cabin and he nodded toward them and said, “OK.”

Outside it was 42 degrees below zero, and as Huey stoked the cabin’s wood stove and boiled water for tea, we talked about the northern pike and walleyes he was catching, and how he transported them every third day by snowmobile to Flin Flon, Manitoba.

Yet to whatever degree catching fish has been the point of ice fishing over the years, it seems less so now, at least among sporting types — this even though many of them arm themselves with more and better gear.

I realize this might be a contrary view.

But consider that today in many instances lake and river ice seem less like harvest platforms than day spas catering to the psychically disenfranchised; harbors in the storm of modern life — quiet places where, paradoxically, the thicker the ice, the more soothing the balm against sensory overload and its twin stepchildren, indifference and regret.

This is especially true in a world seemingly grown smaller, in which everyone’s problems have become everyone else’s.

But not so, necessarily, while on the ice, fishing.

I tied on a Swedish Pimple, an effective lure that long ago was manufactured a few blocks from my house, down an alley in Gladstone, Mich., in what passed for a garage. To it I affixed a crappie minnow through the tail and pinched a split shot onto the line about 18 inches up.

This allowed the bait to swim freely against the weight, one acting as a sort of counter-balance against the other.

Imagining the rig dangling near the river bottom 40 feet down only fueled my seemingly tireless delusion that before too long something would bite.

The ice cracked and groaned as beneath it the big river flowed out of sight, and darkly, adding to the mystery of water in general and in particular to the mystery of flowing water.

Standing almost exactly on the spot where one of my sons caught a sturgeon through the ice some years ago, I nonetheless caught nothing worth keeping, only two small crappies.

Still, I felt good; great, even.

Lights twinkled from the shoreline and the evening’s first stars shone brightly above.

Invisibly, cars moved behind headlights traveling against the Minnesota bluffs.

I weighed all of this. Then, finally, I loaded my little operation into the truck and found the tire-worn, north-south trail that divides the river almost in half.

One pickup was ahead of me, taillights beaming, one behind, smooth sailing atop a river of ice.

• • •

I had friends in town last week from Louisiana, and late Wednesday I was back on the St. Croix with them.

Cruising upriver from Bayport, eventually finding a place to fish among a small village of ice houses, I reminded my companions that collectively holding their breath while driving on ice served no good purpose.

“It’s best just to go ahead and breathe normally,” I said.

With me were Sam Achee, a duck hunting friend, his son Sammy, 12, and daughter, Ciera, 10. Also along was my son Cole, 12.

This time I brought my portable shack. A slight wind blew from the north and the shack and its small heater provided shelter against it.

Quickly we drilled seven holes. The shack sat over four of them. The three others were scattered helter-skelter nearby.

“Mr. Dennis, will we catch anything?” Ciera asked.

“Not necessarily,” I said.

“This is a crazy kind of fishing,” Sam said.

Cole tied on a small jig that glows in the dark when flashed with a light. Baiting it with a minnow he rushed to one of the holes as if anticipating immediate action.

As afternoon and then evening approached, shadows of our companion fishing shacks grew longer.

I had brought my homemade gaff and hoped that a fish of good size would be caught so it could be used. The gaff is made from a long aluminum arrow, with a big treble hook in one end.

I had told Ciera and Sammy that some fishing shacks have bunks in them for sleeping on the ice over night.

This news was received like a cruel joke, and I quickly had to clarify that by nightfall or shortly thereafter they would be safely returned to terra firma.

We didn’t catch any fish, or see any caught.

“This isn’t the best time for ice fishing,” I said. “The St. Croix this winter has actually been pretty good. But these last few weeks have been slow.”

http://www.startribune.com/sports/outdoors/15467871.html

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