The Run to Gitche Gumee

by Robert F. Jones

  From Bonduel we angled northwest on State Route 45 through dairy country to Shawano, then northwest through the Menominee Indian reservation. In the old days it was all tarpaper shacks, the big, bleak, yellow brick orphanage, and that comfortless church at Keshena; roadside stands that sold flimsy toy birchbark canoes and headdresses of dyed turkey feathers and moccasins that fell apart in the first rain; a few fat young Indians in dirty Levis and gray shirts sitting and staring into the gloomy pine woods—the Romance of the Red Man. Now the Rez was prospering. Tidy new housing units sprouted in the clearings, clustered around a neat new tribal headquarters and clinic. The Menominees owned 240,000 acres of climax white pine and hardwood forest, and it all looked healthy as ever. Tribal logging trucks hogged the winding, two-lane road.

  “The red man’s Dauerwald,”Ben said.

  “Doh?”

  “Yeah, I read a piece about it in the Journal awhile back. In Germany they’re trying to maintain ‘Perpetual Forests’ with the same mix of trees—conifers and oaks for the most part—that grew in the days of Arminius. You remember old Herman the German, don’t you? He’s the guy who wiped out those Roman legions in the Teutoburg Forest. Well, the Menominees had the idea first. They’ve kept their woods intact since 1854, the way it was when the white man first showed up in these parts. Selective cutting’s the key. The Indians take only twenty million board feet a year. With the price of lumber these days, it’s enough to keep the tribe in clover.”

  We crossed the Wolf River, fast and cold as it slashed through the dark woods. Ben and I had fished it now and then in our old canoe, the one that ended up on the bottom of Gitche Gumee.

  “How’s the Wolf fishing these days?”

  “Still plenty of big fat brookies, up near the headwaters mainly. You’ve got to hire an Indian guide, and I figure they keep the best water for themselves.”

  Out of the reservation we entered the cutover country around Langlade and Lily and Pickerel—country that only a century earlier had stood skyhigh in white pine, the birthplace of the Paul Bunyan myth, now laid flat and stumpy, regrown in weak popple and birch, jackpine and alder, like a woman with lovely hair who has lain with the enemy and then had her head shaved. A sandy country, the glacier had taken it down to bedrock during its slow grinding retreat ten thousand years ago. And then we emerged—abrupt, marvelous, rolling down the windows—into what I really considered up north: the road shooting straight and dusty through dense stands of spruce and tamarack, with muskegs sprawling right and left, stippled with crooked, wind-silvered snags on some of which perched eagles and ospreys, erect and wild-eyed, and always more frequently the crooked lakes and flowages glinting hard blue and brown in the sunlight that—Up North—still seemed to me cleaner and harsher than anywhere else on the planet, a sharp wind out of the northwest kicking up whitecaps on the open reaches, and old wooden row-boats painted dark green tied up to cockeyed piers, with cabins of peeled spruce logs squatting, smoking, back in the woods, and always a lone man in a red-and-black-checked lumberjack shirt fishing from the shore—casting and reeling, casting and reeling, again and again and again . . .

  We blew through dumpy, grungy little burgs where the boys and girls, largely of Baltic blood, all looked pale and misshapen, with bulging foreheads and washed-out eyes, as if they’d sprouted from potato bins, and the sour stink of pulp mills invaded the car. In most of the towns Golden Arches tainted the atmosphere with the reek of hot, rancid fat, K-Marts and WalMarts sprawled in jampacked parking lots, and car dealerships on the outskirts now waved their red, white, and blue plastic flags over acres of asphalt where once, in our youth, Ben and I had shot ducks—mallards and pintails, bluebills and redheads. Now Neons and Prizms floated there, on heaving seas of blacktop.

  At Rhinelander we turned west . . .

  “Too many fucking people,” Ben said.

  “No, too many people fucking. Do you realize that when we were born there weren’t even two billion human beings on earth? Now it’s up to six billion, and that’s not the end of it.”

  He grunted and lit up another stogey.

  “It all needs a good stiff culling,” I said. “When any animal population gets too big for its habitat, Nature arranges a die-off to bring it back in balance. She’s trying to do it right now. Look at AIDS. Look at Ebola, and Hanta virus, and Legionnaires’ disease. Look at the antibiotic-resistant strains of TB that we’re seeing these days.”

  “I take it you’re not a people person, Doc.”

  “Don’t get me going.”

  “The world’s gone to hell in a handcart, you figger?”

  He glanced across at me and grinned. That gleam in his eye . . . I knew it of yore. The devil’s advocate was emerging—Ben loved the role, he always had.

  “But look how many things are better these days,” he said. “In the old days, you bought a cuppa coffee, you could read the date of dime on the bottom of it, if you were dumb enough to drop one in. Now there’s Starbucks everywhere. Even the supermarkets carry Costa Rican and Kenyan beans. And wine? Used to be nothing but Gallo and Manischewitz on the shelves. Now you got chardonnays and pinot grigios, from California to upstate New York, merlots and medocs. Beaujolais nouveaux up the gigi. Beer ditto. Microbreweries everywhere, not just that thin piss we got from the big boys, Miller and Pabst, Schlitz and Budweiser. And what about telephones? Answering machines, call waiting, caller ID, cordless phones you can take into the john with you if you’ve got a sudden urge. Fax machines, fucking e-mail . . . ”

  I snorted. “All that means is people can hassle you easier. Waste your time with bullshit. Telephonic junk mail’s not even the worst of it. The internet makes it sheer hell. This is a consumer society, pal. And it’s consuming us big time, guts and balls and brains, every fucking minute of the livelong day.”

  “Hold it right there.” Ben reached above the sun visor and pulled down a CD, popped it in the deck.

  The Bird blazed forth in all his long-dead glory, a remastered phoenix rising from needletracked ashes.

  Ben grinned at me in triumph. “Scrapple from the Apple” he said. “Can you dig it, daddy-o?”

  We listened. Then I said, “Pull over, Benjamin. I need my horn. Not only can I dig it, man, I’ll gig it—like you never heard before.”

  It was an hour before sundown when we hit the Firesteel. We’d stopped only once along the way, for burgers and beers at the Little Bohemia lodge on Route 51 just south of Manitowish. Little Bohemia was the place where Dillinger and his boys had a big shootout with the G-men back in ’34—shit, Ben and I were babies then and now it was ancient history. One fed was killed in the fracas, but Dillinger got away clean. The bullet holes from the fight were still there. Big ones, from Tommy guns. They had gear that belonged to the outlaws on display behind glass cases. Homer Van Meter, Baby Face Nelson, Tommy Carroll—famous crooks like that, but nothing that belonged to our old pals Doc and Curly.

  The elderly frycook who served us told us that back in 1937, when Dillinger was still a big name, 51,687 tourists had stopped at the lodge to see the place. “Nobody knows from the Dillinger Gang nowadays,” the old man mourned. Just old farts like us, was the implication.

  “They don’t know what they’re missing,” I reassured him.

  Ben had arranged for a carpenter friend of his from Ashland to shuttle the truck to the mouth of the river. He left the keys under the left front fender and we lugged our gear down to the riverbank. There wasn’t as much this time. Maybe we do get smarter with age. Or is it just weaker but wiser. No—the slimmed-down load was probably because I hadn’t done the shoping for this trip. We dragged down the canoe, much lighter than our late lamented Old Town hog.

  The country hadn’t changed much that I could see. The old black trestle spanning the headwaters of the Firesteel was still standing, though it wore a new coat of lumpy, aluminum-silver paint. The woods had grown up, of course, then been cut again, and regrew a few times more in the half century since we’d last stood on thi
s spot. The swamp was still there though. Amazing in this age of instant malls. “They paved paradise,” as Joni Mitchell sang, “and put up a parking lot.”

  I listened for rising trout but heard nothing. Too many years of gunfire had dulled my ears. They must have been feeding, though. I could see clouds of mayfly spinners in the air—blue-winged olives most likely.

  Jake charged down to the river, plunged in for a drink and a swim, came out, shook himself dry between us, then put his nose in the air and lit up. “He’s birdy,” Ben said, watching. “Go get ‘em, boy.”

  Jake pussyfooted into the bankside alders. His tail snapped skyward, his head thrust forward, and he flushed two woodcock just yards from our put-in point. Then he sat and watched them go. A good omen for our trip.

  “We’ve got about an hour of light left,” Ben said. “What say we push on down through the swamp, pick up a trout or three for supper, then pitch camp in our old place.”

  “The Place of the Bear?”

  “He’s long gone,” Ben said.

  “If you can guarantee it, I’m game.”

  We strung up the rods and pushed off.

  Maybe we took it too fast, maybe we didn’t match the hatch, but we raised not a single fish in the whole spring swamp section. We didn’t even see a rise or hear the splash of a feeding trout. But the spring pools were as thick as before with elodea, the mayflies and caddis just as abundant. Maybe the fish were sated on nymphs and emergers. Or perhaps an otter had passed through, putting them down for the moment. It was odd, though, to say the least. And ominous. The marl itself seemed to have washed out of the riverbed, leaving crevices of limestone visible through the water, crenellated ghost castles sprouting from the bony bottom.

  As we paddled out of the swamp, we saw the lights in the distance. It looked like a housing development. Could the seepage from its septic tanks have altered the water? But the bugs were thriving and we did see a few dace and shiners.

  Well, time enough to worry about it tomorrow. Right now we had to make camp.

  4

  NIGHT OF THE BULL NEWT

  But of course we couldn’t leave well enough alone. “Maybe they’re feeding at night,” Ben said, puffing another corona. “Like the cannibal brown on our first trip.” Jake snoozed at his feet, sedated by a bellyful of lams “Active Maturity,” a crunchy, yummy, low-fat kibble for older dogs.

  Euphemism is our middle name these days, even when it comes to dogfood.

  We were lounging around the campfire sipping Cuervo after a hasty supper of chili con came and Minute Rice. The tent was pitched—one of those nylon pop-tops with an external frame that opens like an umbrella: camping was sure easier nowaways, I’ll give Ben that. The gear was all stowed, and the night was growing cozier by the minute. Our old campsite hadn’t changed much, still plenty of deadfall firewood lying all over the place. But it wasn’t scorched pine slashings this time, just spruce and windtoppled birch.

  “She might have left plenty of offspring at that,” I said. “Great-great-great-grandchildren, all with that cannibal gene. Big fish little fish. Maybe one of them ate up all the others and there’s only one monster brown in the swamp. That would account for the dearth of activity.”

  “I brought along a couple of wet suits and an underwater spotlight,” he said. “What say we swim up there and have a look-see.”

  I thought about it. Two old codgers diving alone at night in a dismal swamp, one of them dying and the other a lush who chain-smokes cigars. “Sounds scary,” I said. “But we’ve got to get to the bottom of this mystery, and the only place to start is on the bottom. Let’s do it.”

  We left Jake to guard the camp against intruders—Ben said he was hard on prowlers, tough enough to scare off even a bear—and snorkeled upstream toward the swamp, snug in our wet suits. Ben led the way with the spotlight to illuminate our route. Everything that lives in the water comes out at night. Crayfish scuttled across the bottom, blackshelled mussels lipped the current, big pink and golden carp with scales the size of silver dollars shouldered their way through the midwater. We even saw a few trout, browns mostly, about eight or ten inches long allowing for the face mask’s magnification, and a couple of dark, fair-sized brook trout. They seemed stunned by the spotlight, swimming up to our masks and goggling at us. One of them hung there in the water, watching me, mesmerized. I reached out slowly and ran my fingertips down its flank. It woke up and flashed away in an ivoryblack blur.

  When we got to the rapids just below the swamp, we had to crawl up them on our bellies. The water was too shallow to swim. It deepened as we entered the lower pool. Ben dropped back beside me and panned the spotlight beam across the bottom. It revealed nothing but limestone, eerie misshapen domes and minarets, fallen slabs of soft white rock like the ruins of some alien mausoleum.

  Ben popped his head above water and pulled the snorkel’s mouthpiece free. “I want to dive down there and look under those slabs. Why don’t you stay up here and hold the spotlight, follow me along wherever I go. If anything flushes out from under the rocks, it’ll probably kick up too much marl for me to see it. Watch where it goes.”

  “You got it.”

  He sucked a few deep breaths, charging his lungs with oxygen, then folded at the waist and dove, the big fins pushing him down fast. He was still damned good in the water. When he reached the bottom, he began pulling himself along, hand over hand, along the bed of slabs. He stopped every now and then to look under one, shoving a gloved hand in there, groping around. He stayed down nearly two minutes. So his lungs weren’t shot yet.

  I swam over when he popped to the surface.

  “Nothing,” he said. “It’s damned weird. You’d think I’d have spooked out at least a few bottom feeders, carp or suckers or something.”

  “This whole place seems dead.”

  “Yeah, I saw a lot of fish skeletons down there in the marl. It’s a boneyard.”

  “Let’s go up to the next channel. That’s where we hooked the cannibal.”

  We finned across the big pool and entered the channel. This time I went ahead, diving every ten feet or so in the light-beam and cruising along the rootbeds of the alders. The channel was about ten feet deep in here. I flushed a few small fish—minnows of some sort, or maybe they were fingerling trout—but nothing of predatory size.

  We came to the end of the gut. The next pool opened out ahead of us. More slabs and falling castles. I swam over to the alders and broke off a branch to use as a probe.

  “Good thinking,” Ben said. “Reach in under there as far as you can. Poke the bastard out where we can see him. We can always come back tomorrow and nail him fair and square.”

  “Are there any alligators this far north?” I said. “Any freshwater sharks?”

  “If there are, they’ll be new to science. Think of it—you’ll get in the history books. And I’ll be sure to gather up your bones for a proper Christian burial.” He grinned at me, the old Ben’s grin again. “Go in peace, my son, and God bless you.”

  It was twenty feet at least down to the bottom and I had plenty of time to think along the way. I’d been kidding about gators and sharks, but there was something scary about this whole affair. The Firesteel below the swamp seemed to be in good shape, we’d spotted enough fish in our short swim upstream to confirm that. But here was this huge font of artesian water, rich in nutrients, grown junglelike with plant life, buzzing with insects, and yet no fish in it to speak of. The water was healthy, no doubt about that. So it had to be predation of some sort that had depleted the fish life. We’d seen an osprey nest on our way down through the swamp in the canoe, but no osprey—or even a squadron of them—could have emptied this fish bowl so thoroughly.

  What could have wrought this piscine desolation?

  Was it the . . .

  I almost giggled . . .

  The Creature from the Black Lagoon?

  It was.

  Here’s how it happened:

  As I probed the third crevice, th
e rotten alder stick broke off short in my hand. I still had air enough in my lungs to reach in for what remained of it. But when I extended my arm I felt something grab my hand. Something soft but strong and quick. Alive . . .

  It clamped down hard on my wrist. I yanked my hand back, shredding the neoprene diving glove in the process, but the nightmare held on.

  I flashed: Moray! I’d encountered them diving in the Caribbean, big ugly mottled graygreen eels with sharp-fanged blocky jaws like bulldogs. They lurked in caves in the coral, snapping up fish that swam by. If a diver reached into one of these crevices, feeling around for rock lobsters, maybe, the moray would grab him, its tail wrapped tight around a projection deep in the cave, and hold him down there till he drowned. But there couldn’t be morays this far north. They were tropical creatures, sea-dwelling animals that would die in fresh water.

  This thing—whatever it was—had me now. Its mouth felt slippery and cold, even through the ripped glove, with craggy nubbed teeth . . . like a mouthful of warts. It wouldn’t let go. My air was going fast. I place my finned feet against the limestone slab and heaved.

  As the creature emerged into the beam of the distant spotlight, I saw it clear . . . a wide lipless mouth, downturned at the corners like Edward G. Robinson’s in the movies.

  Mother of Mercy! Little Caesar! Rico lives!

  I screamed through my snorkel.

  Screamed like a girl.

  Then the creature let loose and disappeared into the murk. I boiled my way to the surface.

  “Holy shit!” Ben said. “What the fuck was that?” His face was whiter than bone.

  “Don’t know,” I said, gasping, “but it wanted to eat me. It had no eyes, just a broad flat head covered all over with lumps. Let’s get out of here—pronto!”