Our map, the prototype we were given back at the Winnipeg map store, told us exactly where to go. But having been wrong many times before I knew it was only a guess. To this point we'd found no major steams entering the File. The few side creeks we had come upon had dried into boulder channels and probably wouldn't have been much to begin with. However, the one rolling in from big Guthrie Lake to the west appeared to be a honker and was drawn in as more than a squiggly, black line. With a little luck there'd be a current flow and a dredged drop off where it entered Burntwood Lake.
Burntwood is a body of serious size and at the same time keeps its personal nature. It meanders every which way for forty or fifty miles and holds hundreds of islands. She's so broken up it appeared as dozens of small lakes hooked together. One look at the map and you knew it had to have fish holding water most everywhere or if you want to look at it from a different angle, anywhere. And anywhere might be hard to find on a lake of over fifty thousand acres. The old saw is ten percent of a lake holds ninety percent of the fish. Don't know if that's true but from my experience, it's close.
Another blue-skied day and island weave led us to a campsite no more than a quarter of a mile across from the river mouth. Wasn't much of a river as I recall but was wide and deep enough to just sneak past creek status. The site was something else. Our tent was pitched on a die level patch of duff beneath a small jack pine with an open view covering three miles of lake, forest, and swamp. The rock we stood upon was immense, six feet above lake level, and afforded fifty yards of open walking space. Across the bay near the swamp paddled an ever-present flotilla of white pelicans so white they were pale blue. As I recall there were an even dozen of them, usually in a line. Small moments sometimes stick with a person for quite a while and this lineup of pelicans returned to me as I wrote the novel. The white of the birds reflected the blue of the sky as it bounced off the lake. Wrote it with a touch more poesy in the book. Can't say this was the best camp we ever had but it was right up there.
Then there was the fishing; what it lacked in size it more than made up in numbers. Two, three hundred fish in our day and a half? Possibly. And all but a handful were in the walleye family. Walleyes by the bucketful, jumbo perch now and then, and surprise, surprise, saugers. I'd heard of saugers before, seen pictures of them, knew they looked like a walleye's little faded-brown cousins, but had never seen a one till our hours on Burntwood. As it turned out nary a fish was found directly in the river mouth but once we paddled past, the numbers on the line were as close to a fish a cast as we'd ever had.
Call it the second night when we hit it right. Whether in a fishing boat or a canoe the drift is critical. Check the wind, position the boat, and let the breeze do the work to carry you over good water. That evening the slightest of breezes carried us along a shore for better than an hour with only a couple of adjusting strokes. Not a one of the walleyes we boated was over twenty inches and the saugers topped out at sixteen. But the numbers were immense. Outside of how many casts in a row produced fish we didn't count. Allan once hit eighteen and had the gall to laugh at my paltry dozen. Our method was simple, we tipped our jigs with three-inch, yellow twister tails, flipped them out a little ways then let them sink till they rested on the bottom. After five seconds of pause we'd take up the line slack and gently lift the rod tip. Should we feel any weight we'd give it a three count before slamming home the set. Simple and effective. Also became a little repetitious after the first hundred. Yeah, I have no idea how many fish we boated and a hundred might be an exaggeration. Also might be a tad short. Could have added to our interest had there been a few lunkers mixed in. Sure is hard to believe such a marginal walleye fisherman as me would dare be audacious enough to say such a thing. Might bring on the curse and I'd never boat another.
We remained for two nights. On the first we were serenaded by a constant croaking kind of howling across the water. That might not nail down the sound but then no words ever duplicate a sound. Natural noises speak their own language and haven't as yet found the need to come up with an alphabet. Maybe it'd be best if I simply said the sounds we heard were other-worldly, or just weird as hell. Whatever, both of us heard the sounds so they must have happened.
As night drew toward morning it began to rain. Not a downpour, more of an oversized drizzle. Each time my ears rose to life during the false dawn, a soft scampering on the tent said we were looking at a wet day ahead. Finally, a bit after what I figured to be sunrise my bladder said it was time to rise and greet the morning. Since my nighttime needs are thirty years older than Allan's, I sleep near the door so as not to awaken him when crawling out. Kind of funny actually, my son sleeps like the dead. Anyhow, I unzipped the screen and the fly, slid my shoes on, stood, and was engulfed in a world of white. A glance across the rock told me the limit of vision was maybe fifteen feet. Even my stream started to fade before it hit the ground. 'Course I had to wake my son. Call it two minutes of bitching before he finally crawled out. Though he found the fog impressive, Al had his doubts whether or not it was worth losing sleep over. A check of the heavily dewed jack pine limbs above the tent told me where what I took to be soft rain had come from. Wasn't but fifteen minutes till the fog burned off and we stood beneath another intense blue, far north sky.
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