FISHERTALE

(One of the stories written for my three children some years ago)

The low buzzing of the alarm had startled me, and for a second I was disoriented. I reached over and stopped the muffled noise. I lay there for a moment while the ceiling became familiar again. I moved my head to one side to notice the curtain fluttering with a soft breeze.

I quickly realized where I was – on the edge of a major event. I was ready.

I rolled my body and sat on the side of the bed, listening for any other sound of importance. The others were surely asleep. It was quiet.

I put on my clothes which were draped over a chair, picked up my sneakers and slowly opened the door. I could hear snoring. It was undoubtedly Chuck – who always snored after a little vodka and a good dinner.

As I moved out into the living area, I was reminded of nights as a child when I would occasionally sneak to my parent’s bedroom to assure myself I was not alone. Funny, I hadn’t thought about this childhood fear for a long time. There was a light on in the kitchen. I stopped to make sure there was no sound from that direction, then walked on my toes to close the door of the bedroom of the asleep but rather loud Chuck. I had done this many times in the early mornings during these trips over the past twenty-six years. A thought that had crossed my mind many times came again – maybe the fact that Chuck and I lived four hundred miles apart was a major factor contributing to our long friendship. It really didn’t matter. We were close friends. Muskie fishing was just an excuse anymore to get together for a week or so each fall.

The door was shut to the other bedroom meaning everyone was accounted for. Don and Dick were good sports. They were always game for a long weekend fishing in the Northwoods.

I reached for the handle on the front door, turned the knob slowly – like it was the spinner on a safe I was cracking – and pulled it open. I was outside.

It was a clear night. No moon but a zillion stars. One could see so many more of them up here away from the lights of more-populated areas. I slipped on my sneakers and waited on the stoop for a few minutes while my eyes adjusted to the night. I could see the boat hooked to the Suburban. And the trees at the end of the drive were now visible.

I stepped off into tonight’s destiny.

Like most States, Wisconsin has long been in the business of managing its fish and wildlife. Sometimes successfully, of course – like muskies, but the bureaucracy was slow to acknowledge mistakes. This one was questionable, at best.

In its ‘wisdom’ some years ago, the State had re-introduced a weasel-like mammal to the Nicolet National Forest called the fisher. Pairs of them had been brought in from Minnesota. At the time there was plenty of small game for the fishers to survive, and it would be a fun experiment for bureaucrats to see whether this carnivore would take to the 1990’s. What the heck – it was probably a slow day at the government office.

The fisher was eradicated from this area in the 1920’s as the lumber industry was running out of trees, and the area settled down to modern civilization. The reason for the fisher’s demise was the same as that for the wolf in Michigan and the mountain lion in Colorado. Trappers had taken their toll, true. But they were also a menace to livestock, poultry and pets. It’s not that the fisher is ugly, its fur was almost treasured by trappers. It was just that the creature provided no obvious benefit to man and was not benign to progress. When ‘Aunt Mable’ lost some chickens and ‘Cousin Luke’ lost his cat to the fishers, the black, martin-like mammal wrote the prologue to its own epitaph here in Wisconsin.

Now they were back – and protected. And the fisher was proliferating and increasing its range each year. So were the stories of the lack of small game and the loss of pets. Funny how we think we get to play God with nature sometimes – choosing good and evil, right and wrong, but rarely considering man in the natural order equation in the first place.

I had had this idea for several months. I wasn’t interested in recognition for what I was about to try. It was probably illegal. I was only a week-long annual visitor, and knew few people in the Conover-Eagle River communities. No, this wasn’t about social acceptance or making some kind of mark for myself with others. It was about satisfaction – the inner kind. It was about knowing that I was alive, and knowing that with my mind and a little courage, I could take on the fisher as prior generations had done. It was a little corny, but real and somewhat exciting.  Maybe the fisher belonged here, maybe not.

The sound of the fisher is something between a whistle and a chirp. I had heard this sound in the darkness of early mornings for the past three years during these visits. I moved now to the section of woods from which I had heard the sounds most often. There were no sounds now – it was probably too early for the ‘strange’ night marauder which tonight might become a victim to its own ferocity and daring.

October had come, and the leaves had mostly fallen. Yesterday’s rain made the moist ground cover a perfect ally to the stealth I had hoped for. The woods were silent but for the breeze that could be heard at the tops of the trees. The air was hardly moving on the ground. The stars provided just enough light to see the trees, both standing and fallen.

I felt surprisingly calm and confident as I moved deeper into the woods. My senses seemed especially keen.  This was going to require all of that, and just a little nod from lady luck.

I arrived at the spot. I couldn’t see the bait inside the makeshift trap, but could see the fishing line – ’spider wire’ – to which it was attached. That stuff was at least good for something. The squirrel I had caught at the bird feeder earlier today was obviously hiding under some leaves, likely still as uncomfortable out of the trees as it was when it was tied here at dusk. I waited.

Just then to my left I heard the sound of a car turning off  ‘K’ onto Denton Road. I resisted the temptation to turn and look directly toward the lights in order to retain as much of my night vision as possible. The light, streaming and broken by the trees, created an eerie aura in the dark night and woods – sort of like a scene from one of those old movies when the Blessed Virgin was about to appear. Just as my mind began to wander with the shadows, I spotted movement directly ahead. A deer maybe, I thought at first. No, it was too low to the ground. A dark shadow moved over a log heading straight for me. The car and its lights were gone.

I could hear the faint sound now of the critter moving slowly across the forest bed. I stayed totally still as my heart began to beat faster. Thank God what breeze there was easterly and I was downwind. The squirrel heard the sound also, and made the instinctive mistake of trying to flee. The sudden sound of moving leaves and the trail of chirps from the captured rodent brought the fisher in. Like most predators it didn’t hesitate. It all happened so fast that I was startled by the falling of the large, camouflaged cardboard box and the wild commotion inside.

My adrenaline was pumping. I started to run the twenty feet to the box, plywood in hand. I jumped over a small depression in the forest floor and stumbled as I picked up the foot on which I had landed. I was too close to the box to avoid it, and fell directly on top of my trap. “Damn!” I said aloud through my heavy breathing.

A few seconds passed while I regained my senses. The first thing that occurred to me was that everything was quiet. There was no sound or commotion anywhere, including under me. The quiet was broken as I suddenly laughed out loud at the vision of myself lying on top of a fisher and a squirrel and a cardboard box out here in the woods in the middle of the night. “Nobody would believe this,” I thought. “This has got to be the funniest ‘totem’ pole ever.” But now what?

I slowly pushed myself up a little at a time in order to sense any movement under me. My plan had been to hold the box down while shoving the plywood under it, thereby being able to safely pick up the box with the quarry inside. I knew this trap was a little light for the task, but I hadn’t thought of anything else with the materials readily available.

There was no movement as I rose to my knees. I could see the crumpled box, and it could not now be used as intended.  But I had apparently stunned the fisher as well as myself – maybe even killed it. Or maybe it wasn’t there anymore. They are great tree climbers. Maybe it was in one close by – wondering what the heck happened. I stood up, and with one hand, picked up the box by the side that had been ripped all the way up at the corner.

There it was. I stood over the fisher as thoughts of my alternatives raced through my mind. I had to think of something quick, for the critter might regain consciousness any second. For some reason I thought of a rodeo, and calf roping. I reached into my pocket and pulled out the ‘spider wire’ Chuck had discarded earlier in the day when it had snapped when throwing a big muskie lure. I had almost forgotten I still had it with me. For some now lucky reason I had not thrown it away at the landing.

I tied the jaws shut first. Those teeth looked ominous. Then sequentially the back feet and the front legs. As I was completing the task, I wondered if the rumor that weasels walk on the balls of their feet was true. That was unneeded trivia for now, I thought.

The squirrel was dead. It had apparently died quickly of a broken neck. I picked up the fisher by its hind legs. Just then it started to wiggle. “Blood to the brain,” I thought. “Well at least it’s not dead.” My weight had been an unfair overmatch for of the fisher.

I started the trek back to the cottage. “This thing must weigh thirty pounds,” I said aloud to myself as I switched the load from my right to left. The fisher was really struggling at times now, and I had to stop and put the fisher down several times, being careful not to lose the grip. I laughed aloud again at the thought of this capture.  I could see the kitchen light now, and the shadow of the vehicles in front of the cottage.

I put the fisher down and started up the steps to wake my fishing partners. Then I stopped. A smile came over my face. This hadn’t been about bragging rights or showing off a ‘trophy.’ It had simply been about doing it.

I turned on the stoop and looked at the struggling varmint on the ground. I pulled out my pocketknife and started back down the steps. I held the head down as I cut the legs free, then the jaws. I hesitated a minute for a final look at a fisher – closer than most anyone had ever done, then released it. Fishers aren’t so tough – just fall on one.

I quietly returned to bed – but couldn’t sleep. What a memory. It was almost like a dream.

SPIDER Bytes

This week’s trivia question is: How many degrees does the earth rotate each hour? The answer to last week’s question re: the name of the world’s longest river: The Nile. It’s 4,132 miles long. Its basin includes parts of Tanzania, Burundi, Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Kenya, Uganda, South Sudan, Ethiopia, Sudan, and the cultivated part of Egypt. According to our retired AF pilot neighbor, in Egypt, it’s green for about a mile on each side of the Nile and that represents the country’s food production land. Some may have guessed Amazon as the longest. That river’s length is 3,977 miles, 150 miles shorter, but by volume it is #1. BTW, the Mississippi is #4, 2,340 miles long and with its tributaries runs through 31 states.

The Clydesdales made a brief appearance during last Sunday’s Super Bowl ads – beautiful horses! Some of the ads went right over my head. BTW, the game set a record of 127.7M viewers – many of whom were disappointed in the half-time show (again) and the lopsided score and Eagle dominance. President Trump had the opportunity to address his largest audience ever via a pre-recorded interview which was aired pregame.

Elon Musk headed a group of investors who made a bid to buy controlling interest of OpenAI last week. The non-profit was co-founded in 2015 by Musk and Sam Altman, the current CEO of the organization, and a few others. Altman rebuffed the $97B offer and instead offered to buy X. Now-now boys, behave.

Who in their right mind is opposed to slashing government waste, fraud and bureaucracies that spend our money on things we would not even think about ‘buying’ if we had control of spending our tax money?

I ask a similar question to those states and cities that oppose the arrest and deportation of violent, illegal immigrant criminals. Why would any leader want to keep them on the streets of their residents?

Can you keep up with the whirlwind of actions on multiple fronts being taken in less than a month the new administration has been in office? Trump’s approval ratings continue in the positive as the swift changes and cabinet confirmations continue, and a plurality – 47% – now believe the country is on the right track, breaking 20-years of ‘wrong track’ exceeding ‘right track,’ according to Rasmussen.

54% approve of the President’s performance thus far.