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The oldest possession of mine still extant, that is, still mine and still in my possession, is a Little Joe Red Devil spinner – a walleye snell. I actually have a couple left from a gift of around a dozen from my grandfather Jim to me when I was about nine.
A snell is a live bait system composed of a leader (monofilament in our case; otherwise wire), a spinner blade attached by a clevis to the leader, some beads threaded on the leader, and a hook tied onto the leader with the special “snell” knot.
I’m sure that after 40 years and more the monofilament line has been compromised. I still keep them, although for many years now I have built my own walleye snells – both spinner rigs and Lindy rigs (which replace the spinner with a foam float to hold a leech or ‘crawler aloft above the lake bottom).
I still have and still love to use the pair of Arctic Fisherman tip-ups my father bought me when I was ten. It was a pair of them because in those days ice fishing in Wisconsin we were allowed three lines down the holes each of the three of us, so that we each – my grandfather and father and I – had our two tip-ups tipped with fatheads and then a jigging rod with a Jigging Rap Rapala. Usually, I didn’t jig because I just loved to tend tip-ups. It reminded me of snaring rabbits, the way you used your equipment (the snare versus tip-up) carefully set and waited for it to be sprung by your quarry (the cottontail versus the walleye).
When I was eleven my father went all-in and bought four pair of Faber Michigan snowshoes for our little family. On our very small front yard in the suburbs in the winter I would practice them, walking the perimeter of the yard on the berms, down alongside our driveway, alongside our street front (no sidewalks) and up the other side along the Adelsman’s driveway, over the big mounds of snow on the corners by the mailboxes and bare ash tree, around and around and around all the while in the darkening latchkey afternoon thinking of Pike Lake and the boreal and Finns and Danes and Dutchman and Indians. I still have my old snowshoes, and still use them, and I have my mother’s pair too because she lives in Houston, Texas.
Now since my father is cleaning out the barns and sheds, I have again come into possession of five of the original half-dozen #1 Victor longspring muskrat traps that my father gave me when I was twelve. Each one has been tagged and re-tagged following the trapping laws with different home addresses (and a couple different names): “Jay Egan/2296 Indian Way…,” “James Jay Egan/3020 Meyer Court…,” “James Egan/724 240th…,” Grand Marais, Hovland. They have caught many muskrats, many gophers, two mink, and one rooster pheasant.
My grandmother Joyce gifted me the first gun I ever owned when I was thirteen: a single shot break action .410 shotgun. I still have it, at my brother’s place; he is the last one to carry it afield. That shot many partridge.
Two years later for Christmas my father gave me my final shotgun, the greatest shotgun of them all: the working man’s Remington Model 870 Wingmaster pump action 12-gauge. I have missed many ducks with it, though I shot my first two deer with it. I had it with me this past week, painted camouflage now after all these years. For the first time ever, after all the 35 years, when a drake mallard got hung up in the wind hovering over me at 30 yards, the gun jammed on me. But jam or not I would – or will – never have another shotgun.
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