The final weeks of December and the first of January are a time to reflect on the year passed. So I will not bother with that. I will bother with looking forward to another calendar year in the Arrowhead of Minnesota. To fishing trout in cold lakes under the two-foot ice, stocked rainbows or naturally-reproducing lake trout, who can be... READ MORE >
The grouse hunters are long gone; the deer hunters are done; the out-of-towners have left from the cold and for the holidays down state. So we are free into the woods, with no worries of my pups bothering anyone, or anyone bothering us. Yesterday was with the 20-gauge and shock collars on Daphne and Foxy, who quarter and range too... READ MORE >
I wish you could smell the curry in the old trapper’s cabin. The store-bought curry with chopped garlic and ginger, onions and potatoes, chicken and fresh green beans, and Geisha canned coconut milk. In the spring and summer and fall with the door of the shack open, it carries round the clearing to where the thick spruce and fir hold... READ MORE >
My father loves to recount the trip up to Lake Lizzie on the opening weekend of duck hunting in 1980. I was ten years old and it was the first “trip” I went on with my father, who was a duck hunter, and who was a very young father then. It was a miserable weekend. It rained all Saturday. That... READ MORE >
The saying goes like this, although I try not to write with clichés. “You may not get the dog you want, but you’ll get the dog you need.” My brother has a yard at his big house on Highway 61 in Grand Marais. A big yard. Mown. With planted tall red pines and planted stunted red oaks, and tall spruce... READ MORE >
The wolves are howling three-quarters of a mile away along the Kadunce River and across Trout Lake Road. I am incontinent. It is late afternoon in our late fall with the crisp layer of snow and ice on the maple leaf duff. I am incontinent and it is as though the wolves can sense it. They can smell it. That’s... READ MORE >
I will not go into the long process of skinning out a beaver. Suffice it to say that there is much pulling of hide from flesh, and much delicate knife work both in separating skin from carcass where it will not pull apart, and in locating the castor and oil glands and removing them, and eventually in separating the ears... READ MORE >
In those days very long ago I was a schoolboy trapper. In Tolstoy’s delineation it covered my boyhood and youth, but I was always in the public school system in that time, so I’ll call myself a schoolboy. Plus there was an old book from the fifties that my father had given me called “Schoolboy Trapper” by Pat Sedlak which... READ MORE >
The Vietnamese practice the version of Buddhism often called Mahayana; literally “The Great Vehicle” (from the Sanskrit). That is, they worshiped – in addition to their Vietnamese ancestors – not just the Buddha as a God but many buddhas or bodhisattvas as deities, and did not simply or strictly follow the Buddha’s ways and words. Mahayana is Buddhism for the... READ MORE >
In the mornings among the wire grass and cattails, in my canoe camouflaged for the same, a dozen-anda half mallard and wood duck decoys amongst the wild rice and lily pads – the majority brilliantly colored drakes (too brilliantly, because brilliantly colored drakes sell decoys to duck hunters but do not fool ducks), and Peppy in the bow, my body... READ MORE >
