They Shoot Canoes, Don't They?, page 3
“I don’t know,” Gram said. “It just doesn’t seem like a fair contest to me.”
“Because Rancid uses guns and traps?” I asked.
“No, because the skunk has a brain!”
Gram and Rancid were not fond of each other.
The next day I was sent to tell Rancid we needed his expertise in extracting a skunk from under our woodshed. His face brightened at this news.
“Ha!” he said. “Thet ol’ woman couldn’t figure out how to git a skonk out from under yore shed, so fust thang she does is start yelling fer ol’ Crabtree! If thet don’t beat all!”
“Actually, it was Mom who told me to come get you,” I said.
“Oh. Wall, in thet case, Ah’ll come. Jist keep the ol’ woman outta ma ha’r.”
When we arrived, Gram was standing out by the woodshed banging on a pot with a steel spoon and whooping and hollering. The old woodsman nudged me in the ribs and winked. I could tell he was going to get off one of his “good ones.”
“Would you mind practicin’ your drummin’ and singin’ somewhar else?” Rancid said to her. “Me and the boy got to git a skonk out from under thet shed.”
If Gram could have given the skunk the same look she fired at Rancid, the creature would have been stunned if not killed outright. The glare had no effect on Rancid, however, since he was bent over laughing and slapping his knee in appreciation of his good one. It was, in fact, one of the best good ones I’d ever heard him get off, but I didn’t dare laugh.
“All right, Bob Hope,” Gram snapped. “Let’s see how you get the skunk out from under there. Maybe if you stood upwind of it, that would do the trick!”
“Don’t rile me, ol’ woman, don’t rile me,” Rancid said. “Now, boy, go fetch me some newspapers. Ah’m gonna smoke thet critter outta thar.”
“And burn down the shed most likely,” Gram said.
“Ha!” Rancid said. “You thank Ah don’t know how to smoke a skonk out from under a shed?”
Fortunately, the well and a bucket were close at hand and we were able to douse the fire before it did any more damage than blackening one corner of the building.
During these proceedings, Strange had emerged from his house and sat looking on with an air of bemusement. There was nothing he loved better than a ruckus.
“Maybe we should just let the skunk be,” Mom said.
“Land sakes, yes!” Gram shouted at Rancid. “Before you destroy the whole dang farm!”
Rancid snorted. “No skonk’s ever bested me yet, and this ain’t gonna be the fust!”
After each failed attempt to drive out the skunk, Rancid seemed to become angrier and more frenzied. Furiously, he dug a hole on one side of the shed. Then he jammed a long pole in through the hole and flailed wildly about with it. No luck. He went inside the shed and jumped up and down on the floor with his heavy boots. Still no skunk emerged. At one point, he tried to crawl under the shed, apparently with the idea of entering into hand-to-gland combat with the skunk, but the shed floor was too low to the ground. Then he grabbed up the pole and flailed it wildly under the floor again. Next he dropped the pole and yelled at me, “Go git another batch of newspapers!”
“No, no, no!” screamed Mom.
“Leave the poor skunk alone,” Gram yelled. “I’m startin’ to become fond of the little critter!”
Rancid stood there panting and mopping sweat from his forehead with his arm. “Ah know what Ah’ll do, Ah’ll set a trap fer him! Should of did thet in the fust place. No skonk is gonna …”
At that moment, the skunk, no doubt taking advantage of the calm, or perhaps frightened by it, ran out from under the shed and made for the nearby brush.
“Ah figured thet little trick would work,” Rancid said, although no one else was quite sure which trick he was speaking of. “And this way, there ain’t no big stank, which is how Ah planned it.”
Then Strange tore into the skunk.
The battle was short but fierce, with the skunk expending its whole arsenal as Strange dragged it about the yard, up the porch and down, into the woodshed and out, and through the group of frantically dispersing spectators. At last, coming to his senses, the dog dropped the skunk and allowed it to stagger off into the bushes.
Strange seemed embarrassed by his first and only display of heroism. “I don’t know what came over me,” he said, shaking. “I’ve got nothing against skunks!” Still, I couldn’t help but be proud of him.
The skunk was gone, but its essence lingered on. The air was stiff with the smell of skunk for weeks afterwards.
“That dog has got to go,” Mom said. But, of course, Strange refused to go, and that was that.
It was years before Strange was entirely free of the skunk odor. Every time he got wet, the smell came back in potent force.
“Phew!” a new friend of mine would say. “That your dog?”
“Yeah,” I’d say, proudly, “he’s a skunk dog.”
Cold Fish
Show me a man who fishes in winter, and I’ll show you a fanatic. Actually, I’ll get the better of the deal, because for sheer spectacle a fanatic doesn’t hold a candle to a man who fishes in winter.
I have often thought that if you could capture a half-dozen winter fishermen and put them in a circus sideshow you could make a fortune on them: “Step right this way ladies and gentlemen—no children please, we don’t want to warp any young minds—and see the men who actually fish during the winter! They are amazing, they are absolutely astounding! Their skin is blue, their hair is blue, ladies and gentlemen, even their language is blue!”
Much as it pains me, I must confess that I too am a winter fisherman. It has been said that the first step toward recovering from this affliction is to admit that you are one, but I have been admitting it for years without noticeable effect. Actually, I take a certain pride in being a member of this select but compulsive group of hearty anglers. We even have a number of sayings: “No man is an icicle unto himself, but each a piece of the whole cube.” And: “If one ice fisherman is defrosted, another will freeze to take his place.” This goes to show that you can’t expect memorable sayings from a bunch of demented fishermen.
Frequently I am asked why a man of my age and character persists in fishing right on through the most bitter months of winter. If I recall correctly, the exact wording of the question is: “Why does an old fool like you persist in going fishing in sub-zero weather?”
My answer is succinct and to the point. “Shut up and help me off with these bleeping boots. And be careful with my socks! I don’t want my toes falling out and rolling under the chesterfield!”
There is a thin streak of sadism that runs through the directors of state fish and game departments. I have long suspected the requirements for fish and game directors include the following: “Must be outstanding citizens of their communities; must have demonstrated deep interest in outdoor sports and recreation; must have not less than three years experience as fiends.”
How else explain their declaring certain waters open during the winter months? Indeed, I have no difficulty imagining the directors roaring with maniacal laughter as they debate the subject of which waters to open for winter fishing.
“Hey, fellows,” says Milt Thumbscrew, “how about opening Lake Chill Factor during February?” He giggles wildly.
The other directors stomp their feet and pound on the table as they try to withdraw from fits of hysterical laughter.
“Oh dear, that’s absolutely great!” says Adolf Wrinklebunn. “Can’t you just see those poor devils up to their armpits in snow and ice, fighting their way to the lake!” He slides from his chair, shrieking.
“And they aren’t even out of their cars yet!” screams the chairman. “Oh, stop, stop, you’re killing me! Quick, somebody call for the vote!”
Now, even though I know that is basically how and why certain water is open for winter fishing, I find the enticement almost impossible to resist. Consider, if you will, a telephone conversation I had with my friend Retch Sweeney a while back.
“Speak up,” I said. “The wind is howling so bad outside I can’t hear you.”
“I said,” Retch shouted, “I tried to get through to you earlier, but the lines were down. I guess the ice got so heavy on them they broke. Anyway, I got this terrible urge to go fishing.”
“Well, that’s easily cured,” I said. “Just go out in your backyard and stand in a bucket of ice water while your wife shovels snow down the back of your neck.”
“I already tried that, but I still got the urge,” Retch said.
“Have you talked to a psychiatrist?”
“As a matter of fact I did. I ran into Doc Portnoy over at the hospital. He was the one who told me about catching a five-pound rainbow up on the Frigid River. It’s open in February, ya know.”
“A five-pounder! Did he say what he caught it on?”
“Salmon eggs. That was all I could get out of him before the nurses rushed him into the furnace room in a last-ditch effort to thaw him out.”
“I’ll get my gear together and pick you up in half an hour,” I said. Actually, it took me a bit longer than I had anticipated. I hadn’t figured in the time it would take to stand in a bucket of ice water in the backyard while my wife shoveled snow down the back of my neck.
When I was a kid still in my single-digit years, I got my start in winter fishing under the tutelage of old Rancid Crabtree. Rancid was a man who believed in teaching a kid the basics.
“You know how to check fer thin ice, boy?” he would ask me. “Wall, what you do is stick one foot way out ahead of you and stomp the ice real hard and listen fer it to make a crackin’ sound. Thar now, did you hear how the ice cracked whan Ah stomped it? Thet means it’s too thin to hold a man’s weight. Now pull me up out of hyar and we’ll run back to shore and see if we kin built a fahr b’fore Ah freezes to death!”
Our usual practice was simply to hike out on the frozen surface of the lake or river, chop a hole in the ice, and try to catch some fish before either the hole or we froze over. One year, however, we built ourselves a luxurious fishing shack. It was made of scrap lumber, rusty tin, tarpaper, and other equally attractive materials. We put a tiny airtight heater inside with the stovepipe running out through the roof at a rakish angle. I always expected the stovepipe to set fire to the roof and was not often disappointed. Having the roof catch fire became so much a part of our fishing routine that Rancid would say to me, “Go put the fahr on the roof out, will ya? Ah thank Ah jist had a bite.”
The truth is I was always glad for an excuse to step outside of the shack for a breath of fresh air. Rancid was a man who bathed only on leap years, and the previous leap year had escaped his notice. He smelled bad enough dry; wet, he could drive a lame badger out of its hole at forty yards. Sometimes in the warmth of the tiny shack he would actually begin to steam, and that was the worst. I’d sit there hoping the roof would catch fire so I’d have an excuse to step outside.
Sometimes when I knew I’d be cooped up in the fishing shack with Rancid for several hours on the following day, I’d try to induce in him the desire to take a bath.
“You know what I like to do after a nasty chore like this,” I’d tell him as we worked together at his place. “I like to climb into a nice hot tub of soapy water and soak and scrub and soak and scrub and soak and scrub. Doesn’t that sound good?”
“Nope, it don’t. Now watch what yore doin’ thar! How many times I got to show you how to skin a skonk?”
Despite Rancid’s aversion to bathing, the days we spent fishing together in the fish shack were among the best I’ve ever known. From the darkness of the shack you could peer through the hole in the ice clear down to the bottom of the lake and watch the fish move in to take the bait. And Rancid would tell me all the old stories over again, changing them just enough each time so that they always seemed fresh and new. He gave me little fishing tips, too. He said one good way to warm up bait maggots was to stick a pinch of them under your lower lip. I said I’d have to try that sometime when the need arose. After thirty years and more, the need has not yet arisen, but it’s a good thing to know anyhow.
Another interesting thing he told me was about the time he went fishing in winter and it was so cold his line froze right in the middle of a cast. He said it was downright comical the way his line just stuck out in the air stiff as a wire from the end of his pole. He had to stand his line up against a tall snag and build a little fire near it. As the end close to the fire thawed out, the line just slid down the snag and formed itself into a nice little coil. Rancid knew all kinds of neat fishing lore like that.
The one problem with the fishing shack was that dragging it about the lake from one fishing site to another bore a striking resemblance to hard work. Rancid said that he didn’t have anything against hard work in principle and that if other folks wanted to indulge themselves in it that was all right with him and he certainly wouldn’t hold it against them. He said that some folks were born with that flaw in their character and just couldn’t help themselves. All a decent man could do, he said, was pretend that such folks were just as normal as anybody else and that they should never be looked down upon or ridiculed or in any way be made to feel inferior.
Rancid told me that what a normal man did when confronted with a task that bore a striking resemblance to hard work was to sit down and try to come up with an idea for avoiding it. That is exactly what Rancid did in regard to the fishing shack.
“Ah got a great idea,” he said. “What we is gonna do is rig up a sail fer the fish shack! We’ll let the wind blow the fish shack along the ice and we’ll jist foller along behind and steer it whar ever we wants it to go.”
In practically no time at all, Rancid had a tall, slender cedar pole bolted to the front end of the fish shack for a mast. A massive canvas tarp was converted swiftly into a sail. A confusion of booms, lines, and pulleys allowed the sail to be hauled up the mast, in which position its general appearance was not unlike some of the sails on the boats pictured in my geography book.
“Say, it looks just like a Chinese junk,” I told Rancid, realizing at once that I had hurt his feelings.
“Ah don’t care iffin it looks like a whole gol-durn Chinese dump,” he snapped, “jist so it works.”
Looking back through the corrective lens of time, I now realize that Rancid was one of those men who just can’t let a good idea be but have to keep improving on it right up to the point where it turns into a catastrophe. I didn’t know that back then, of course, and just assumed that what happened was one of those unavoidable mishaps that occurred with surprising regularity while I was in the company of Rancid.
Much to my surprise, the sail worked like a charm. The gentle breeze on the lake filled the billowing tarp and moved the little fish shack steadily if somewhat jerkily across the wind-burnished surface of the ice. We walked behind or alongside the shack, guiding the little vessel this way and that by pulling on various lines, much as one guides horses with a set of reins. Then Rancid came up with his improvement on the basic idea.
“Say,” he said, “Ah got me a good notion to get inside the shack and jist ride along. Ah bet Ah kin steer it jist by pushing a stick along the ice through the hole in the floor. Iffin the critter gits to movin’ too fast, Ah’ll jist drag maw feet to slow it down.”
The breeze had fallen off for the moment, so we made fast all the lines and Rancid climbed into the shack and made himself comfortable. Later Rancid was to accuse me of having dropped the spike through the latch on the outside of the door, thereby locking him inside; but if that was the case, the action was merely an absentminded reflex on my part and bore not the slightest hint of mischief. Besides, how was I to know that anytime he wanted out I wouldn’t be there to pull the spike out of the latch?
I stood around outside the shack stomping my feet and rubbing my hands together, waiting for a breeze to come up and get us under way again. Every so often, Rancid would shout at me from inside the shack. “Any sign of wind out thar yet?”
“Nope,” I’d reply. “It’s pretty quiet.” If I’d been more attuned to the weather, I would have known that the particular quiet we were experiencing was the kind known as “ominous.”
I heard a distant rustling behind me. Turning, I observed a rather startling phenomenon. Clouds of snow were billowing up off the far side of the lake and moving in our direction.
“HOLY COW, RANCID, THE WIND … !”
“The wind’s comin’ up is she? Hot dang! Now yore gonna see …”
He never finished his sentence.
As soon as I got to my feet after being knocked down by the first blast of wind, I tried to track the fish shack as best I could. I felt I owed it to Rancid, since by then I had remembered dropping the spike through the latch. Rancid wasn’t a person you wanted to have mad at you.
For a long ways, I could see the skid marks Rancid had made with his boots on the ice. After that I saw some scratches that looked like they had been made by two sets of fingernails. Then there were only the ski marks made by the sled and an occasional board or piece of tin from the fish shack. Over several long stretches, where the shack had become airborne, there were no signs at all.
After a while I came across two ice fishermen fighting against the wind on their way home. I asked them if they had seen Rancid go by in the fish shack. They said they had.
“I don’t know what that durn fool will think of next,” one of the men said, “but he was reachin’ out a little winder with a hatchet, and it looked like he was tryin’ to chop down the pole holdin’ up that hay tarp. He went by so fast we couldn’t rightly see what he was up to.”
“Did you hear him say anything?” I asked.
“Nothin’ I’d repeat to a boy your age,” the man said.
A half-mile farther on, I ran into another fisherman. Before I could ask him anything, he said, “Land sakes, boy, you shouldn’t be out alone in a blizzard like this! Why, I just saw some farmer’s hay tarp fly by here. Somehow it got hooked onto his outhouse and was draggin’ it along too. Just tearin’ that privy all to pieces. Strangest dang thing I ever seen! Anyway, come along with me and I’ll give you a ride home.”
