Two days ago, I went to Wood Lake to check on our boats. I took Delilah on a leash to get her used to seeing new things and still remain with me or as least near by. Good thing I had her on a leash. I walked a fast pace over that 210 rod portage, skipping around big muddy sections, looking for rocks to land my feet on to keep dry. Delilah followed along in a trot but every now and then she would blast off in a direction of a squirrel or "perceived" animal of the woods. With a firm grip on the end of the leash, she would wind up doing an undignified backflip when she accelerated herself to the end. She remained unflappable (and unable to learn, apparently) in the whole "running out of rope thing" as she did it several times. She's still a puppy.
After about 12 minutes of walking on last year's leaves on top of this year's mud, we made it to the hill above the water. Only at this time of year with no leaves on the branches, can one see out into the endless muskeg towards Wood Lake from the overlooking hill. I could see that the water was really high. There is a waterfall behind the hill that comes out right where our boats are locked up and it, too, was roaring loudly. Delilah was obviously having a ball with so many new sights and sounds in focused oblivion smelling every scent of every animal that came this way.
I made my way down those same rocks that I have now crossed for an entire lifetime. At the water's edge, I turned starboard to use the little path that takes me to our boats and tied Delilah's leash to an alder branch. I flipped the boats upright and checked them over to make sure nobody shot them up over winter.
As a young lad, when we had our boats down there and Deer Trail Lodge had theirs, I remember the constant struggle with their lodge guests using our dock because it was built better than Deer Trail's. Then, their guests in utter laziness would sometimes simply lock a Deer Trail boat to the back handles of our boats so when our guests would get there, they "could" go fishing but would need to drag along a Deer Trail boat which was generally frowned upon as a viable option. Our lodge guests would have to come get us, we'd have to call Deer Trail. They'd have to send somebody down the portage with their key. We'd have to go there as well. It was a gargantuan pain sometimes. Everybody ended up doing a whole lot of walking because of one clueless individual with a lock.
Those boats from the other resort would truly drive us nuts. One year, the owner took his four green boats in the fall and stacked them upside down in a pile directly across the end of the portage. We were simply astounded by the apparent lack of concern for anyone else using that portage, namely in the winter. Lots of people would snowmobile to Wood Lake to go ice fishing as did we. Coming off the portage with a "gate" built out of 14 foot long, steel, green boats made for some fancy maneuvering and cussing by a lot of people forced to crash through the surrounding brush with their snowmobiles. A clear, open portage would have worked a lot better. That winter, those boats didn't fair too well. They ended up riddled with bullet holes -lots of them- through all the important parts and not one fired by us. Apparently, someone took out their anger - boat rage - on those Deer Trail boats. Based on the caliber, we're pretty sure we know who shot them up but we didn't have proof and nobody was terribly surprised that this happened. (Plug the portage with boats, somebody shoots up the boats? Nah!) Well, except for Deer Trail Lodge - they had to do a lot of repairs - they were probably upset. After that incident, however, he always flipped them over off to the side and had no more trouble with bullet holes. And, that is one of the things I think about coming down that hill to look at our own boats. Over the years, we've had bullets holes and shotgun blasts with birdshot from fall grouse hunters who couldn't find a bird so they shot a big red steel boat. We've always done our best to keep them tucked away off the beaten path and have been fortunate to not have a lot of vandalism. They were fine on this trip as well.
Another thing I think of when I get ready to walk down that final hill is a story my dad told. When HE was a kid, some of his guests went to Wood Lake for the day back in the 40's. Back then, personal flotation devices were not required but people brought along those old kapok boat cushions because even in the 40's, the seats got hard after a while. Sitting in one of our floating boats were some of our guests who were just getting ready to start the motor and head out to the lake. They suddenly heard a loud shot and felt the impact as a 30 caliber bullet tore under the middle guy's backside cutting a 14 inch groove in the seat under his boat cushion and then making an exit hole out the side of the boat 4 inches below the gunwale. It missed him completely. Everybody ducked, squirmed and yelled when they realized that someone actually took a shot a them with a 30-30 Winchester! What the...? It was spring time - NOT deer season! Who the heck is out there shooting and why?!
As it turned out, there were two escaped convicts from some faraway prison who were on the run. For actual motives unbeknownst to my dad and grandpa, they fired one round at our guests and narrowly missed a seated man's hip and butt by mere inches. Then they took off. It made no sense -shoot at unarmed people once without warning or robbing them and then take off into the woods. The authorities eventually apprehended these guys and caught them with the rifle. Initially, nobody could figure out what they were doing at the end of the Wood Lake portage in the middle of nowhere. Then it was surmised that they were interested in taking the boat and heading to Canada with an ill-planned escape trip. It made sense because we're are pretty far north and the border is only a hop, skip and a jump away. However, one would need canoes to quickly cross the portages at Hula and Good Lake to get to Basswood. Maybe they only had one bullet left and missed killing the guy so the other two would not have been very cooperative. Who knows? It made for an interesting day of fishing in the area that was eventually deemed God's country by the federal government or AKA, the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness some thirty-plus years later. Unbeknownst to the vast majority of visitors today, many things happened in the BWCA when it was a just a mere wilderness instead of a federally-designated wilderness - which the same but with more rules. To all of us at those times, it was just rocks and sticks and water in the middle of nowhere without all the government restrictions and the fancy title.
This story, and my dad running into bears on the Wood Lake portage resulted in me carrying a .45 cal. 1911 pistol for the first several years of my guiding career on Wood Lake. As a kid, I used to pull that heavy pistol out of my pack and clip its army-issued leather holster around a gunwale bracket of the boat right next to me.
My new clients would usually gasp audibly and then stutter as they asked if the pistol was "real". "Yeah, it's very real" I would reply.
"Is it loaded?", they would query hesitantly.
"Yup!" would be my answer. "It's ready to go."
I would always tell them it was for bears on the portage. Some of the clients would nervously smile or show facial trepidation to their buddy on the other seat. Then, after the shock of having a 15-year-old with a loaded cannon sitting next to him in the boat subsided, they would ask incredulously as an after thought, "There are BEARS here?"
"Well, of course", I would reply and then tell the Cliff notes version of how my dad and his friend John Butorac had a big momma bear chasing them around in the dark one night on the Wood Lake portage. Coffee can of gasoline wired to a forked stick for a torch, stumbling through through muskeg, wet up to their armpits, feeling with their hands for the portage in the pitch black, not knowing where that 350 lb. angry bear was, etc. Fun times! It seemed that nobody ever lolly-gagged on the Wood Lake portage on the way out.
Since I was young and guiding many "off the road" people (who weren't staying with us and we didn't know them), I never told them I carried that .45 mainly for them. Nobody messed with me ever, not that I ever felt that any of my clients would. But who knows - I had a .45 right next to me a all times so it could have been a real disincentive. For the most part, they were all nice people. When I finally grew bigger and surlier, I left the .45 at home. It was extra weight that I happy to live without on the portage. An oar would have worked pretty well, had I needed it.
So, I checked the locks, floated the boats and untied Delilah. Back up that hill we went with the little brown dog tirelessly sniffing the ghosts of many seasons past. There were leaves to be raked, water lines to be turned on and remnants of a hard winter that needed to be put to rest at Northwind Lodge so we headed home. Our first people would be arriving tomorrow.
