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This spring has been a mighty cold one, so cold that our annual early trout fishing season foray into Sonny's camp had to be postponed. T'was damn near opening day before the ice left the deadwater in front of the camp. A sure sign of the bunch getting long on the tooth, me dears. A few years back we'd buck ice floes, snow squalls, and suffer the terrible wrath of wives who had other plans, to cast fishing lines on opening day.
Wilbert Haynes and I were a long way from home, on the south fringe of “The Enchanted Country” where Moose Mountain eases down to bathe its feet in cool rattles and slack water windings of Serpentine Stream.
Uncle Fred had sent us to Ragged Pond where we’d cut firewood, replaced stovepipes and otherwise readied a derelict trapper’s shack for occupancy by a party of late season fishermen.
Those chores were completed and on the two-portage return trip to Big Buckshot Camps we were overnighting at Spider Lake. This was black growth country, deep in the region’s last remaining stand of untouched spruce forest, shading amber-tinted ponds and bogs rich with native speckled trout.
It was a gimpy start to the season of anglers, I tells ya. A bit of explaining needs to be done here and now. Back in the snowless winter, I bumped into a friend who was part of a bunch of never-were and never-will-be shinny players about 20 years ago.
“We’re getting a group of 55 years of age and over for an hour-and-a-half of hockey on Wednesdays. You interested?” he said.
At first I totally rejected the idea. It had been over 20 years since I had donned skates. I didn’t even have a pair of skates, my last pair succumbing to army ants and dry rot: wooden blades, you see.
A pleasant perk inherent to the business of guiding is looking forward to the arrival in camp of certain parties or individual sports who visit season after season.
It’s like meeting old friends again after a year’s absence. By the early 1950s many sportsmen who patronized Big Buckshot Camps were repeat customers, some of whom had visited annually since the camp’s modest beginnings nearly 30 years before.
There were those who made two trips—first for a week’s fishing in late spring, then again in autumn to hunt upland birds or deer. Uncle Fred, “Gimpy Tom” Quinn the cook, and several of the older guides were on first-name terms with many of these valued clients, irrespective of their social or financial standings.
Tony R. had to pick this past winter to trade in his circa-1970s juiced-down snow runner for one of them new-fangled gutteral trail-blasting skidoodlers. Had to sell his treasured Model 94 Whinny (unregistered), a Bowie knife, and a map clearly pointing out favourite spectacled trout fishing spots, as a down payment on the machine.
Never told the glad-hander at the dealership that the map had been penned in the pre-acid-rain days of the 1960s. Only thing in them holes nowadays is, well, acidy water. As those of you blessed or cursed to live at the arse end of this province already know, the snowflakes were few and far between this winter, so that Tony R’s new snow buggy went into forced hibernation. The mildest January since the Farmer’s Almanac began gracing Smiley’s Chip-N-Nail “desk” out on the lanai.
