by Peter Walker

            In the 1970s the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife had need for a large float plane that could carry large loads of fish for stocking remote lakes as well as occasional heavy or bulky loads to road-less locations in the northern interior of the state. That need was satisfied by the long-term loan by the U.S. Army of a deHavilland Beaver from its reserve aircraft fleet.

            The Canadian-made Beaver is a single-engine, high winged “tail dragger” powered by a big 400 hp radial engine. ME IF&W fitted large floats to the 7-passenger flying truck and soon the distinctive oscillating rumble of its 9 cylinders could be heard from time to time as it lumbered from one lake to another on its various missions.

            The Beaver’s primary use was as a flying hatchery truck. With two large, bomb-shaped water tanks mounted on top of each pontoon, the Beaver could carry enough water to support 360 pounds of brook trout, landlocked Atlantic salmon, or lake trout (Mackinaw) per load. Generally loads that size were destined for large lakes. Therefore, on most of the Beaver’s stocking missions, the pilot could land and gently release the fish into the water rather than rudely “bomb” them into the lakes from the air.

            The ability to carry that much water aloft made the Beaver a fairly capable forest fire fighter as well. Maine Warden Service pilot Gary Dumond once responded to a Maine Forest Service request for help and managed to kill a small lightning-sparked fire with a single drop before it could progress beyond an acre or so.

            Maine IF&W maintains a hangar with float plane ramp in Greeneville at the southern tip of 42-mile-long Moosehead Lake in the northern interior of the state. One June day Chief Aircraft Mechanic Howard Lambertson, an assistant, and Pilot Gary Dumond were overhauling the engine on one of the department’s Cessna 185s when the distinctive drone of a radial engine began to grow in the distance.

The Warden Service Radio was wired to a speaker over the workbench. From it came the clear voice of Chief Pilot Dana Toothaker, who was at the controls of the Beaver. “Howard, something has come loose and is banging against the floats. I’m going to do a low fly-by. See if you can tell what it is.”

Pulses quickening, the three men grabbed binoculars and ran out onto the tarmac between the hangar and the lake. Damage to the rigging of the floats could make a landing dangerous.

To the north they could see the big yellow plane lumbering toward them and appearing larger and larger as it closed the distance.

With field glasses trained on the plane’s undercarriage, each man strained to spot some loose cable or strut. The engine noise grew loud as the airplane filled their lenses.

Closer and closer; louder and louder it came until it was right overhead. Then, in an instant, there was nothing but water in their fields of view!

Bloosh! The three were struck by 1,000 gallons of water released 300 feet overhead at a speed of 100 mph!

Now that is wet!

Gotcha!

In Colorado, as in most states, for safety’s sake it is illegal to possess a loaded gun (cartridge in the chamber) in a vehicle. It is also illegal to fire a weapon from a vehicle, whether on or off road and it is illegal to fire from or across a public road. Yet so many Colorado hunters, despite having to take mandatory hunter safety classes before they can buy a hunting license, somehow rationalize that the seconds that it will save them if a deer or a pheasant runs across the road in front of them justifies breaking those rules.

The ones I can’t figure out are the knot-heads that store their weapons in the bed of the pickup or the back of their SUV fully loaded. There is no advantage and often it places themselves or their passengers in great danger. I once wrote a ticket up in Sedgwick County to a goose hunter who was driving alone off road in a Suburban with a collection of long guns stacked inside the rear cargo door with barrels aiming right at his seat. The top one in the stack was an enormous 10 gauge shotgun fully loaded with giant shells that looked like small sticks of dynamite! What on earth was he thinking? The fine wasn’t very large. Unfortunately you can’t write someone a ticket for being stupid.

Another time through binoculars I watched a man get out of his SUV and open the tailgate to remove a pump shotgun laid in the back with the barrel pointed at the driver’s seat. He popped open the breach, apparently to make sure it was loaded, then drove it back shut. Instantly the defective gun went off aimed at the ground and blew a large chunk of asphalt skyward startling both the hunter and the two game wardens watching him in the distance. As if to prove the deliberateness of his stupidity, he reloaded the defective firearm and placed it back in his vehicle exactly as it had been before! The guy turned out to be an engineer from the Denver metro area – a person that certainly should have been smart enough to know better. I wrote that ticket with no regrets.

More than twenty years ago Game Warden Larry Budde, now retired from the agency, was on patrol in rural northeastern Colorado north of Hillrose. There is a long bridge across the South Platte on a back road. As he approached the bridge from the south side, Larry spotted the top of a vehicle about to come up onto the bridge from the north. The warden stopped to look and a brand new white pickup with three teenage boys came up onto the bridge and stopped very suddenly when they saw the game warden vehicle 100 yards away on the far side.

Suddenly the windshield of the pickup became opaque white! Budde couldn’t imagine what had happened. He drove forward and, as he approached the truck, he saw a one-inch hole in the center of the roof over the cab and sharp points of steel peeled back around the edges of the hole.

The warden pulled up close to the pickup and could barely make out the driver in a dense cloud of white smoke. He signaled to the young driver to roll his window down. Smoke billowed out of the cab as a stunned face came into clearer view. Budde could see an upright shotgun being held by the boy in the middle.

“Did that shotgun just go off?” Budde asked.

“The kid sort of read his lips, then yelled., “WHA-A-A-T?”

Years ago officers from the Colorado Division of Wildlife organized a road check on Raton Pass on I-25 just before traffic passed on into New Mexico. Even though the main reason for a major check station is wildlife law enforcement (they always coincide with big game seasons), officers from many other agencies attend as well. A typical check station will have State Patrol, drug enforcement, U.S. Forest Service (illegally harvested Christmas trees), federal game wardens and even FBI agents in case someone with a federal warrant should be encountered.

On this particular day a new and very fancy Ford pickup with Texas plates came through the checkpoint with a nice mule deer buck lying in the bed. The driver was a big, good-natured fellow from Dallas in a big white cowboy hat.

He proudly showed them his Colorado Deer License that matched the tag attached to the deer carcass, then engaged several of the officers in some pleasant banter. Meanwhile an older Colorado officer took a closer look at the deer. When he lifted one hind leg it exposed the end of a Canada goose stuffed up inside the chest cavity. For those of you who are not familiar with hunting, waterfowl require a separate license and stamps issued by both the State and the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service.

When a break came in the conversation up front, the game warden asked the Dallas hunter to come back to the back of the truck. Then the officer lifted the leg of the carcass wide to expose the goose and asked, “What’s that?”

Without skipping a beat the fellow feigned a look of total surprise, then grinned and boomed out, “Why that goose-eatin’ son-of-a-bitch!”

In the 46+ years I have been (legally) driving, I have owned just about one of everything and two or three of a few. In fact, my very first automobile after I got my license in the fall of 1963 was a 1956 Olds 88 that my grandfather surrendered to me when he decided to give up driving. Along with it came about ten well worn tires which I managed to rotate around and keep it propped up on inflated wheels most days. That car must have weighed as much as today’s average bus. It contained a substantial amount of steel (one of my aunts suggested the frame was probably cast iron).

It had a big (for the time) V-8 and might have been a fairly fast car if it weren’t for the self regulation of only one working motor mount. If I punched it, it shook like it was trying to break the sound barrier. (“Captain! I don’t know how much more those di-lithium crystals can take!”) It didn’t take me long to figure out I’d have to baby it if it was going to last. The old dinosaur never let me down in the two years I drove it.

When it finally coughed its last, it was right in my folks’ yard when I came home from school. In those days the local mechanic made house calls. I think my dad may have given him a do-not-resuscitate document. I was told that replacing the timing chain would cost more than the beast was worth. I sold it the following week for $35 to a stock car racing team that wanted the hulk for parts.

Thirty years later I bought a second hand Oldsmobile Omega that turned out to be the second worst lemon I ever owned. (Nothing but nothing could compare to the Ford Pinto. But that’s another story.) I knew I’d made a bad purchase when “Meg’s” oil plug was removed and nothing flowed out. DOH! Once the sawdust-oil mixture was dug out of the crankcase, Meg’s motor developed a loud tick from the bad engine bearings. Replacing her engine with a rebuilt one would have cost about as much as I paid for the car in the first place. Instead I sold the hulk while it still could move under its own power to West Side Auto Parts near Fort Morgan.

But there was one Oldsmobile that was a gem. When my son Corey was in college I bought him a used Subaru sedan to drive back and forth to school. This was about 1991 or 1992 as I recall. One summer night he went out with the guys and never showed up again until the next morning. The Subaru had a big fold across the roof with grass and flowers pinched in the crease. Corey’s attempts to put a good spin on what happened made less sense than when Teddy Kennedy tried to explain how he gave Mary Jo Kopechne a ride home from Chappaquiddick Island. At any rate I suddenly found myself in need of yet another used car.

The solution was an old creampuff in the form of a 1974 Oldsmobile Delta 88 4-door sedan complete with the famous 454 Rocket engine and a carburetor that could suck pigeons out of the sky. It had relatively low mileage and was in excellent shape for an 18-year-old vehicle. I got it for exactly half of what Corey’s Subaru Taco had cost me. She was 18 feet 10 inches from bow to stern light, white with red interior. Let’s see you roll that one over, Kid!

It wasn’t long before Corey loved that old car. He asked me for a distinguished name and I came up with the “U.S.S. Alice Briggs Mitchell” in honor of my 7^th grade teacher back in Maine. Alice literally became a family member. On the road she was rock steady. In traffic she was a brute and a bully.

But all good cars come to the end of their usefulness. After Corey graduated and he and Amy were married, he traded Alice off for something newer and more economical. I hope she’s still alive out there somewhere. Who knows? Maybe Alice is the 454 Rocket that Kathy Mattea sang about.

One thousand acre Wassookeag Lake lies just outside the little mill town of Dexter, Maine. From 1975 through 1977, Wassookeag was the most northerly of the more than 600 lakes on my watch as an Assistant Regional Fishery Biologist in Maine’s Fishery Region B, the south central coastal plain.

            Lying next to a minor population center in otherwise rural central Maine, Wassookeag received heavier ice fishing pressure than most lakes. The lake at that time possessed small populations of landlocked Atlantic salmon and lake trout (“Mackinaw”). There were never enough to go around, yet I could always find an assortment of several dozen “townies” trying their luck on Wassookeag.

Wassookeag was well inland and high enough in latitude to lie in a much colder climate than lakes along the coast. By late winter the ice might approach four feet in thickness. This was enough to support any vehicle safely.

            During that particular winter we had a couple of February rain storms in between cold weather cycles that had flattened and blended the snow cover on the lake before it refroze.

            Whereas the teens in Fort Morgan cruise Main Street after school each day, when conditions were right, the students at Dexter High School went out and cruised the surface of Lake Wassookeag.

            My mission, on those days when I worked Wassookeag was to sort through the relative chaos and glean accurate angler hour and catch rate information from the confusion.  I found the most effective way was to interview individual anglers out on the ice during the middle of the morning and afternoon, then return to the one vehicle access point – the town boat ramp – during the noon hour and again as sundown approached. I interviewed anglers at the end of their efforts.

            On that particular day in 1977, I returned to shore around 3 p.m. and parked parallel to the boat ramp. With an excellent view of the entire lake, through binoculars I could monitor the activities of about 60 scattered ice fishermen.

            Except for fish holes and a few chunks of litter and debris, the surface of the ice was nearly unblemished except for an 18-inch raised  “wave” in the ice about 100 yards off shore to the west of the south-facing access ramp. This had been created earlier in the winter when someone with a Jeep plowed a road out onto the lake after a big snowstorm. Soon afterward the rain flattened the snow and the cold that followed welded it into the ice sheet. The snow bank created by the plow became a solid, wave-like ridge that presented a potential obstacle to drivers and snowmobilers.

            The day had begun sunny and clear. By afternoon puffy clouds moving in from the southwest began to increase in size and darken. As I sat in the warmth of my Plymouth station wagon, I watched a particularly dark cloud approaching on a track that would bring it right over the lake. Heavy precipitation was dropping from its underside.

            Before the squall hit, most of the cruisers left the lake and headed into town leaving the lake to the die-hard ice fishermen. But a minute or two before the squall struck, one of those huge, 1963-vintage Oldsmobile 98s came down the ramp and headed off across the lake. You probably remember those cars – broad and flat with hood and trunk so large helicopters could land on either end.

As the rusted relic passed close down the port side of my own vehicle, I saw that its 4 occupants were droopy-eyed men in their 60s. I’d run into them a few times before. All four had little else to do all day in a rural town than ride from spot to spot while maintaining a high titer of blood alcohol to ward off the boredom of a long winter.

            Moments later the squall struck Wassookeag with a vengeance. Like a great white curtain it enveloped us and pelted the lake with wet snow driven by high wind. In the 15 minutes it lasted, it blanketed the lake with 3 inches of sticky snow.

            Visibility at the height of the mini-blizzard was barely 100 yards. It was an absolute whiteout. There were no shadows; there was no horizon.

            Halfway through the squall, through wipers set at the fastest speed, I suddenly made out the faint glow of double headlights off to the right. A second later I could make out the large, low silhouette of the Oldsmobile. It was coming on fast and, although I couldn’t see it, I knew it was fast approaching the vicinity of that ridge on the ice.

            So limited was the visibility that no more than a couple of seconds lapsed between my first spotting the car and it hitting the curved ridge at right angles at 35-40 mph.

            The effect was sort of like the launch of a jet from the deck of an aircraft carrier. Suddenly the nose snapped into the air and the great craft left earth on an orbital trajectory. Sadly it lacked the means to continue its rather graceful flight.

            For a brief moment I saw the entire underside of the car as it completely left the ice at a 45-degree, nose-up angle and rolled slowly to the right. Then its right rear corner struck the ice and caused the car to slam back onto the ice on all four tires very violently.

Within two or three car lengths the would-be spacecraft came to a stop with the heads, arms, and legs of its scrambled occupants sticking up out of a pile of bodies clustered more or less in the center of the fuselage. An entire header pipe, muffler, and tail pipe assembly, along with a wide assortment of other rust-colored pieces-parts, littered its wake.

I was just about to drive out and assess the damage and check for injuries when the car suddenly came back to life. Sans muffler, it sounded like a stock car as the driver revved the engine. Ever so slowly the battered, roaring beast moved forward again and limped up the ramp. I rolled down my window and the driver did the same as he pulled alongside.

All four men were nearly as white as the snow. I asked if they were okay. The driver said he thought so, but they all needed to go home and change their underwear.

Did you ever hear of a hound making a career change?

Years ago my friend Dave Schnoor, manager back then of the state fish hatchery out in Wray, had a little rabbit hound named Luke. Luke was “beagle-ish,” but by no means a purebred. He was tri-colored like a typical beagle and small in stature. But Luke was heavier set and his head, ears and feet suggested a basset somewhere in his recent ancestry.

At any rate, Luke’s true love, aside from being a Schnoor family member and all the duties that entailed, was hunting rabbits. With his super nose and full voice, he was very good at it.

When Luke was around 7 years old, the unthinkable happened. His humans, for reasons he couldn’t fathom, brought home a pair of Brittany puppies. Suddenly he was overwhelmed with competition. Life was cruel. Life was unfair. And it was about to turn more so.

That fall Luke saw Dave take a shotgun out of the cabinet and naturally assumed it was time to go bunny hunting. He squealed and spun with delight. Imagine his disappointment when it was the two young Brits that were loaded into the Jeep and Luke was shut in his kennel. Luke howled with anger and heartbreak the entire time they were gone.

The next time Dave got ready for a bird hunt with his promising Brittanies, his wife Tammy intervened and implored him to take Luke along lest he drive her crazy with his mourning. Dave agreed to try it.

Most folks do not place beagles or other hounds very high on the canine intelligence tree. But Luke proved the exception. Made to walk at heal beside Dave while the two youngsters romped in front of them, Luke watched carefully and soon figured out the new game. The pups were looking for birds!

If you can’t beat them, join them.

Within two or three hunts Luke created a role for himself as a sort of crew chief and backup. For whatever reason, Dave just wasn’t interested in rabbits any more. So Luke learned to suppress his instincts and become a sort of self-made bird dog.

It was late in that first fall of Luke’s career change that Dave invited me on a bird hunt on Sandsage State Wildlife Area west of Wray. We started out behind the three dogs, the Brittanies working enthusiastically back and forth out ahead while Luke stayed just ahead of us as if waiting for an opportunity to prove himself.

The behavior of the full-grown Brittanies belied their young age. Frequently they would forget the task at hand and tussle with each other. They were, after all, less than a year old.

After 15 minutes of on-again, off-again hunting the Brittanies began to act “birdy” along the edge of corn stubble and I walked up behind them. A covey of bobwhite burst up like the shrapnel of a firecracker in front of the dogs. I’m not known for my shooting ability; but that time it all came together and I knocked down a quail with each barrel. Meanwhile the two pups were already one hundred yards away trying to catch some of the remaining birds as they scaled across the field. Now it was Luke’s turn.

As Dave hollered at his misbehaving bird dogs, Luke quietly worked out ahead and made a double retrieve, returning to his master with both quail in his mouth. A retrieving beagle!

Later in the afternoon, as I was walking along a deer path with Luke coming up from behind me, a cottontail bolted across my path a few yards ahead. I stopped and let Luke pass, wondering what he’d do with a nose full of bunny scent. As he crossed the spot where the rabbit had just been, he slammed on the brakes. He looked off in the direction the bunny had fled, pointed his nose to the sky, and let out a loud, soulful Bo-WOOOO. After all, he was a rabbit hound in his first life.

 by Peter Walker

His name was Tiny. He belonged to the Tedfords who lived up the hill from my grandparents in rural southwestern Maine.

He was quite possibly the oddest little dog I’ll ever see. Physically he looked like a critter made of leftover parts and pieces. His head was pretty much golden retriever both in size and appearance. But his body was more or less basset hound. So his head was way too big for his body.

His legs were extremely short and his tail stood straight up. His hair was long and frilly – a mixture of yellows and whites. The upper half of his tail had long white hair trailing off like the big flag on a sailboat’s mast.

            If he looked absurd, you should have heard him try to bark! Try as he might, the only thing Tiny could muster was a loud coughing noise like a circus sea lion. It always made people laugh.

            But Tiny had heart. His chosen profession was neighborhood greeter and ambassador of friendship.

Every morning Tiny would make the rounds from his house to the half dozen or so houses down the hill. Several of the neighbors were elderly and very much looked forward to Tiny’s enthusiastic morning visits. More than one of the elderly neighbor’s asked to adopt Tiny; but he better served the world as an equal opportunity friend to all.

My best friend – and the only other high school age boy within several miles of my home during that part of my life – was Gayland Brackett, who lived almost across the road from Tiny’s house. One day Gayland was loading up his gear for a pheasant hunt while Tiny supervised the job. On a whim, Gayland invited him along.

Now Tiny looked about as much like a bird dog as a poodle resembles a parrot! As far as anyone knew, Tiny had never gone bird hunting – or even chased a chicken!

Perhaps somewhere in his muddled ancestry, one of Tiny’s antecedents was a setter or a spaniel. Much to Gayland’s surprise, the little guy figured out how to play the game in no time at all!

Plowing through the thick grass was a problem for a little dog with minimum clearance. He would have been very hard to see had it not been for the great white banner flapping from his upright tail.

When Tiny encountered pheasant scent, he determined the general area from which it was emanating, then set off in a wide circle around the source. It was better than a point. As the funny little dog gradually tightened his circles and closed in on the pheasant, the bird crouched and sat tight. Finally, with Tiny only a couple of feet away, the pheasant would burst into the air with a cackle.

Although the little dog’s head was large enough to be a retriever’s, Tiny’s 7-inch legs were just not suitable for bringing back a downed bird. That, too, was no problem for Tiny’s improvisation. Tiny would simply find the dead bird, then sit on it and bark like a seal!

Thus the neighborhood mascot launched a second career as an unorthodox, but extremely effective pheasant dog. In all my years of working in conservation agencies, I’ve never seen a more unique dog. Tiny made the most he could with what he was given, and that was more than enough.

USFWS photo by Peter Johnson, 2008

Oh, why does man pursue the smelt?
It has no valuable pelt,
It boasts of no escutcheon royal,
It yields no ivory or oil,
Its life is dull, its death is tame,
a fish as humble as its name.
Yet – take this salmon somewhere else;
And bring me half a dozen smelts!

Ogden Nash, 1902-1971

            I can’t explain it either. But ever since I was a little kid I’ve had a fascination with the smelt. And lots of other Mainers do, too.

            Middle Range Pond, the natural lake at the foot of the hill where I grew up in Poland Spring, Maine had a thriving population of tiny, sardine-sized smelts. They lived in the lake’s depths and were only seen in the early spring around ice-out when they ran up the little tributary brooks late at night to spawn. Men used to stay out all night to go smelting. They would catch the tiny fish with fine mesh dip nets. The limit was 4 quarts per fisherman per night. But, as I soon came to realize, smelts for most Maine outdoorsmen, are simply an excuse to stay out all night and howl at the moon and drink themselves into oblivion.

            When I was seven I got my first bicycle, a 24” Columbia, and shortly after discovered there was gold on the roadsides in the form of returnable bottles: 2¢ for a long-necked beer bottle, 3¢ for a 12-ounce pop bottle, and 5¢ for a quart pop or beer bottle.

            One of my first bicycle trips afield was down the hill to a 2-track woods road that led in to a cove where Schellinger’s Brook emptied into the lake. It was April, 1955 on one of the very first warm days of spring at that high latitude. I don’t remember why I chose that destination but, when I reached the edge of the brook, I knew I’d struck it rich. Every square inch of the rocks and fontinalis moss in the brook from the mouth up to the first falls was coated with tiny yellow-white smelt eggs in testimony of what had taken place the night before. Everywhere on either bank lay returnable beer bottles by the dozen! I was rich!

            It took me awhile to gather up all the good ones and stash them behind a brush pile lest someone else find them and steal them before I could get them all home. In the process I came upon a big dry cell flashlight, the kind with a handle and a red-flashing beacon on the back. Even in the second grade I knew that whoever left that nice light must have been smashed when he staggered back up out of the woods.

            I never really caught the smelt dipping bug. Once in awhile in high school I would go out with a few buddies and try to locate a run. Once I remember walking out on the end of an 8” x 8” cross piece on a logging road bridge. “Be careful of these beams,” I warned my friends. “Some of them may be rot….ten!”

            A second or two later the outer 4 feet of the beam and I both hit the shell ice and water ten feet below. My buddies said the only thing visible in their flashlight beams was my wool cap floating on the surface. I spent the rest of the evening stripped down and wrapped in a car blanket trying to trap the entire output of the car’s heater inside my blanket.

            Angling for smelts was a different story. The smelts in the lake spent most of their time near the bottom even in winter. My older friend at the base of the hill, Ronnie Morrill, had a fishing shack that his dad would put out in the middle of the lake every January. For two months Ronnie and I would fish in 60 feet of water for the occasional lake trout and all the smelts we could catch. To catch a 4-5” smelt at that depth takes a special rig. We used a 10-12” length of spring steel such as an old corset stay anchored to the wall of the shanty above a hole in the floor. To the end was attached a length of fine monofilament line – either 2 or 4 pound test – long enough to reach down to within a foot of the bottom of the lake. On the business end of that line was a small sinker and a #10 or #12 fly-tying hook baited with a tiny sliver of cut up baitfish.

            We usually each fished two smelt lines and set several tip-ups with live shiners or smelts for lake trout in proximity to the shanty. In those days an ice fisherman could have up to five lines.  The object was to watch the tips of the bowed springs closely. When a tiny smelt took the bait far below the spring wiggled slightly. One had to grab the line to set the hook, then haul it in hand over hand. It wasn’t an occupation that would keep a person fed. If we caught enough smelts in ten days afield, for one man to make a meal  I don’t remember when that was. But it was a great way to spend a bitterly cold winter’s day and it sure beat the heck out of Saturday cartoons.

            For some reason the Maine legislature has never looked upon ice fishing at night with favor. Middle Range, like most of the lakes in my county, was closed to fishing after dark. One day Ronnie and I discussed the state of affairs and decided there must be a good reason for it. We figured it must be a conservation measure. Smelts must be much easier to catch at night. Therefore we hatched a plan to test our hypothesis.

            The next weekend we took a small bag of night-fishing supplies out to the shack. As evening came on, we taped black paper across the three, single-pane windows and banked snow thickly around the base of the shack so that no light would be visible from shore. As nightful came on, we turned off the portable AM radio and placed tiny candles just above the smelt springs that gave just enough light to see the movement of the springs.

            Well, darned if it didn’t work spectacularly! Just about dark the springs began to wiggle and we caught smelts one after another about as fast as we could bait our hooks. In a couple of hours we easily caught more smelts than we’d caught collectively in the past 2-3 years! Around 9:30 p.m. we quietly locked up and walked the half mile across the lake to Ronnie’s house making as little noise as possible.

            Among the other ice anglers frequenting the lake in those days was my much older cousin Bobby Walker and his friend Bobby Martin. Bobby had a better-built shanty much closer to the landing on Route 26 than Ronnie’s little tarpaper-covered shack. The week after our successful smelt poaching operation we bragged about our success to the older boys.

            Thus on the following Saturday the two Bobbies came equipped with black paper, masking tape, and candles to give our technique a try. It worked just as well. The two high school seniors had a ball catching smelts through the evening. Perhaps if Bobby Walker’s giggle didn’t carry quite so far on a still winter’s night and perhaps if their shanty was another quarter of a mile off the highway, the game warden would never have become suspicious and walked out to see what was going on.

That’s how, at 9-years-old, I out-poached my cousin Bobbie.

Drawing by Wayne Lewis courtesy of Colorado Division of Wildlife.

by Peter Walker

            Three years ago my then 7-year-old grandson, Jason, introduced me to the recent hit animated movie “Over the Hedge.” One of the funniest scenes takes place in a tract home when the invading small animals are confronted by the woman of the house, armed with a broom.

            In the confusion the skunk turns to one of her compatriots and says, “I’m sorry you have to see this.”

Then she yells out, “FIRE IN THE HOLE!”

The view pans back away from the house as, “POOM!” a green cloud blows out simultaneously from the windows and doors.

That incident reminds me of a tale often told in the Walker family. My paternal grandfather, Elmer Walker, was a big man for his generation. At 6’ 3” he had a deep booming voice to match his stature.

My grandparents lived in a huge farmhouse in southern Maine that had been in our family since 1840. Typical of the homes of that era, the barn and house were attached by an enclosed shed to make chores possible without going out into the snow.

In more recent times the shed was finished off into a 2-story apartment. That apartment once served as a doctor’s office and at other times was rented to various people, including Nancy and me early in our marriage.

 The particular incident occurred in summer in the 1950s. At that time my Uncle Gerry and Aunt Claire were living in the apartment and saving to buy a house of their own.

Grampa owned a plumbing company. One of the responsibilities of the trade is making house calls at all hours of the night.

On that particular night, Grampa had been out fixing a water pump or unplugging a drain until after midnight. He returned dirty, tired and hungry to a darkened house and yard. The door to the main part of the house was on a low, open porch.

My grandmother had forgotten to leave the porch light on. Without a light Grampa fumbled through his ring of keys without success. As his frustration grew, the cat – or so he thought – squeezed between his ankles and the door.

At that point my temperamental grandfather took out his frustrations on the bothersome animal straddling his feet. Uttering, “Get out of here, cat!” he cuffed the critter off to one side with the side of his work boot.

FIRE IN THE HOLE!

Grampa caught the full retaliation of an offended skunk dead center in the sternum.

Those who have never experienced the wrath of a skunk at close range cannot appreciate how it overwhelms all the senses. Every nerve in one’s body fires off in panic. Your hearing; your eyesight; everything is temporarily paralyzed.

In that state of impaired thinking, Grampa headed for safety – sort of. Somewhere in his brain the urge to take shelter inside took over. Since he couldn’t find his key, he headed for the barn.

In the back of the barn, a hallway led to an unlocked door through my aunt and uncle’s apartment and on into the main part of the house. Aunt Claire said she and Gerry were watching TV in the sanctity of their darkened living room when their home was suddenly invaded by a bellowing, wounded beast preceeding an odor most foul.

By now my grandmother had been awakened. She met her howling husband at the door into the main kitchen and blocked his way. Instead she herded him back through Gerry and Claire’s apartment and into the barn from which he came, once again fumigating the already reeking quarters.

Once out in the yard, my 95-pound grandmother took control of the situation. She ordered the big man to strip off his ruined clothing while she connected the garden hose. The bellowing changed pitch but never let up as she directed a hard stream of ice-cold well water onto his naked frame and gradually took the edge off the skunk smell.

This was followed by several scrubbings with her homemade lye soap and still more icy rinses.

Needless to say no one in the house got a full night’s sleep and the after-effects of the event lingered on for weeks to come.