2:24 p.m.-
A sunfish just “"clumped" the floor of the boat.
It and four others are dying out of sight behind me--freshly caught and whacked
on the head with the P-pipe. They, and a small perch I lured into the boat
an hour ago, are the tomato plant fertilizers I'd hoped to catch yesterday.
We got on the water about noon and fished near the landing for a half hour.
The perch was brought up from a depth of five feet, but no others volunteered
to go home with me for a soily new life.
Most
of the trek downriver toward town was done by memory, assisted vaguely by hazy
traces of greens lining the course, but the two shortcuts were not yet sided by
rushes so I relied on the depth finder to show me the long way around. My
favorite fishing hole is in the main lake near town, behind a tall Norway pine
island and beside a fifteen-foot high floating tag alder bog, a riotous asylum
of cheering redwing blackbirds. The dragonflies have hatched, swarms of thirty
and more swooping and flitting around the boat. We have had little rain this
spring so there are few pesky bugs, but for some gnats. Mosquitoes are scarce
and deerflies nonexistent as yet.
4:05-
Anchored under a maple in SSC. Exactly as I conjectured yesterday,
Beaver worked the night to redo what I undid yesterday afternoon. The narrow
passage was re-fitted with sticks and into a squat poplar stump the words
“"STA OUT" were gnawed.
I remained calm and a little impressed, dropped anchor over the clog
and set into redoing the undoing I'd done 24 hours ago. The heap of saplings
I threw up on the bank yesterday was somewhat still there, but diminished.
Beaver took many of them back and crunched up a batch of new dam materials
and re-stuck them randomly, stems sticking into the air in a mediocre lazy
design.
So,
I piled the boat full of ten-foot long Beaver debris trees, leaving bow space
for me to work and EZ to get excited over -- then worried about when the space
closed in and alder limbs pronged into her flanks. Channel re-opened and boat
piled with Beaver leavings, I motored the boat through to the upper exit and
unloaded it all into the main river so it could drift into the shallows. The
motor scraped bottom a couple of times where it never has before, so I spent
fifteen minutes sawing dead limbs and widening the passage farther from the
bank.
There
are no tree frogs or peepers trilling this year due, I hope, to the lack of
precipitation, not increased cyanide and mercury and lead and other heavy metal
smoke business is blowing into our eyes.