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Finkel & Filion

Part I

Finkel Road springs from the rocky shores of Lake Huron and runs east to west through Harbor Beach, Michigan. At section 24, the gravel lane passes Earl Braun’s red-brick farmhouse. Earl came into the world 82 years ago, the son of immigrant German farmers. Each morning he sees the sun refract off of the great lake and cast its amber rays over the same stretch of dirt. On a clear night you could from Earl's front steps see a candle placed on the porch of the house where he was born. He toiled for the better part of a century in the loamy sand that his father worked with horses and that Earl and his sons have worked with tractors to provide food and shelter for three generations of Brauns. The acres are blessed with abundant corn, sugar beets, and whitetail deer.

Earl doesn’t own a gun. Never has. He doesn’t object to them. A shotgun or a .22 rifle are common tools of this trade. But Earl didn’t need them to keep the farm going. That’s all. His sons are different. They have pump twelve-gauges with slug barrels. Larry, Warren, and Dennis are deer hunters. Like all brothers they compete in a friendly way. Each has a big buck on the wall. But Warren seems to have an edge.

One frigid November day more than a decade ago, Warren was rolling in his Ford truck to bowling league in Harbor Beach. It was late on a Wednesday afternoon during gun deer season. Dusk was setting in the west. Warren noticed a dark spot that stood out against the snow in a sugar beet field far from the road. He eased in the clutch and pushed the stick shift to neutral. The Ford crunched to a stop on the gravel.

Warren didn’t need binoculars to see that it was a deer. A big doe was digging beets. He slid a Remington Wingmaster from behind the seat and let the brown vinyl case drop to the floor. The truck idled on the road while Warren stole across the ditch. The doe scraped the frozen dirt with her front hoof and turned toward the road. He slipped two slugs into the magazine and pressed the latch in front of the trigger guard. His left hand gripped the forend.

Snick, snick.

Warren took the safety off as he raised the worn walnut stock to his cheek. The doe lifted her head and flicked an ear. No stomping or snorting. She was way too far away to be that concerned. He covered the deer’s chest with the front sight. The doe lifted her head and chewed. Warren raised the sight blade until it was directly between the doe’s ears, then raised it another two feet. He exhaled and squeezed the trigger. The bark of the twelve- gauge fragmented the freezing air, spitting a three-foot flame. Warren felt the sharp punch of recoil on his shoulder. When he lifted his head the doe was in a heap.

Warren looked at his watch.

Shit, I’ll be late for league.

He walked back to the Ford and cased the gun. From the bowling alley he dialed Larry.

Hey, I shot a big doe in the beet field just west of Dad’s house. Didn’t have time to drag it out. Can you do me a favor?

When Larry reached the doe he looked for the fatal gunshot. It took him a few seconds to see that the slug went in the deer’s nose and out the back of its skull. He paced the distance back to Warren’s boot marks—175 yards easy.

Part II

Warren’s long-distance strike on the way to bowling league is one of many stories that are told and retold in Earl Braun’s machine shed after a family deer hunt. There is a cavernous wood stove, fed with three-foot rounds of ash and oak from the grove north of the barn. Enough heat radiates from the glowing coals to keep an armada of heavy equipment from freezing on subzero nights. A cube of Coors light beer sits on a workbench near the door of the shed. The first hunter in from the woods cracks the case and nips lukewarm brew. Depending on how deer are moving, he might throw two empties in the bin before the next hunter bustles in. Eventually a half-dozen Brauns gather in front of the crackling fire. Broad shoulders in Carhartt bibs lean on a red Case International combine.

Larry saw a forkhorn at first light. Dennis passed on a six and a spike. Warren took a poke at a monster, lots of brush, dammit. Everyone saw a herd of does.

Three years after marrying Larry's daughter I was on the Braun deer hunt for the first time. I sat in the corner of the shed. My second beer was chasing away the cold in my bones after 11 hours in an oak tree.

Shooting the bull about deer hunting is old hat to me. I grew up in rural Wisconsin. Farm plots, gang drives, squads of men from church were the main event each November. Everybody was out to fill the freezer. Our strategy was simple. A few hunters would stand in a line at one end of a patch of cover. Others walked in from the other side to drive out the deer. There was a lot of whistling and shouting. Best know where everyone is so you can get your gun up if a branch snaps in the other direction.

The action always started quick. Slugs aimed at bobbing white tails went airborne at a liberal clip. If nothing else, the noise would let standers know that deer were moving. Usually someone was victorious. Shotgun cradled in the crook of an arm, steam rising from a blaze orange stocking cap and a big smile. Knife out ready to gut and drag. Deer stretched on the snow, tongue hanging from a slack jaw. Sometimes it would be an eight or ten-pointer. Huge by the standards of farm groves and public forest. There was no deer management or special crops that grow antlers. Usually it was a forkhorn or a doe. Nobody held out for a Booner.

If it’s brown, it’s down

That was the rule. Not just for deer either. More than once my dad blew a grouse’s head off with a twenty-gauge slug while slogging through pines on a drive. The hunters in our group wouldn't starve without a deer. But we didn’t buy many beef steaks at the grocery store either. If you wanted a tenderloin grilled medium rare on a Saturday night, it cost sixteen dollars for the license, fifty cents for a Federal slug, and the electric bill for running the chest freezer until you ate.

We’d stand around a truck after each drive and compare notes. Somebody announced where the deer jumped. Somebody else was pretty sure they saw a huge buck sneak out the back of a bean field before we walked in. Often, the dialogue was all-business. Two men negotiating who would keep a deer that both shot at and each believed he killed. Others calling dibs on a stand for the next drive. A safety-minded deacon admonishing a teen for pointing his loaded gun astray. Sometimes there was gossip about a church member who went into a bar. Or a teenager that was caught in flagrante delicto with another kid from the church.

I was tired of gang drives by the middle of high school. Too much whistling and yelling. Too much time in the car going to the next spot. Deer always running, breathing hard, slugs coming toward you. I wanted to sit still. There isn’t as much action. But it’s effective. Especially if you go in before light and stay until dark. Grey fox, pheasants, fishers, black squirrels, and trespassers. Even with blaze orange clothing, it’s uncanny how much you see when you keep still for a long time.

So, when Larry Braun invited me to join his family’s hunt, I was happy to learn that they hunt from stands. On a mid-November Thursday after work, I loaded my warm coveralls, a single-shot twelve gauge, a pink suitcase, and my seven-year-old daughter Ella into the truck. We drove through the night from Minneapolis, around the south side of Lake Michigan, through the lights of Chicago, smelled the paper-mill pungency of Indiana, then north along Lake Huron, and a half-mile past Earl Braun’s farm to Larry’s house. We arrived around sunrise. Larry was in the kitchen. He fried fresh eggs and a venison tenderloin for our breakfast. After that I had time for a two-hour nap before heading out to check the deer stands.

Part III

The first order of business was to fix a box blind that the wind screaming over Michigan’s thumb had toppled sometime in the summer. The blind is a ten-foot square shack on stilts, made from old barn wood. It overlooks a ravine a half mile south of Finkel road by the Fillion intersection. The perch is outfitted with a metal folding chair—the kind you see in the basement of Our Lady of Lake Huron Catholic Church in Harbor Beach. If that chair ever did time seating the faithful at Easter potluck dinners, the penance is over. Now it provides back support for man’s dominion over the animals. South of the blind you can see over a 20-acre fallow field, bounded by a row of mature pine trees. East there’s a swamp, the far end of which would be a tough shot for a Navy Seal with a .50 caliber sniper rifle. North are thick trees with patchy views of the ravine. On the way out, three white tails popped up and waved through the trees.

That night, sometime after cheesy potatoes and before bourbon, I learned that I would sit in Schubring’s ravine in the morning. My brother-in-law has a ladder stand there. Brian gave me his best spot with grace that, to a deer hunter, rivals Christ washing the disciple’s feet. Just before midnight I went outside to hang my coveralls on a clothesline in the barnyard. The moon was up. Across the road I could see three deer feeding. A few minutes later I drifted off to sleep imagining that one of them was a ten-pointer walking past my stand.

I didn’t need an alarm. Larry’s muffled movement through the dark house woke me at four. He headed out across the yard to reload the corn dryer. In the icy night air he shimmied up a metal ladder to the top of the galvanized steel cylinder, moonlight reflecting from the convex top. Larry scooped corn into a plastic jug and climbed down. I saw his flashlight on the silver dial that he used to test the moisture level in the kernels. Must have been okay because he fired up the John Deer 5093 parked next to the dryer and eased the throttle open. Around 3,500 RPM the power takeoff shaft started spinning and Larry hunched down into brown Carhartt coveralls in the dark tractor cab. It took about fifteen minutes for the auger to move the corn from the dryer to a grain bin. It would be there until Braun Acre’s contract required delivery to the elevator in the spring. Larry jumped down and pushed a conveyor. In the thick shadows it looked like a slender prehistoric giraffe. When the snout lined up with the dryer, he pulled open the gate of a grain truck. Corn started falling onto the conveyor. Larry throttled up the tractor again. A chain carried a stream of kernels upward until they went over the top of the conveyor shaft into the dryer. Another fifteen minutes and the dryer was full. He turned on a massive propane heater which would drive moisture from the corn. Larry does this every three hours for a month straight during the harvest.

A half-hour before daybreak I was high in Brian’s tree. Before light the twigs were snapping. Timber ghosts moved through the trees. When I could see, a deer appeared every five minutes. They were thicker than squirrels. By noon I passed up three bucks. A fork and two little six pointers. Near dusk I almost took a monster doe that ambled up the ridge behind me. It stood broadside, forty yards away. I centered the crosshairs behind her shoulder, eased the hammer back and started letting out my breath. Before my trigger finger tightened I had a sudden thought.

Wait until tomorrow so Ella can see.

A half hour later I sat on the yellow four-wheeler in Earl's shed finishing my third Coors. I told everybody about the little bucks. Passed around my camera with photos of the one that bedded underneath me.

Larry told me that tomorrow I would be in the box blind over by Finkel and Fillion.

Part IV

It was pitch black out when Larry let in a blast of arctic on his way to fill the corn dryer. I forced myself off the couch and shuffled to the room where Ella hibernated under a mound of blankets. A sliver of light from the bulb in the hallway shone on her blonde locks. Rapunzel was sleeping harder than Snow White.

Ella.

Eleanor!

Mmph.

Time to go hunting.

Yawn.

This happened four times before the wake-up stuck. When Ella finally emerged, she was wearing a bright green turtleneck and pink leggings. Her hair was in a knot.

Where’s my breakfast?

I looked at her and contemplated what would be necessary to achieve basic scent control. It would be impossible. As far as deer were concerned, she was a bubblegum aromatherapy candle. I decided to adjust my expectations and make sure she stayed warm.

Twenty minutes later I parked the truck on a field road across from Earl’s house. It was around 5:30. His is kitchen lights were on. Retirement for a Harbor Beach farmer is different than in Marco Island. I grabbed a sleeping bag from the truck and told Ella to follow me. We crept through a fallow field toward the shadow of the blind. Five minutes later she was tucked in a sleeping bag up to her chin.

Do you see all the stars sweetie?

She nodded silently. I leaned against the blind and dropped a slug into the barrel of the 12 gauge. When the Eastern sky turned pink I looked at Ella. She was sound asleep.

Dawn broke clear as frozen vodka. No snapping twigs. No does. Not a forkhorn to be seen. The sun was an hour into its westward ascent. I looked down the treeline in front of me. A buck’s head and neck was peeking out. Sun gleamed off of white bone. Four points on each side. Steam rose from his nostrils.

Moment of truth. Tick tock, Tick tock. Lord I want that deer.

I was holding my shotgun the way I do when I hunt pheasants. Center balanced waist high. I couldn’t, didn’t look the deer in the eyes. Buck in my peripheral vision, slow, painfully slow, shoulders tense, heart thumping, raising the gun, for ever and ever, still not there, waiting to hear a snort and the deer is gone, buck standing, hammer back, stock almost to my shoulder.

He jumped. If the buck had gone North back into the trees that would have been that. But he went South, not running, not bounding. Breaking into a deliberate trot. Shots at running deer on Wisconsin drives came home to roost. I don’t remember where the cross-hairs were when the gun went off. I was swinging right to left and the recoil bit me and the deer was down. I broke the barrel and dropped in another slug. I could see tall grass swaying.

Dad, did you get it?

The shotgun blast catapulted sleeping beauty into the world of the living. Her eyes were like half-dollars, peeking out from the sleeping bag.

Do you see the grass moving over there?

Yes.

Keep watching.

Through the scope I saw an antler then a nose and an ear in the grass. I moved the cosshairs back and down a foot. When they found a patch of brown hair a squeezed of another shot.

Ella was scrambling out of the sleeping bag, blue eyes dancing with excitement.

Let’s go get it!

The buck was a healthy two year-old. Slender, symmetrical antlers inside the ears. When we were close I could see that the deer’s eyes were still bright.

Ella, this deer is alive. I need to shoot it again. Cover your ears, okay?

She looked at me.

Can I shoot it?

Ella has perforated countless beer cans with a .22 rifle. 12 gauge, very different thing.

Okay sweetie.

I dropped in another slug and stood beside her.

Don’t put your eye up to the scope. Just point.

I handed her the gun and knelt by her left side. Then I cocked the hammer and put my right hand in the middle of her back. My left hand slid between her shoulder and the stock to blunt the recoil.

You okay?

She nodded in anticipation.

Okay, squeeze the trigger when you’re ready.

She concentrated for a few seconds. Whump! She had a big smile. Steam rose from behind the deer’s shoulder. Its eyes faded to a glassy grey.

Halfway through field dressing Ella piped up.

Good thing I was here, Dad. Otherwise that deer would have jumped up and ran away.

You’re right sweetie. Thank you.

By the time we dragged the deer to the truck she had advanced her theory.

Dad.

Yes, sweetie.

Are you sure you even hit it?

Okanse Lake

Okanse means "pile of bones."

There's one way in. Erik the bush pilot and his Dehaviland Beaver. A World War II relic that sounds and feels like a flying Harley Davidson.

I saw no bones at Okanse. But you could pile walleyes and northern pike as high as you want.

We made a small pile, then ate them. Anthony Bourdain in all of his parts unknown has never found a pair of these fillets with Miller Genuine Draft.

Three glorious days under skies that started pastel and ended on fire.

Spinning rods and soft plastics, sometimes a Mepps. Cast, click, wind, repeat.

Loons, bald eagles, and a concerned-looking moose. Easy neighbors.

Spartan quarters, staying up all night stoking the fire, drinking. Somehow there is no headache at this "pile of bones" lake. A quick nap was all we needed before hot coffee and another go at the fish.

You have a scruffy neck beard and a twinge of regret when the sound of Erik's plane rolls across Okanse again on day four.

Erik and Allysson can hook you up. http://kabeelo.com/

The Silver Fish

A young man stood on a rock at the edge of the river, late afternoon sun cascading over the steep riverbank above him and illuminating his lean frame. Sweat glistened on strong shoulders. His eyes scanned the water as it swirled and foamed among the stones near his feet, then ran heavy and smooth and green into a flat pool at the bank, where it disappeared into the darkness of the evening’s first shadows.

The dry air was hot and alive with the erratic flight of stoneflies rising and falling. They looped high, blazing sunlight flashing through translucent wings, bright orange abdomens glowing, dancing to the score of the midsummer breeze. The man’s eyes flickered between the water and air. A fly buzzed past his face, faltering as if its engines had stalled, crashing into the glittering rock on the far side of the river. It came to rest in the clear water near the rocky bank, legs thrashing, wings flat, spinning. Up from the deep a silver fish charged and sucked the fly from the surface. Water shot into the air and suspended, splitting the sunlight into primary colors that scattered like a handful of diamonds over a silver platter.

The droplets rejoined the river, the fish descended, the man’s heart beat faster. He remained still and intent. The sequence repeated and the river’s silky song filled the space around him. Time passed, merging with the flowing water. A rhythm emerged like a distant drumbeat as the stoneflies careened into rock and danced on water, drawing the silver fish from their underworld.

The man crouched and leapt into the air, landing on a rock. Three times he did this, until he stood in the middle of the river where the foaming current turned flat. His back was to the sun, his face in the direction of the river’s source. From his pocket he removed a small tin box and opened it. The man removed a dry fly and held it to the sun, admiring his work. He had fashioned a thorax of bright orange foam and fixed it to the hook’s steel shank with waxed thread. The body was elk hair, spun and trimmed with a razor. Thin white foam made delicate wings.

The man threaded a wisp of monofilament tippet through the eye of the hook. His hand turned and he ran the line through his lips. With a soft tug he seated the knot and flicked the fly into the water. It made a small wake in the current as it pulled against the leader, rubber legs twitching. The man’s fingers stripped line from the reel and let it drop around his feet, where it coiled, snakelike, on the water. He gazed again at the seam of clear water at the base of the sheer rock bank. The silver fish reappeared, keeping cadence with every third stonefly that floated along a narrow seam of current.

When the fisherman felt the tempo, the muscles in his forearm tightened, snapping the graphite rod toward the sun. The dry fly jumped from the water and the yellow line climbed and floated, connecting sky and earth. The man’s arm pushed forward and the serpent at his feet uncoiled and hissed toward the rock wall in a tight loop. He was sweating more now, his body gleaming as the muscles contracted in even time, music of a sort. The rod sliced air again and again, loading, releasing, shooting line across the river.

The fly line rolled out, hung golden in the sunlight, then floated soft and clean to the water. The fly drifted free and high on the seam and the man’s heart surged in his chest. His breathing stopped, but the river flowed on.

The silver fish rocketed to the surface as natural elements converged in crescendo. Water touched air and refracted light and electricity surged through the man’s body as his soul became one with the river. In that instant his heart and the air and water and fly and silver fish all beat once. In perfect rhythm.

First Communion

In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing. We lived at the junction of great trout rivers in western Montana, and our father was a Presbyterian minister and a fly fisherman who tied his own flies and taught others. He told us about Christ's disciples being fishermen, and we were left to assume, as my brother and I did, that all first-class fishermen on the Sea of Galilee were fly fishermen and that John, the favorite, was a dry-fly fisherman.

–Norman Maclean, A River Runs Though it

Teddy always wakes up first. Pre-dawn silence in our house breaks around five-thirty, when his two year-old hands slap quarter-note pulse on the hardwood stair treads that lead to our bedroom. At the top he breaks into a trot to my side of the bed.

Daddy. wake up!

It’s night time, Teddy. Lay down for a little bit.

No! Wake up I said!

When this occurs it is best to concede and head downstairs to make coffee.

Waking with the birds is not the only thing Teddy has in common with the men of Galilee. Before he could walk he held a stunted bluegill like a rosary. Gently clutching, prayerful cooing, long enough that it floated belly up when I finally convinced him to let it go.

Just before Teddy’s second birthday I found a six-weight fly blank in a barrel at a thrift shop. I turned the tip-section into a tiny Tenkara rod. Not because using a fly reel is a lower form of art. I thought that putting a little reel seat on it would be cute. Then in a moment of foresight, I imagined him turning the handle backward with glee and force until it would turn no more. So, his first fly-rod ended up with five feet of worn-out, double taper line attached at the tip with an epoxied loop connector. No reel.

Teddy caught a few panfish with the tiny wand last summer. Every time quivering like a setter with a nose full of grouse. Always with a baby-tooth smile and a shriek of delight that, if heard from a distance, would leave you to assume that a parade of baby panda bears had delivered him an ice-cream cone. These experiences seem to have stuck. Even in the dead of December, snow, wind, Minnesota polar vortex he occasionally whispered as I laid him in his crib:

Go feeshing?

On the evening before the Wisconsin trout opener, my reel was oiled, line dressed, each fly box replenished to degree uncommon in my recent seasons. Everything ready for a tip-toe exit into three dark thirty out the back door and:

Father please let me not wake the dog or kids.

Two fingers of whisky and several hours before the alarm was set to ring I had a thought.

Maybe I should bring Teddy.

A spouse-issued pass for solitary fishing is nearly as valuable to me as my favorite shotgun. Voluntarily adding a two-year old is, in fishing terms, almost like choosing to leave your waders behind. You can catch fish but you’ll be pissed before too long. The idea that he might catch a trout overpowered all others and set the hook in my conscience. So I added three diapers, a pack of baby wipes, two changes of toddler clothes, a thermos of milk, and a baggie of goldfish to my duffel. My last thought as I drifted off was: I’ll wake him up for a change.

Wrong. At three fifteen he was tugging at my pillow. No doubt expecting warm milk as a bribe to lay down for another hour. Instead, I croaked:

Teddy, do you want to go fishing?

He jumped up and down screaming.

Woohooo!

Mama, I go feeeshing!

It was like winning the 3 a.m. Powerball.

For almost two hours we drove through the dark in my pickup. He chattered like a chipmunk on a warm September day. Talked to the moon. Told me about his pet tiger. Asked if we would catch a shark. The sky was pink when we coasted to a stop in front of the Ellsworth Sportsman’s Club.

There is a large expanse of mowed grass in front of the clubhouse. There he carried my flyrod, where branches could not interfere. At the river bank I started a juggling act. Present the fly, stay between Teddy and the water. Cast, mend, look at the boy. Mend, drift, tuck the rod under my arm. Grab him before he steps into the flow. Watch the fly, let him hold the rod.

Teddy. Here, Daddy help you.

Guide the little arm as it struggles against the casting rhythm. Head moving back and forth. Tiny hands trying to turn the reel. Bright eyes watching the line. Watching a bird. Losing interest. Then, strike indicator sliding sideways. Not under. Just a pause. Rod tip up, his arm resisting. And there it was.

I let go of the rod.

Teddy, hold it up to the sky.

He relished the freedom. Just him and the rod. Slowly lifting and feeling the sharp throb of a five-inch brook trout. His first communion. Quivering again. Baby teeth and shrieks. Bamboo rod bobbing until the miniature trout was on its side. Teddy holding, smiling, caressing, bragging.

Is a shark, Daddy.

“My father was very sure about certain matters pertaining to the universe. To him all good things-trout as well as eternal salvation-come by grace and grace comes by art and art does not come easy.”

― Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It