Two Boys Walking

We didn’t catch anything in the first mile. The water ran slowly through beaver meadows with a silt bottom. When the stream turned to the north, we were out of the meadows and in the woods. The hillsides were covered with balsams and dark spruce. Aspens and pole birch took the high ground, and sometimes we’d see stands of maples or ash. The water was faster here, over stones, and we began to catch the brook trout. They were eight to eleven inches long, and dark in the stained water.

The stream turned south and west again, and we walked the banks and fished all the good places. As the day wore on, I was sure we wouldn’t make the next bridge by nightfall. What a crazy idea Daryl had, to walk and fish that far in one day. I had been on the downstream water and I kept hoping to see some familiar pools. That never happened. We stopped at a large beaver dam to eat our sandwiches, and caught our biggest fish casting into the pool above the dam.

The sun was fading and we left the stream and walked to the southwest. We were headed for a gravel road on the western edge of this big woods. Soon we were in a tangle of timber blow downs, and it was too much work to crawl over and under the trees. We came to a line of cedars, and a small swamp, and creek three feet wide. We followed the creek and we found a broken footbridge and a hunting shack on the trail above the bridge. We rested at the shack for a few minutes, then began a fast walk to the west on a wet jeep trail. The trail was at least a mile long. We came out to the gravel road as the sun fell behind the horizon, and we turned south toward home.

A car came up behind us then, and stopped. The man behind the wheel said he’d been looking for a trout stream and had gotten lost. He wanted us to point him toward the main road. We traded a ride down to the lower bridge for directions back to town, and we caught Daryl’s mother just leaving for the third time. She thought she’d have to let us boys sleep in the woods, but I had a late supper and I slept in my own bed at home, after feeding the heads and tails of my brook trout to the cats.