You can only stay good for so long. That spring I was exemplary: a faithful husband, a model father, a dry-fly purist so devoted to the ethics and aesthetics of the sport that I should have been sainted, bronzed, and sacrificed on some shrine to Ernie Schwiebert.
For weeks I'd been fishing delicate mayfly hatches and catching precious, tiny, terribly wild trout in the skinny rivers near my home in northern Michigan. I fished only during gentleman's hours (ten o'clock to four), then again briefly in the evening during the spinner fall--and released every fish I caught. Every damned one.
But the pressure to be good was too great and soon I started having impure thoughts. The world had become too tame for me. It lacked mystery and flavor and the spice of slightly illicit pleasures. I imagined 12-inch brookies sputtering in butter in a skillet. I daydreamed about walking into our local Orvis shop dragging a brown trout I'd had to subdue with a crack to the skull with a baseball bat. I started longing for a knock-down drag-em-out brawl with a muskie or northern pike. To hell with gentility. I wanted bleeding knuckles and flying snot.
So when my buddy Tom Carney called one evening in June and started babbling about night-fishing for pig-sized walleyes, I listened. Tom is a high school English teacher, the kind who goes to work early every morning and grades papers at home every evening and lays awake at night worrying about the future of each slacker slouching in the back row of his class.
When the school-year ends Tom is always in serious need of a vacation. Now his mood matched mine exactly. He wanted to catch unsophisticated fish with unsophisticated methods. He wanted to fill a cooler with fillets and fry them in beer-batter. He wanted to get out on water deep enough to hide mysteries, where he might hook something so big he had no chance of landing it. I asked if he had any place in particular in mind and he said North Dakota. I started packing that night.
We drove the interstates west to where the prairie stretched taut from horizon to horizon and didn't stop until we bumped up against the Missouri River near Bismarck. Upstream, Lake Sakakawea sprawled across the state like a vast taproot. Downstream, the Missouri flowed strong, calm, and unhurried.
In Mandan we asked around for someone who could show us a thing or two about catching walleye at night and were introduced to a soft-spoken young man named Keith Christianson, a railroad engineer by profession and a fishing guide weekends, evenings, and holidays. He had been fishing the Missouri and its impoundments most of his life.
"Sure, we can fish after dark," he said, but he hesitated as he said it. I've heard that same hesitation in the voices of guides on Saginaw Bay, Lake Erie, and other places where walleye grow big and abundant. It was a way of saying, "Yeah, we can fish at night, but the fishing's so good during the day, why bother?"
That evening we launched Keith's aluminum boat into the Missouri below Garrison Dam and drifted downstream between striated clay banks that turned to flaming ocher as the sun set. We fished the snag-infested bottom with whole nightcrawlers on Lindy Rigs--a wire dropper-and-sinker arrangement popular in the Midwest--and caught a half dozen walleye up to three pounds, a few sauger (the walleye's smaller cousin), and two small channel catfish. Tom and I were certain we would start hooking larger fish once night fell.
But as dusk moved up the valley Keith began losing confidence. He was nervous about maneuvering his boat in the dark around the many snags and sandbars and decided we should move upstream near the dam, where the water was deeper. He knew large walleye were sometimes caught there at night, in the deep, turbulent pool below the turbines.
It was dark by the time we got there. We switched to Rapalas and fished the edge of the current in the half mile of river below the dam, trolling so close to the bank it was possible to reach out and tap dry gravel with the tips of our rods. We had occasional strikes and hooked a few walleye 12 to 15 inches long, smaller even than the ones we had taken downstream on nightcrawlers. Once a lone fisherman standing on the bank cast across our stern, so close his lure whistled past Keith's head. We had intruded on his territory. Keith made no comment, just steered us farther from shore.
The night was lit only by the broad streak of the Milky Way straight overhead and in the humid air the stars glittered like bits of glass flung across black ice. We motored around a bend and there stood the dam: three immense, looming columns of white concrete illuminated with glaring floodlights. Swarms of insects spiraled around the lights; bats and nighthawks swooped in and out of the beams like marauding fighter planes.
Below the dam the river was strong, the surface swelling with turbulence. I thought of the poet John Neihardt, who in 1908 floated most of the length of the Missouri River in a small boat and afterwards wrote: "I love all things that yearn toward distant seas."
A river as long as the Missouri has a powerful yearning. Riding the heaving current beneath the dam I smelled mountain headwaters, sweet prairie grasses, and salty ocean. It was a heady and primitive smell, one that cut across continents and centuries, and I wanted to follow it all the way down to the Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico.
Suddenly there was a beating of wings, like sails luffing in a wind, and three large and heavy-boned pelicans flapped slowly out of the darkness 30 feet above our heads. In the lights from the dam they glowed a ghostly white that made them seem both prehistoric and timeless, like pterodactyls attracted across the ages. The scene had the searing quality of light burned into your retina by a flashbulb. I looked at Tom and Keith: they were wide-eyed and speechless.
We stayed on the river until after midnight but caught nothing more. Enough night-fishing, we decided. We would fish in daylight, in the reservoir, where Keith said there were walleye that could put a real bend in a rod.
Early the next morning we met for breakfast at a restaurant in Garrison. It was the kind of small-town cafe you expect to see patronized by farmers and retired cowboys, but it was filled instead with tanned men in jeans and gimme hats talking about walleye fishing. On every wall were walleye mounted on enameled plaques. Most had weighed eight pounds or more. All had been caught in recent years from Lake Sakakawea.
Keith asked if we were willing to do some driving to get near the distant center of the lake, where he had heard from other guides that a lot of fish were being caught. We consolidated gear into Keith's truck and drove 40 miles to a public ramp, launched the boat, and motored up the lake into wind and rolling waves. The shores were barren of trees and sloped at flat angles into the water or ended at great eroding cliffs of stratified rock and clay. The land was colored entirely in grays and browns, the sky so blue it could have been cut into pieces and sold to tourists. We motored on, the spray from the waves drifting over the bow into our faces.
Lake Sakakawea is named for the Shoshone woman who was guide and interpreter for Lewis and Clark during their expedition up the Missouri and over the Continental Divide to Oregon in 1804-1806. The reservoir stretches 180 miles from the Montana border, where the Missouri and Yellowstone rivers come together, to Garrison Dam north of Bismarck. It is such a large body of water that fishermen tend to focus on one portion exclusively. They might fish for years among the islands and complex bays in the wide lower end, yet know nothing about the lake 50 miles closer to Montana. That strange water to the west might as well be another lake altogether.
Most anglers on Lake Sac are after walleye, sauger, and saugeye--a naturally occurring hybrid of the two--although the lake also supports smallmouth bass, white bass, northern pike, channel catfish, paddlefish, and king salmon. We caught a few small channel cats and a northern pike, but mostly we caught walleye. We caught them by trolling, casting, and drifting, in shallow water and over deep gravel bars, with jigs and crankbaits, with nightcrawlers, leeches, and minnows. Though we failed to hook any of the 10-pound and larger fish the lake is famous for, we caught many two-to-four pounders--so many we often fought two and sometimes three fish at the same time--and every one over about 18 inches went into the live well.
Our steadiest action came after Keith steered us to a sunken reef in the middle of the reservoir where a half-dozen other boats were drift-fishing jigs tipped with nightcrawlers and minnows. The procedure was to cut the motor at the windward side of the reef, where someone had planted a temporary marker buoy, throw out a sea anchor to slow the boat, then drift with the wind down the length of the reef, watching the depth locator as it marked 60, 40, 20, and finally 12 feet of water. The fish were at 12 feet. We handled two rods each, or tried to: sometimes strikes came so quickly we could not put our second lines in the water.
Once as we motored upwind to begin another pass over the reef we noticed a man and a woman in a bass boat off by themselves in deep water. The man, sitting in the bow seat, held a deeply arched rod. A half-hour later, when we circled around again, the boat was farther away and the man in the bow still held the bent rod. It occurred to us that he had been fighting the same fish the entire time. Keith pulled out a pair of binoculars and watched for a few minutes. "He's got a real hog on," he said.
Our next trip upwind we saw the woman in the stern standing with a landing net in her hands. Even from our distance we could see the net was much too small. We reeled in our lines and started toward them to see if we could help.
The man was in his late 30s or early 40s, and not in the best of shape. It was mid-day by then, with the sun high and hot, but even in the heat and after more than an hour of exertion he was not getting sloppy. He kept the rod up, the pressure steady on the fish, and seemed to know better than to get impatient and try to horse it. He used his feet to control an electric trolling motor that kept the boat moving slowly in the direction of the fish.
"What you got?" Keith called as we came up slowly from the stern.
The man turned and appraised us. "I don't know. Something big."
"Want a bigger net?"
"You bet. Thanks. I don't know what I'm hooked to, but it's surely too big for our little net."
"What'd you hook it on?"
"A small spinner and minnow. When it hit it felt like it was going 30 miles an hour and planned to run straight on through to St. Louis. I think maybe it's a big pike. Or a paddlefish. I've only got six-pound-test line, but it's fresh, and I'm in no hurry. There's no place, in fact, I'd rather be right now."
We passed Keith's wide salmon net to the woman, then backed off slowly, and when we were far enough to be clear in case the fish turned and ran our way we shut off our motor and watched. The electronics showed we were in 80 feet of water. From the contours drawn on the graph it appeared there was a sunken forest beneath us. Bizarre shapes rose 10 and 20 feet from the bottom.
"A lot of snags down there," Keith called. "Don't let it go to the bottom."
The man glanced at us and shrugged. "I don't have much say in the matter."
Sometimes he gained line, pumping and reeling as his boat moved up on the fish. But then it would run, taking line in a high-pitched racheting whine. Holding his rod out, the tip bent nearly to the water, the man would allow the line to go until it seemed certain he would soon be down to bare spool. But the fish would eventually slow and the man would pump the rod and get a little line back. He turned once, said something to the woman, and she held a can of soda to his mouth and he took a long drink.
We watched for a half hour but became restless and went back to the reef. The man and woman were far from the other fishermen by then, their boat low and small in the distance. We kept track of them with the binoculars.
Finally, more than two hours after we first noticed them, they motored across the lake toward us. They came up beside our boat, smiling grimly and shaking their heads. The woman passed the big net back to Keith.
"It got down into something on the bottom," she said. "After all that time. And we never even saw it. We have no idea what it was."
"Maybe it was a big channel cat," Keith suggested.
"All I know," the man said, "is it was the biggest fish I ever hooked in fresh water and it beat me. We're heading home to Colorado now, but I'll tell you what: We'll be back."
Later, as Tom and I forklifted our fish off Keith's boat, some guy motored up next to us at the access site and made a great show of unloading a limit of walleyes that must have averaged eight pounds each. Tom asked him where he'd caught them and he nodded vaguely toward the middle of the lake. He winked to let us know he'd devoted a lifetime learning the deepest secrets of Sakakawea and he wasn't about to share them with out-of-state duffers like us. Which was fine with me. Tom and I had been in North Dakota only two days and already we knew a few secrets of our own.
Copyright (c) 1996 Jerry Dennis. All rights reserved.
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