Grayling! The name conjures yellowed men's magazines when the centerfold, if any, was of an angler landing a fish.
Up there, above the 58th parallel where air conditioning is courtesy of God, that's the domain of the grayling, now a fish of legend down where most people live.
Hatchet Lake Lodge in northeast Saskatchewan features the grayling on its logo because it is symbolic of the north country, this odd fish with a dorsal fin by Dali.
It's the smallest fish you'll catch at Hatchet. Fly-in anglers routinely tangle with northern pike and lake trout of more than 20 pounds, walleyes above 10 pounds. A good grayling weighs two or three pounds. The Hatchet Lake pike record is 35 pounds, the lake trout record 38. The grayling record is just under four pounds.
But grayling are representative of the gentle, but fiercely individual man who carved Hatchet from the wilderness more than a quarter of a century ago.
George Fleming will let you catch grayling, eat a few of them for a shore lunch, even keep one if you really are determined. Just one. The rest go back to the chill waters they must have to live so they'll be there for the next greenhorn angler, fresh from the States.
Neither Fleming nor the grayling could exist other than in this harsh, clean land. The Lodge is 30 miles from the nearest roadhead, 200 miles from the nearest town, La Ronge, and nearly 500 miles north of Saskatoon, the nearest city. Chicago is 1,600 miles south.
FLEMING, AN EXPATRIATE SCOT, emigrated when he was 16 to work for the Hudson's Bay Company. When he realized that a fellow worker with 16 years seniority was making only $60 a month more than he was, he decided to quit. He was making a lordly $325 monthly. "I planned to go to New Zealand," he says. "But I heard about this island camp."
He and a partner bought the lodge site on a 200-acre island in the 128,000-acre lake in 1964. Fleming bought out his partner in 1970. Now the lodge complex is host to 500-700 anglers per year and there is a guide force of nearly 30 guides, mostly Cree and Ojibway Indians.
Fleming had logistical problems shuttling equipment with a couple of Otter float planes. So he advertised a 3,000-foot runway. "Once it was in the brochure," he says. "I had to build it."
It took eight days in winter to drive a bulldozer from the roadhead (he'd never driven one in his life), across lakes and rivers. He and a helper camped in a tent in the bitter cold, but sweated bullets as the ice creaked and cracked under the heavy dozer.
Fleming located an esker, a ridge of glacially-deposited gravel. He followed a steep moose trail to the top with the bulldozer threatening to tip over backward and began to level the strip which now lands jets.
Ernest Mitts, a retired family practitioner from Bonner Springs, Kansas, was an early customer. A friend had fished there and Dr. Mitts saw photos of lake trout that filled the arms of anglers. "I started going up there 25 years ago," he says. He has been to Hatchet seven times since.
"I've fished in Manitoba and Ontario, but it's not the same--that being up there by yourself. And George and I have become good friends. First time I went, it was as primitive as it's ever been. There was no hot water, no lodge, only four cabins."
TODAY, HATCHET HAS 30 CABINS and a lodge/dining room, with a meeting area for corporate types who can't get away from the conference table. The amenities are what distinguish Hatchet. While fly-in fishing is the dream of serious anglers, 40 percent of George Fleming's customers never have fished before.
Most fly-in camps promise outstanding fishing; only a few can guarantee a hot shower. A huge generator, located over a hill from the lodge and cabins to eliminate noise, provides electricity for lights and hot water.
"George is a bright man and knows the business. He takes care of people," Dr. Mitts says. Anglers fish for five species from Fleming's Hatchet Lake Lodge--walleye, northern pike, lake trout, whitefish, and grayling.
A typical day starts at 6:30 a.m. with a wakeup (and, if it's near-freezing, as it usually is in September, they fire up a woodstove for you). A few minutes later, someone comes with a pitcher of hot coffee. At 7:00 a.m., the skirl of bagpipes announces breakfast. Scotland may be a continent and an ocean away from George Fleming...but when the pipes play, it's as close as his heart.
Breakfast is huge and includes Red River Cereal, the oatmeal of the north--a mixture of wheat, rye, and flax that one angler dubbed "Colon Blow."
Then anglers have the choice of fishing Hatchet or flying out in an antique Otter float plane to one of 14 other lakes.
SHORE LUNCHES ARE A TRADITIONAL MIDDAY BREAK. By noon, there will be enough fish in the boat to feed the anglers and guide--the only fish kept. It's luck-of-the-catch, sometimes pike, sometimes trout, sometimes (if you're lucky, for they are delectable) grayling.
A heart specialist would shudder at the high cholesterol lunches. Everything is fried, in fat...but what a sin! The fresh-caught fish is flaky and firm and there is campfire coffee, complete with floating wood ash and filled with the grits of the coffee itself. One angler, going back for seconds of fish and the muscular coffee, enthused, "Man, we're male-bonding now!"
Anglers get to Hatchet via airplane. The contrast between the jumping-off place, the wheat-growing area of southern Saskatchewan, and the north country is startling. Saskatoon, like Regina before it, is a city plunked down in a horrible dead-flat landscape of harvested wheat fields. The wind blows continually.
But to the north, the landscape changes dramatically from the sere wheatfields to dark green forest, laced with countless rivers and lakes. Wind tickles the lake surfaces far below and turns them to silver filigreed artwork.
You fly through broken clouds, a couple thousand feet high. "Sparsely settled" say the aeronautical maps euphemistically. "Unsettled" is more like it. There may be a few Chippewayan Indians in the black spruce forest that stretches to the horizon in any direction, but you see no towns, no freeways, none of the familiar landmarks. Just the rolling sweep of woods and lakes.
"If you hear a plane up there, it's coming for you," says Ernest Mitts. The silence is alien to urban ears, conditioned to traffic, passing airplanes, other people. You can hear your internal workings.
Through the summer, the Hatchet runway handles a 60-passenger jet, but in fall, when the night temperatures dip below freezing, customers come by twin-engine Cessna, tossed like a Frisbee by Canada's powerful autumn winds.
It can be 90 degrees in Regina and 30 at Hatchet Lake. But fall is when big lake trout come from the deeps of summer and cruise the flats, visible as they slash at a fishing plug. You see them as dark shadows against the tan bottom. If you fish Hatchet for three days in September and don't catch a laker close to 20 pounds, you're unusually unlucky.
BIG NORTHERN PIKE are at their most voracious in early spring (June, this far north), just after ice-out. Lake trout are scattered in shallow water early in spring and come to reefs to spawn in September.
Autumn fly fisherman can entice either lakers or pike with big streamers, fished just off the bottom, or can go after grayling with light fly or spinfishing equipment, either in the feeder streams to Hatchet or in "fly-out" streams, reached by float plane.
The Otter is the aerial pack mule of the north country. It looks like a refugee from an aeronautical museum, but is as sturdy as a Percheron. It grumbles and rumbles through the morning sunshine at a thumping 80 miles per hour, like the turtle of tortoise-and-hare fame. Riding in an Otter is a trip in a time machine. So is the grayling fishing at the end of the trip.
It's a 10-mile lake boat ride after landing on Durrant Lake to the Waterfount River, a broad feeder stream. There's an eagle nest along the way, inhabited by a couple of kid eagles whose parents soar overhead, screaming thinly.
A loon always laments down lake. Loons are the voice of the granite-ribbed north country and the dark conifers create its aroma.
Also symbolic of the north are the Cree guides. Cornelius Ratt calls himself "The Man of the North. "Call me Corny," he says, with a Copenhagen-stained grin.
Corny, good-humored and pedal-to-the-metal when it comes to boat driving, has a one-joke routine. Every time he releases a fish, he shouts after it, "Go home and get yo' momma!" Corny never has been farther south than Saskatoon.
DESPITE THE REMOTENESS AND VASTNESS of northern Saskatchewan, the fishing would fall apart if the lodges didn't practice catch-and-release. The number of outfitters has doubled in the last decade or so, to nearly 300 now.
And curious straight lines, visible from the air, slice across the endless woods below. They are not some geologic phenomenon--they are grid lines carved in winter by Indians with chain saws, traveling alone on snowmobiles. The grid lines are references for uranium mining engineers. So the last wilderness gives up its secrets...
Jerry Pond, a diagnostic radiologist with the University of Arizona at Tucson, has been to Hatchet Lake Lodge twice.
His first trip was with his brother Eric. "We caught northerns until our arms got tired," he says. "In one afternoon, I think the two of us caught a hundred. As fast as the guide could take 'em off the hook, we were hooked up again. The lure would splash and the next splash was a fish taking it." Dr. Pond caught both pike and lake trout of more than 20 pounds.
"Eric and I are in our 40s and never had been on an adventure together," he says. The adventure was all they'd hoped for...and then some. There was floating ice on the lake. One day the wind shifted and blew the ice against the shore, blocking their return to Hatchet Lake. "We broke ice for about a mile and once all three of us had to walk precariously beside the boat on the disintegrating ice, holding the gunwales and sliding the boat along, hoping not to fall in."
Some 26 years before, George Fleming had a pilot drop him off at a remote lake he wanted to scout for fishing potential.
His radio failed and he decided to walk home to Hatchet--32 miles away, through the forest, around lakes, and across rivers.
And he got lost. His compass was faulty; he began to blunder into lakes that shouldn't have been where they were.
He finally used the sun as a compass and hit the north shore of Hatchet Lake two days later, his muscles cramping, near exhaustion. He clung to a log and swam to the island.
So, from George Fleming to Jerry Pond, not much has changed. There is no emergency road service when the emergency comes up. You're on your own. The country is real and impersonal and you live by its terms, not yours.
Even if there are no unfished lakes anymore, even if the sweeping forest has been diced by chain saws, even if the virgin wilderness is a fiction...there still is adventure in the northern wilds of Saskatchewan.
How to Get There
Canadians call 403-286-2717 (Fax 403-286-7256). United States citizens call 1-800-661-9183. The lodge number is 306-633-2132, June 1-September. 20.
June/July there is a 60-passenger jet leaving from Minneapolis every four days for a 5,000-foot runway. August/September flights are via Athabaska Airlines twin-engine planes out of Saskatoon.
Costs
Airplane cost is roughly $400 from Minneapolis. A four-day stay will be about $2,000-plus (there are group and corporate discounts). Flyouts to any of 14 other lakes are about $150/person daily. Everything is included but fishing tackle, liquor, and en route lodging. Lodge prices are very high (a fifth of liquor is $35 or more).
Special Considerations
United States citizens need proof of citizenship: voter registration card, birth certificate, or passport. Make sure rods are carefully cased. Be sure to take warm clothing and rain gear; this is sub-arctic country and it rains often. Take at least a dozen rolls of film and leave them boxed for the flight in--saves time at security checks. Have them hand-inspected, not x-rayed (regardless of the promises that x-rays don't affect film under 1000 ASA).
Other Saskatchewan Fishing Lodges
For a complete listing of 280 Saskatchewan outfitting camps, write Saskatchewan Tourism, 1919 Saskatchewan Drive, Regina, Saskatchewan S4P 3V7. The toll-free number is 1-800-667-7191 (1-800- 667-7538 in Saskatchewan).
Copyright (c) 1996 Joel Vance. All rights reserved.
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