Trae, Our Neighbor with his Walleye
While I roamed around our yard yesterday looking for pictures to snap, Our neighbors Trae and his dad drove in from a day of fishing the Missouri and unloaded their limit of walleyes. I told him to get one and I would take his picture. This is the one he grabbed, so I don't know if they were all this size or not, but I especially liked the story his dad told,(with a straight face). He is a school principal, and given my experience in that same profession, we cannot tell a lie.
This how the story went. He caught a big one and just about had it when it got under a rock and broke the line. Lost! Later on he caught another, and as he reeled it in, here comes the other one with it, twisted up on the line. Two in one! Trae's mother asked if we like fish. Oh, yes, we do! And sure enough, a little later Tina comes to the door with a beautifully cleaned sack of fillets.
I used to fish quite a little, have owned two boats, and still have a bundle of gear in one corner of the garage. The fishing trip that still stands out in my mind as the best one took place on The Lake of the Woods in the spring of 1973. After three years as high school principal in Dunseith, I was a total burn-out and when this trip came up I jumped at it. George Bunn, Ray Bartholomay, and I drove up to northern Minnesota and met up with an acquaintance of George's who owned a large fishing/pleasure boat who graciously took us out on the big lake. We never caught fish of any size, but we caught a lot of them, and I still can taste that walleye fixed on Shake and Bake and washed down with gallons of beer. It was a relaxing interlude before I jumped back into the fire and took another administrative job.
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Our friend Ole always gets accused of being the dumb one, but how about when he fooled the game warden:
Ole was stopped by the game warden just as he was leaving the Lake of the Woods with two buckets of fish. "Let me see your fishing license." . . . "Oh, Sir, I don't have vun, dese here are my pet fish," says Ole . . ."Pet fish?" . . . "You betcha, every night I take dese fish down to the lake and let them swim around for awhile. Den I whistle and dey yump back into the buckets , and I take dem home." . . . "That's a bunch of hooey, fish can't do that," the warden says. . . Ole looked at the warden with a real hurt expression on his face and said, "Vell, den, I'll yust show you den. It really does work." . . . "OK, I've got to see this," says the warden, really curious now. So Ole poured the fish into the lake and stood waiting. After several minutes, the game warden turned to Ole and said, "Well?" . . . "Vell, what?" . . . "When are you going to call them back?" the red-faced warden says. . . "Call who back?" Ole asks . . . "The fish!" . . . . . . . "What fish?"
