A brace for the broiler

Still no numbers of sunfish in the shallows.  Ones and twos at the very edge of last year's scirpus beds.
Lurking largemouth breaks me off in the thick shit - four weight dilemma.  Another warm day tomorrow, then back into the tank for a week.  Fish will be right on time, yet seem late, due to the fact that the lake has been open for nearly a month.  Hard to wait.  Need crappies. Need pumpkins.  Need more bluegill !

Canis lupus, turdis

Just at the junction of the minimum maintenance road and the half mile dirt track into my cabin, a pack of recently somewhat unprotected, shoot em if you feel threatened, grey wolves declared their presence. Right nice pile of poop, that. Plenty of wolves in this neighborhood. I see one or two each year. But they usually only leave a pile or two in the trail or the dirt track - just once in a while, just to let you know they're around- no big deal, here a turd, there a turd........   But this !  This is a proper display.  This is art. This is fecal art ! This just screams,  "Hunting season ?  Bring on your proposed hunting season ! We can give a crap about your freaking howling hunting season !!!"

This harsh place in April. High 30s by mid afternoon, then plunge to mid twenties as the sun goes down. Spring peepers jingle through the freezing dusk. A snipe wings his tremolo love songs throughout the whole of the night.  Drumming grouse claim and strut their favorite ancient logs. The rivers run at 4 degrees C. And the northeast wind will not quit. The urgency of springtime living fills these cold valleys.  Too cold for and old curmudgeon and his steelheaded memories. Check fish lust to comfort level ratio - comfort it is. Check fish lust to chore list ratio - chores it is.  Back to the west, where it is beginning to green up........where the sunfish have begun.

The wolves can have it. It is truly theirs.  I'll be back..............

Hybrid
right down the middle
cold water hinders not
it begins

Chowder

I wouldn't call it a killing spree exactly, just some damn cooperative crappies that I couldn't seem to leave alone. Not that they are the tastiest fish around. Not that they are good fighters. Not that they are the most beautiful to look at. They were just so eager to come through the hole, night after night. And big. Big to me is 12 inches or larger. They were that and more.

Maybe it was about the bobber. That little orb of connectivity between the earthly realm and the limnetic underworld. Seeing its descent into that icy tunnel of fading light. Staring intently, waiting for the quick pop, the slow roll onto its side, and then that slow journey down the hole, knowing that there is a fish at the bait, anticipating the weight at the hook set,the distinct crappie struggle, sliding another slab onto the ice. Irresistible delights all. Perhaps it also had something to do with the lack of a real winter. Virtually no snow, so that the ease of accessing  the panfish grounds coaxed me out there several evenings per week.

So, instead of killing a fish or two like I normally would do in the summer, I started to uncharacteristically kill numbers of fish- first two, then seven, then five, then seven again, then two more. After I had eaten and frozen ahead a bunch of them, I went back to the well again and couldn't leave 'em alone.  Maybe it was the flask full of Bushmills, but maybe it is because ice fishing is about making meat. After all you can't do any casting ! Somebody stop him,will ya !? 

So, what's a guy to do ?  Stop fishing for a while I guess and make some chowder. I'd never made one before, but have partaken of the pleasures of several fish soups over the years. I remember stopping by a friend's place a very long time ago one April morning,  to an aroma filled kitchen and big stock pot on the stove.  Daniel was brewing fish stock with  the carcass of a freshly filleted steelhead.  In those days, you could still kill three fish a day, legally on the Shore - and we always tried to be as legal as possible.  So, I helped to peel a few carrots and potatoes, shoot the breeze, and waited around for what turned out to be a fantastic experience in great eats - one that I will not forget.

But I've gone in a different direction here:

3 Tsp olive oil
1 medium onion
3 stalks celery
3 carrots
3 medium potatoes
1 can chicken broth + 2 cans water
1 can evaporated milk

2 bay leaves
5 sprigs fresh tarragon (one good pinch dried)
3 good pinches thyme
salt & black pepper to taste

1.5 - 2 pounds white fleshed fish (crappie, perch, bluegill, eelpout, walleye - hell, bass if you're desperate). Cut he fish into 2 inch chunks

In a heavy sauce pan or stock pot heat the oil to a shimmer and add the chopped onions, carrots, and celery and sweat for about five minutes. Season well with salt and black pepper. Add the fresh chopped tarragon, bay leaves, and thyme. Stir a bit until the tarragon wilts and begins to get pungent. Add the chicken broth and water and bring to a boil. Reduce heat and simmer for about ten minutes. Add the chopped potatoes, bring back to a boil, reduce heat and simmer for another fifteen minutes or until the potatoes are tender. Add the evaporated mik and bring back to a simmer.  Add in the fish and cook until just firm - this depends entirely on the thickness of the fish chunks.  Bluegills can be done in two minutes, while walleye and eelpout could take ten.  Just don't over cook the fish ! 

 Oh baby !!

An old husk

After foraging, feeding, and stashing seeds all day, the chickadees will find refuge tonight in an old husk of a quaking aspen not far from the house. There is nearly nothing left of it and it will likely be lying on the forest floor by next spring. For now though, it provides overnight lodging for a dozen or so little black caps that will descend into the state of torpor that ensures their survival through the bitterly cold night.  Winter temperatures have finally arrived around here, and while I am not acclimated to the minus 40 windchill temps, the little birds will be just fine.

Twenty years ago, when I first had a picture window to gaze from, the husk was very much alive and robust, one of several dozen quakers that dominated the hillside overlooking the lake. Stout mature fory-five footers. Beneath them scrub oaks, chokecherries, bigtoothed aspen, raspberries, bitter sweet and hundreds of their own annual sprouts were relentlessly reclaiming an old horse pasture back into something boreal.  Now at least half of the adult aspen have died off and come crashing down.

In late April of those decades past, the aspen became a dawn stage upon which gaudy male wood ducks would fret and strut to gain favor of a hen.  Sometimes half a dozen drakes cavorted in its branches while a single female would scrutinize from a nearby perch.  In winter a grouse would on occasion make a meal of topmost buds. In spring red squirrels would pilfer early catkins. Warblers and dragonflies hunted its branches in high summer. And in early autumn the wind-music of those quivering leaves would provide cover to the urbanizing neighborhood around us. Golden coins would waft to earth, as the sunlight waned toward winter.

After the popple died, it became another food source. First for fungi and bacteria, and then for beetles and their larvae, and then for woodpeckers, and then even big beautiful noisy pileated woodpeckers! And now it is a home for chickadees, perhaps a deer mouse or a flying squirrel. Not bad for a single tree.

There may be more - if the spring is wet, oyster mushrooms?

 

Boxing Day

Today I went to town and exchanged the old blades on the Mora for a new, fresh, sharp set
Zip, zop - ten inches of clear ice bored through
Wax worm on a micro jig at 20 feet
Not fly fishing, but it'll do.
Bull bluegills offer up

Thump then
The gods are smiling on Boxing Day

 

Starting out or doing what one does, only differently ?

Why the blog ? I have no good answer to that - perhaps an antidote to rage and disappointment.  I have no clue  how to do this, so it could be interesting.    It begins.....


I went into the hazel wood
because a fire was in my head
and cut and peeled a hazel wand
and hooked a berry to a thread

and when white moths were on the wing
and moth-like stars were flick'ring out
I dropped the berry in a stream
and caught a little silver trout

I found this little bit of anonymous poetry many years ago when reading a book by Mary Orvis.  It serves me well when things go nuts.  Currently I recite it daily.