Sioux Falls Northern Plains Sentinel
Editor, Sundays Outdoors SectionRe: Fantastic Fish Tales Contest
Dear Sirs,
I found the following story while I was sorting through some of my brother Louis’s personal effects. My wife read the article about your contest and we both felt this tale would certainly qualify. I know it probably exceeds your suggested word total but I could not find it in myself to edit it. (I did take the liberty of copying it to type from his original script and also to correct some spelling errors.)
My younger brother saw fit to take his own life shortly after last Christmas. He was nearly 15 years my junior and I think we both believed we had little in common – apart from family that is. I sadly realize that I did not know him all that well. I had found him a bit remote, reflective, almost somber. It comes as an unfortunate surprise for me to now find, through his manuscripts and journals, that he was possessed of a kind, expansive nature and a keen wit.
That is not to say that he was given to flights of fancy, however. Frankly I do not know what to make of this story. Being a part of the family I do share some of the memories mentioned herein, for instance the old man and his fireside yarns at the resort. However, as you will see, I have no way of verifying the actual events that happened to my younger brothers on their last day of fishing together in 1966.
But, just the same, in all honesty, I think I will elect to stay home on opening weekends that coincide with Mother’s Day.
Best regards,
Dr. Henrik Voldersdyke M.D.
Edgerton, MN. 2-21-‘01
` SHELTER ISLAND BABY
“You know Louie, lets not tell anyone about this.” Danny whispered.
I met his eye and nodded. It was the sort of statement a big brother makes that is actually a command but feels more like a mutual consent.
We looked at the water and then looked at each other and then looked back at the water again.I wondered what his reasons were for keeping this silent. At first I thought it was the typical fisherman’s coy code of secrecy, an already forming plan for him to return to these waters for another secret conquest. I also suspected that perhaps he wanted to keep this incredible event quiet because nobody would believe it anyway and the telling of it would make us look like fools.
I never got a chance to ask him his reason. Within 3 months his flame would flicker out on a rice paddy in some weirdly alien place called Viet Nam.
It was the last day of our annual vacation at Higgin’s Resort, (now Norway Point) on Pelican Lake, the big Pelican Lake, the one at Orr. Danny and I were fishing Dutchman style. At least Danny was fishing; I was just running the motor and enjoying time spent alone with my spit polished big brother.
I call it Dutchman style fishing because I have observed that most of the practitioners of this style of fishing were indeed “Hollanders”, specifically my entire extended family. I certainly would never lay claim to this type of fishing as an ethnic domain. I am sure many others employ it and I noticed the style would propagate through the resort as those “Crazy Dutchmen” would be the only ones tying up to the dock in the evening with full stringers. It was not uncommon to see furtive cane poles leaning up against many other cabins by the end of the week.
I suppose it wasn’t the most sporting type of fishing. Often a fish would be hauled in caught by the tail or the back of the head. Really it was more like harvesting fish, but when you had a limited budget, limited time, and seemingly unlimited mouths to feed, it was effective.
The accoutrements were simple: A long bamboo cane pole, 45 pound test braided line, a huge spoon or buck tail, a stout gaff, and a heavy stringer. And, in case you hooked a monster: a ball peen hammer and a gunnysack. A big muskie, or even a huge northern pike, was a formidable adversary inside a small boat. I recall my father handing me the burlap once as he was about to land a muskie on Leech, “Louie, you cover his head up with that sack now. He’ll think he’s hiding and it’ll quiet him down a good bit….then you hand me that ballpeen.”
Danny and I were trolling that day at the usual pace, one that nearly causes that big spoon to plane. Suddenly I sensed him tense up. He’d had a strike. Instead of reacting with a jerk, he reacted with the kind of discipline necessary to this type of fishing: allowing his pole to slide back towards the stern. Following his line of sight, I turned my head to the side and saw the huge swirl on the surface. Then came a burnished flash, down deep, like submerged lightening. Danny’s pole was nearly pointed straight back alongside me as we waited. The Scott Atwater screwed us forward inexorably.
I was about to turn for another pass when his line snapped taut and his bamboo pole was bent acutely. Now here is where the heroic part of this sort of fishing is manifested. Knowing full well there is probably a once in a lifetime fish down there; it is extremely difficult not to haul back on that cane. Stalwart as ever, my brother let it go.
That pole shot out over the surface like a cruise missile and we were off on our own version of the Nantucket sleigh ride. We followed that pole up and down the north shoreline. Sometimes the fish, having found a hitherto unknown deep spot, would dive leaving just a few inches of the butt above the surface, rotating there quietly, alongside our boat. Then it would tear off again and so would we in its wake, the pole looking like some type of liberated compass needle, quivering on a heading of its own. Twice that fish took the entire pole under. That is no small feat if you have ever tried to keep one totally submerged lengthwise. We would wait in quiet panic, holding our breaths, fearing we would lose it.
But it was a calm day, the kind of sultry, brassy, August doldrum “that drives pike wild.” Had there been seas that day we would’ve never heard the “ploop” the pole made as its end finally surfaced, this time directly astern. I peered, with more than a little apprehension, over the transom. Slowly, gracefully, the entire pole emerged and floated there mutely.
I nodded at my brother and pointed down. He deftly joined me at the stern and leaning over, he gently grasped the pole. Indicating to me with a tilt of his head, I clambered forward, amidships, and got things ready. I pulled out the sack, hooked the hammer through an oarlock and I hefted the mighty gaff. I stood there poised, one foot on the seat, like a mad freshwater Ahab, coiling, focusing on my thrust and silently breathing to myself, “Don’t let me screw this up.”
Danny maneuvered the line up alongside. I brought the gaff back a fraction. Then came the coppery flash again. Oh my God it’s big. I hope it is entirely spent. Danny edged it closer, slowly, easy now, get ready. I took a deep breath, this was it.
“No!” Danny shouted. I nearly did a full pirouette and he grabbed my shoulder, steadying me. He pointed, “Look!”
It wasn’t a fish. It was a man. Clearly it was not a fish. Danny’s line had been cut, probably sawed off by the pointed triangular teeth exposed in the thing’s slash of a mouth as it sneered or smiled or grimaced up at us. He held the line in one tiny claw-like hand at his side. It appeared as if some sort of membrane had fused his arms to the trunk of his body. Likewise, his legs were conjoined. His feet were unnaturally long and flat and flexible, as if they had never borne the weight of gravity but instead had been melded by the forces of hydrodynamics.
He undulated in the water there, panting a bit, the edge of that wide mouth just above the surface. His head, and so his face, was like the blade of an axe. Through adaptation and necessity his eyes had migrated more to the sides of his head and his nose was pointed so it could just crease the surface for his respiration. Save for wisps on his elongated skull and random remnants on his chest and genitals, he was nearly totally hairless.
With what seemed like disgust he let go of the line. He floated there awhile, slowly arcing back and forth. Danny and I were speechless.
His eye arrested me and I could not break its spell. Large and flat, nearly entirely iris with very little white at all, the pupil was widely dilated and it was fixed on me.
I have heard it said that a human cannot look an animal directly in the eye because a beast has no soul. I have always thought that perhaps the reason some cannot look an animal in the eye is because they have no soul themselves. I routinely look my dog in the eye and in it I can see mirth, impatience, anger, determination, fear, a wide range of identifiable emotions. There is a spirit there, if not a soul.
But there is something else there. It is a rift I see. It is a mutual awareness that between our total understandings there lies a cleft that cannot be breached. It is the boundary between man awareness and animal awareness.
No such divide existed here between that fishboy and I. His gaze bore down upon me heavily, carrying an intensity and a depth of understanding that felt like physical weight. It was a look of contempt and rage and despair, and maybe most of all, in the end, it was a look of longing.
Curling, he lifted his head totally out of the water. He regarded us, and then, startling us both, he uttered the most plaintive cry imaginable. Clearly human in origin, its timbre was such that gooseflesh blossomed on my skin and a gasp erupted from my throat. It was the sound of an infant, hungry or otherwise in need of its mother’s affection. But it was also a cry wrought by long unused and unpracticed vocal instruments, a keening rasp that still haunts.
He circled the boat once, paused, inspired a long whistling draught of air through his extended nose and then he dove like a dart for the depths, leaving a whirl, a swirling eddy on the placid surface, a perfect vortex in his wake.
A person would think that having borne witness to such events, a fellow might return to them and often ponder their significance. I suppose I did at first, but the traumas inflicted by the learning of my brother’s death have somehow intruded upon most of my memories prior to his departure for the war. And no memories are so deeply affected as those surrounding the times spent together with Daniel. Those times are cherished keepsakes. Although rare and beautiful, sometimes looking directly at them can smite the heart’s eye. The handling of such rarified elements can levy a toll that is often too extravagant to afford.
Yet sometimes a memory can come crashing to the surface unbidden, like a muskellunge from the deep arrowing towards an innocent duckling bobbing in the sun.
So why tonight, at this late hour, do I permit myself the sweet discomfort of recalling that event of 33 years ago? Why do I sit here, on the eve of my uncle Gerritt’s funeral, looking at this grainy photo in an old psychology textbook?
In my defense I can honestly say my brother’s tragic death prohibited me from making the connection I stumbled upon tonight, a connection that would seem so obvious to anyone else. It was my uncle Gerritt’s death, and me laying there awake tonight trying to learn what his life had to teach me, that caused me to bolt upright with a dawning comprehension. This revelation would lead me to shuffle down here to the basement, beneath a swinging bulb, to an old carton and this dusty volume.
Tonight, as I thought of my late uncle, my memory was drawn back again to Pelican Lake and Higgin’s Resort. It was our week at the lake, probably about 2-3 years before my adventure with brother Danny would occur.
I was making my way back to the cabin one night concerned about my 10:30PM curfew. I hated to leave my playmates behind at the campfire on the point, but showing contempt for the rules would surely merit consequences.
I was just stepping out of the woods near the fish cleaning house, where the feeble advance of the yellow bug light was a mockery to the unassailable dark of the northwood’s night. I paused, the men were cleaning fish and my uncle Gerritt was addressing Old Leo, the fishing guide, outboard repairer, beach groomer, lawn mower, toilet paper bringer, boat steadier, dock greeter, story teller, local historian and all around handy man at the resort. Tonight Leo was performing the fish-cleaning role of his long, but often enviable, job description.“You know Leo,” my uncle was saying in that nearly incessant whine of his, “I don’t mind if you like to spook the kids a little with that myth about the baby crying at Shelter Island…and some of that other stuff.”
He paused, and after a quick look at his brothers, he then damned the torpedoes and sailed on, “That kind of tall tale is all in good fun, I suppose. But I don’t think telling our children about the dead whore they found drifting out there in that boat years ago would be the sort of thing I’d want them to hear.”
Gerritt raised his chin and sniffed, “The wages of sin is death, that’s what I say.”
Nodding in self-affirmation he again peered over Leo’s shoulder at his big brothers, as if to seek some type of consensus. But they had suddenly became intensely absorbed with the cleaning of fish, as if they were extracting priceless pearls from those fillets. My father cleared his throat. Uncle Gerritt was the kid brother, the only one who had moved to the city, and he always made the kind of noise you didn’t want to hear.
“Thank you Cousin Gary.” I whispered to myself. Gerritt’s own son had just taught us the meaning of the word whore. Gary had held court that night at the fire and expounded upon his vast knowledge of the ways of “worldly women,” and where to find them in Sioux Falls.Leo did not respond for a moment. He just put down his knife and reached into his khaki shirt pocket. Extracting a pack of Lucky Strikes, he shook one out into his lips and returned the pack in the kind of practiced motion that revealed a lifetime’s devotion to the act.
It became very quiet. I could hear the bell jingle up at the lodge as someone passed though the door. The insistent whir of the Lure-A-Light, which Higgin’s Resort boasted, was magnified to my ears.
Leo drug a match along the table and the flare of it revealed his face, which had been in the shadow of his Pure Oil cap. He was looking at Uncle Gerritt with an expression that was, as far as I was concerned, foreign to his face.
I had known Leo for as long as I could remember and it was true that sometimes he would join us at the campfire, with a bottle of Hamm’s, and tell us tales. Some of them were real beauties too: the Goat Girl and her pyrotechnic ways, The Baby crying at Shelter Island, and of course the one about Leveque’s Hand still scooting around out there on the bottom of the lake. That one always got the kids to look uneasily over their shoulders, and sometimes I would swim all afternoon without putting my feet on the bottom, much.
But the familiar twinkle had left Leo’s eyes now and his mouth twisted down as if he had tasted something offal. He exhaled a billow of smoke that hung in the humid air like a hive in front of his face. He fanned at it and looked down at the cigarette with disdain, as if he was surprised to see it there between his fingers.
His eyes locked on my uncle’s and I was thinking, “Oh boy, he’s finally gonna get it now, come on Leo let him have it, give it to him for not letting us swim for 2 precious hours after we eat.”
“Well, mister,” Leo began as Uncle Gerritt backed up against the screen a little, “My good book tells me that it is dangerous to judge what is in the heart of another. And when it comes to that final payday, the wages we each draw will be tallied ONLY by that master who cuts the check.”Leo tilted his head to the side, his gaze not wavering, “Have you ever seen a baby get born?”
My uncle quickly shook his head, blinking.
Leo continued, “Well my last one, Loretta, was the only one born in the hospital. The rest were born at home and I’ll tell you,” he paused, nodding slightly as if confirming some recollection, “It makes one heck of a mess. There is blood and human fluids that gush all over the place.”
Gerritt swallowed still looking into Leo’s face.
“I found that girl, you’re so-called “whore,” out on the lake that day and she wasn’t drifting either.” Leo continued, pointing now in the direction of the lake, “She was tied up to my dock out there on Shelter Island.”
“I have a duck hunting shack there and I go out there sometimes,” he said, “And one morning I see this boat at my dock. So as I get closer I see there is blood all over everything and then, when I clamber out onto the dock, I see her body there in the bottom of the boat.”
Leo’s words were becoming more forceful now, “She had went out there, you see, to have that child in my little shack. But something went wrong, really wrong, there was too much blood. And you know what?”
Uncle Gerritt shook his head again, quickly.
“Your harlot even brought a pail and rags with her and she tried to clean up the shack. The best she could anyways. She even put the afterbirth in the pail.”Leo looked down now, “But something went wrong, like I said, and she knew it. She tried to make it back to the boat; I followed the trial of blood. I think she stumbled. It looked to me like she tumbled into the boat and she died there reaching over the side like she was trying to get something out of the water. The bloodied baby blanket was half in the water too. I think she dropped her baby over the side when she fell, and she died reaching for it.”
Then Leo squared his shoulders and pointed a finger at my uncle. “I myself have heard a baby crying out there at Shelter Island. And it is the sort of sound a man would never want to hear again. Now your calling it a myth calls me a liar. I have lived 75 years and no man has called me that to my face yet, sir,” he poked at my uncle, “And I am not about to let someone like you be the first.”
My uncle shriveled back further, crossing his arms about his chest, grasping himself in some sort of pitiful embrace. He turned his head to the side and closed his eyes tightly.
“Here it comes, “ I thought to myself, but just then my Uncle Frank stepped forward and gently grasped Leo’s arm. He looked down at Leo and said quietly, “You know, my good book puts a lot of stock into forgiveness, Leo. It says a man should turn his other cheek.”
The Dutch, except for my Uncle Gerritt of course, are not overly demonstrable about their faith. They live a certain way to be sure, a lifestyle that could aggravate others, but they aren’t much for Bible thumping or grand piety. But one thing is certain: you can never trump them when it came to Good Bookisms.
So here I am tonight looking again at this photograph in my old psychology text. I have not seen it since my college days but it has always been with me it seems. Never far from my consciousness, I have thought of it often. There was something about it, there still is, that was familiar and disturbing. Even though the picture is of poor quality, the shadows too dark and the light too bright, the portrait still reveals much to me.
In it a boy squats on his haunches. A coarse blanket or robe covers what appear to be bony shoulders. His knuckles rest on the rocky ground and his head is hunched forward, jaw partly agape as if panting. His hair is wild and even though his brow is heavy, it cannot afford enough shadow to quench the galvanic charge generated by that piercing gaze.
Tonight I know that it was the look in those eyes that resonated within me years ago back there in my classroom in Brookings. It modulated an air of indifferent understanding upon a thick wave of what, to me, seemed an accusatory inquiry. The frequency once disturbed by locking eyes with the pikeboy, or pikeman, was again excited by the gaze of the boy in the photo. Although I failed to identify that source when I was making my pitiful college psychology report on “Nature vs. Nurture,” the connection is now bridged, the crystals vibrate in tune and the signal is finally received.
The text below the picture reads in part: “In 1911 a hunter in the Transylvanian Alps near the city of Sibiu in what is now modern day Romania was said to have captured this boy. The hunter claimed the boy was running with a group of wolves. It was asserted the boy, “Lycan,” as he was called by the peasants there, had been adopted by the wolf pack shortly after birth. A country physician who examined the boy said he did not walk erect, but rather, preferred to “Scamper on all fours like an animal.” He claimed the boy fed himself as a dog would and uttered only canine-like vocalizations. Unfortunately the boy died in transport to the University in Bucharest where an objective evaluation had been proposed.
On every continent folk tales have been identified which support similar myths. Whether it is tigers in SE Asia, leopards in West Africa, or jaguars in South America that perform the nurturing, the appeal of these legends seems to be universal among primitive societies. Why do you think it might be important for aboriginal cultures to construct these”…… And so on.
So now I wonder, did that lonely girl who gave birth on Shelter Island accidentally drop her child into the lake when she returned to the boat? Or, as her death posture might suggest, did she hand her child over the side? Did she find one last desperate hope for her newborn there? Would not a newborn so recently suspended within the womb’s waters be at least familiar with a buoyant environment? Can anyone know the maternal instincts of such a beautiful and noble creature as the Northern Pike?
Louis Voldersdyke
Ivanhoe, MN
8-15-99
