This story, “Pike in Chickenbone Lake? I’ll Say!” appeared in the April 1950 issue of Outdoor Life. Chickenbone Lake is located in Michigan’s Isle Royale National Park. Today, it has two primitive campgrounds on its shores.
Men pay a price to see the unspoiled and untrod places of earth. I was paying it that July day by clambering over fallen logs, toiling through waist-high thimbleberry tangles, slipping on hidden rocks, and worming around the cluttered edges of beaver ponds. And I was toting, bot tom-side-up on my shoulders, an inflated ten-foot rubber life raft that made me look like an oversized, yellow-backed, two-legged beatle crawling up and down the ridges.
In front of me Elis Holmes trudged along, picking out the best going, searching for moose paths that led around the worst of the down stuff, breaking trail through the thimbleberries. He carried our fishing gear. Maurice Brandt brought up the rear, weighed down with cameras and film. It was hard, hot going. It had rained in the morning and the air now was sticky and humid. I was wet up to the belt from the undergrowth, and sweat ran down my face and neck in trickling streams. Mosquitoes, blackflies, and a few deerflies kept me obnoxious company under the canopy of the life raft. We had left the boat inflated to save the tedious job of blowing it up when we reached our destination.
But none of the discomforts or hard work of that hike really mattered. Up ahead another mile lay Chickenbone Lake, a virgin sheet of water locked in primitive wilderness, reached by no trail, seen by human eyes hardly once a year, knowing the dip of a paddle blade perhaps at ten-summer intervals. Rumor had it that Chickenbone Lake crawled with northern pike and big walleyes. Who would mind a portage of a couple of miles through rough country with that possibility ahead?
It had taken me almost twenty years to achieve this fishing trip. Back in 1931 I made an overnight hike with a companion into the Chickenbone country. We had gone ashore from a small boat in late afternoon at the head of McCargoes Cove, on the north shore of Isle Royale, a big wilderness island in upper Lake Superior. We meant to find out for ourselves whether the Chickenbone pike and walleyes we had heard so much about were really there.
Let me explain that Isle Royale was at that time — and still is — one of the biggest and most beautiful tracts of roadless wilderness left in the midwestern United States. Formed by the top of a mountain range that juts out of Lake Superior fifty miles north of the Michigan mainland and less than twenty miles from the Canadian shore, the is land is fifty miles long and about five wide. It has more than thirty inland lakes hidden among its rugged ridges and is still unmarred by roads of any kind. It is due to remain permanently in that wild and unspoiled state, too, for it has been a national park since 1940, and the U.S. Park Service has no intention of ever changing its primitive character.
The air now was sticky and humid. I was wet up to the belt from the undergrowth, and sweat ran down my face and neck in trickling streams. Mosquitoes, blackflies, and a few deerflies kept me obnoxious company under the canopy of the life raft.
On that 1931 trip, we followed moose trails in to Chickenbone Lake, carrying a small, early type of rubber doughnut deflated in a packsack. We camped on the shore of the lake and were kept awake half the night by the discordant laughter of loons and the yapping of coyotes on the ridges. Next morning we blew up our doughnut, put our bait rods together, and made ready to test the northern pike and walleye fishing. But alas for the plans of fishermen!
When we were about to launch the doughnut, we discovered that we had overlooked one little item. Somehow we’d left behind on the boat a box containing all the plugs and spoons we had chosen for the trip. We had not a single fishhook between us, and our boat had sailed out of McCargoes Cove the evening before and was now beyond reach!
We spent the day hiking, portaging, and floating the rubber raft. And all day we watched with futile and bitter longing the dark, fertile-looking water, the drowned snags, the rush-grown shorelines that fairly screamed “pike!” at us. Chickenbone and its neighboring lake, Livermore, were as promising as any waters we’d ever laid eyes on, and we were powerless to fish them!
That experience had rankled in my soul ever since. At last, Elis and Maurice and I were on the way to do just that.
Beaver colonies had made a shambles of the upper reaches of the Chickenbone River. We worked our way around three or four ponds before we finally saw, through the slim, white birch trunks, the blue water of the lake opening out ahead.
Chickenbone is a lonely spot, with the look of wild and far-off places about it. High, rocky ridges hem it in, and along the shore towering pines look down like sentinels upon its wind-ruffled waters. It’s the kind of lake that belongs where it is, in the heart of a roadless island. We found the trunk of a fallen pine jutting out into the water and used it as a makeshift pier as we loaded our gear into the doughnut.
When we shoved away from the snag, a pair of loons halfway down the lake burst into wild, mirthless laughter, as if deriding human fools who would come so far for a little fishing. Then we heard a shrill, harsh scream overhead, and down from one of the tall pines plunged a big white headed eagle, to circle over our raft and cry his resentment at our intrusion.
I’ll remember that scene for a long time. I was at the oars of the doughnut, and I let it drift with the light wind while Maurice and Elis chose their lures. We, of course, would not be the first to learn what sort of fish lurked in that dark water; the lake had been fished before. But never frequently and not in recent times. So far as I could learn nobody had laid a line over it in perhaps a dozen years. Few men ever get to fish such water. I sat there in the drifting doughnut and mentally photo graphed the pines and birches, the surrounding ridges, and the long point dividing the two wishbone-shaped arms that give the lake its name.
Then Maurice snapped a gold-and-silver wobbling spoon onto his leader and we were ready to fish. I worked the doughnut within casting range of a sunken cedar log that lifted skeleton branches above the water.
So far as I could learn nobody had laid a line over it in perhaps a dozen years. Few men ever get to fish such water.
Maurice laid his spoon close in. A patch of emergent grass grew a couple of yards out from the cedar snag. He dragged his lure abreast of it and there was a sudden swirling commotion. We saw the pike lance out from the grass and strike with a savage fury that carried fish and spoon to the top together. The fish latched on at the surface, in plain sight. Then it bent like an oxbow and plunged in a headlong rush.
That pike was not big — hardly more than three pounds — but it was all steel and brawn and fighting heart, and it never let up for a second. It bucked and hammered and rolled and slashed, boring time after time for the bottom or the shelter of the snags farther inshore. Maurice is stubborn when he has a good fish hooked – likes to slug things out at close quarters. He yields line reluctantly or not at all, and he puts his gear to a severe test. This pike ruffled his temper with its lunging rushes, and so Maurice really lowered the boom. He had horsed it up to within two oar lengths of the raft and was hanging grimly onto the reel handle, when I heard a startled grunt from Elis and then a quiet announcement: “I got one too.”
At that same instant I realized I had forgotten to keep the oars going, and the wind was carrying the doughnut swiftly in toward the snags alongshore. We had quite a lively time for a few seconds. A rubber raft rows with the perversity of a bull calf led by the tail, but I worked us out away from the shoals as fast as I could. Elis gave his fish line and let it play around, so as to keep the decks clear for Maurice. Then all of a sudden Maurice didn’t need working space any longer.
His pike made a swift, powerhouse dive under the raft itself and wrapped the rod around the side of the doughnut so hard that the inflated rubber cylinder thrummed like a drum. Then the arched rod sprang straight, and pike, spoon, and leader were gone together.
Maurice managed a rueful grin. “Well, I had fun with him anyway,” he declared.
Three or four minutes later Elis brought his fish alongside. But at close range it showed clearly it wasn’t ready to be boated, so he yielded line and let it make a few more runs to work off the rest of its energy. When he finally led it back to the raft it came along docilely, thirty inches of lean and ugly looking pike, showing its long white belly in abject surrender.
They Wouldn’t Be Horsed
It cost Maurice three more good fish to convince himself that the pike of Chickenbone wouldn’t be horsed. The first of the three got what it wanted ten seconds after it struck, when Maurice insisted on snubbing it up short with a tight line. The pike went deep in the dark water and tore the hooks out of its long, lean jaws in a slashing display of guts and power.
The second one came to the top only a couple of yards from the raft and threw the spoon with a rolling, threshing twist of its whole body. The third followed the pattern set by the first; it smacked the rod down hard against the raft and went away with the spoon without even pausing.
Maurice revised his tactics after that. The next pike he hooked he treated with the respect due a fish with murder in its heart and rockets in its tail. He played it, craftily and warily, and made out all right — but I lost it for him. He had led it up to the raft after a scrap that was brass-knuckle and knee-in-the groin stuff all the way, and wheedled it in where I could reach for it. The pike seemed subdued and ready to come aboard. I slid my hand down the line and lifted, but even before the fish left the water I knew our judgment had been bad. It doubled up like a steel spring and when it uncoiled my teeth rattled. That one lunge was all it took. The pike went free of the hooks as if they were bent pins, and celebrated by kicking a gallon of Chickenbone Lake into my face with its tail.
“Look,” Maurice remonstrated, “I don’t need help to lose ’em. I can do that by myself. You two guys coach and kibitz and tell me to play ’em more, and when I finally get a good one along side you go and turn him loose!”
“You land your own from now on,” I retorted, wiping my mouth and eyes dry.
Elis had three in the boat by that time. He was handling them carefully, but at that he had lost as many as he had landed.
Pike Lurked Under Every Snag
It is hard to find words to describe the fishing we had in the next couple of hours. Pike were lurking under every snag, in every patch of grass, beneath each clump of lily pads, along the mar gin of every rush bed. Not singly, not a lone fish here and there, but in packs. Lean, dark shapes-hungry, savagely eager to pounce upon any food that moved within killing range. They came two and three together out of the tiny coves and weed pockets, hunting down our spoons, striking with merciless fury. They were untutored wilderness fish, reckless and unwary, knowing nothing of hooks or lines, understanding only how to strike and fight, how to lunge at the lure and rake it with their long teeth, how to buck and battle for their lives once they felt steel barbs in their jaws.
There were rarely more than three or four casts between strikes and there were places along the shore, where snags lay thick or grass beds provided cover, that sent a fish out to each cast as surely as the spoons touched the water.
Often we fought two pike simultaneously, one from either end of the raft. More than once they contrived to tangle the lines together and one or both went free in the ensuing mix-up. Time and again we watched big fish follow the lure out from shoal water as we retrieved, not quite making up their minds to take it, lying sinister and vengeful-looking a rod’s length from the boat after the spoon had been lifted from the water. And then we’d drop the bait back in front of the fish, dangling it on a foot or so of line, and twitch it under their noses until we tantalized them into smashing at it. It seemed as if the sight of a morsel of food unable to escape was more than they could endure!
Then, halfway down the short arm of the lake, Maurice hooked a fish that behaved differently. It fought hard, but it was more canny and less reckless than the northerns. It rolled and twisted on the line, without the headlong rushes we had come to expect, like a small-mouth bass making a stand deep down. Maurice finally brought it close and we saw a heavy-bodied, golden-brown fish, shorter and more blocky than a northern pike, turning over and over in the water. We knew then there were walleyes in the lake too.
There were rarely more than three or four casts between strikes and there were places along the shore, where snags lay thick or grass beds provided cover, that sent a fish out to each cast as surely as the spoons touched the water.
They were feeding close to the top in that one area, probably over a submerged bar or deep weed bed that we could not see. We let the raft drift, for getting about the northerns for a few minutes, and went after the walleyes.
They showed only moderate interest in spoons, so we switched baits. I had an oddity in my tackle box, a slender pike minnow covered with genuine frog skin, that I had carried for years and never used. On a hunch I snapped it on the leader. It lured a five-pound walleye on the second cast, one of the few times in my life I have coaxed one of that tribe into striking at a plug. We took six of them in half an hour, all good fish, before we drifted beyond their feeding ground and went back to northerns for livelier action.
In two hours we boated twenty northerns and walleyes. We kept a few of the big ones, plus the smaller ones that were hooked deeply enough to fill the icebox aboard the Sally Ann, anchored down in McCargoes Cove. The rest we returned to the water. We kept no account of those we lost but in that two hours the three of us must have hooked and fought no less than forty fish.
When the sun was only an hour above the western ridges we packed the doughnut through the thimbleberry thickets and over a low rise Livermore; where we fished a short section of shore. The snags were thicker, and the pike bigger and hungrier if any fish can be hungrier than those in Chickenbone. For an hour we returned northerns to the water as fast as we caught ’em, and that was about as fast as we could lay our spoons in the water.
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It’s a long trip back to McCargoes Cove from Lake Livermore after sun down, with fishing gear and cameras and a doughnut to tote. It was almost dark when we came out of the timber and saw our cruiser lying at an old pier. The last mile had been a hard one, as we stumbled over logs, clawed through brush tangles, and felt for the trail underfoot, while the raft on my back cut off the little light that lingered in the sky.
But it had been worth it. A man has to pay a price to see the spoiled places. And when he finds at the end of the trail what we had found that afternoon no portage is too long, no load too heavy. Such fishing as that is worth whatever it may cost!
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