The Name in the Lodge Record Book
Our Week
Ken met us at the dock in rubber boots and the same faded green cap he had worn for as long as I could remember.
He shook my hand, and then he shook Hailey’s, the same way, like she was a paying guest. Which she was.
“So you’re the one,” he said to her. “Your dad’s been talking about you up here since you were in diapers.”
Hailey went red to the ears. I had not known that I did that. I suppose I had, every June, at the fish-cleaning table with the other men.
Cabin seven was small. Two bunks, a propane stove, a table with an oilcloth cover, and a window that looked straight down the lake. Hailey claimed the top bunk before I had both bags through the door.
That first evening we just went out for an hour. I showed her how to start the twenty-horse, choke out, pull hard, choke back in.
She got it on the fourth pull and grinned at me like she had won a prize.
I ran the boat that first night. By Tuesday she was running it herself, sitting in the back with her hand on the tiller, life jacket zipped to her chin, steering us around the rock bars I pointed out.
We fished the way my dad taught me. A quarter-ounce jig and a lively minnow, dropped to the bottom and lifted just a few inches, over and over, along the edge where the rock meets the sand.
She lost her first three fish. She set the hook too hard on one and not at all on the other two.
On the fourth, she felt the tap, waited, and swept the rod back, and the rod stayed bent.
It was a fifteen-inch walleye, golden on the sides with that milky eye. She held it up with both hands and looked at it like it was made of glass.
“Can we keep it?” she asked. “For shore lunch?”
“That’s exactly the right size to keep,” I said. And she whooped so loud a loon dove a hundred yards away.
On Wednesday we ran out to the island my dad always used for shore lunch, a hump of pink granite with three big pines and a fire ring that has been there longer than I have.
I showed her how to clean a walleye on the paddle of the boat, the way my dad had shown me.
She watched my knife the way I used to watch his. She cleaned the second one herself, slow and careful, and did not lose much.