The Whitefish Nets We Brought Back

The buoy staffs were gone.

That was the first thing I saw on Monday morning, coming around the point with the sun already high over Madeline Island and the lake flat as a kitchen table.

Four gangs of whitefish nets, 6,000 feet of them, and not one orange flag standing where we had set them on Saturday. Just blue water and a couple of gulls.

Toivo was at the wheel. He throttled the tug back and stood there a minute without saying anything, which for Toivo Rask is the same as most men swearing.

“Could the wind have taken them?” Pete asked. He was 27 and still believed the lake did most things by accident.

“There was no wind,” Toivo said. “There has been no wind since Friday.”

He was right. It had been the kind of calm June weekend the tourists come up to Bayfield for, sailboats sitting still in the channel, kayaks out by the sea caves.

We ran the grid for an hour on the plotter, back and forth over the numbers Arne had written in his little green book years ago and I had copied into the machine.

The sounder showed the bottom at 90 feet, mud and sand, the same as always. It did not show our nets. A gill net lying flat on the bottom does not show on anything.

Around eleven Pete spotted one of our staffs. It was drifting a mile east of where it belonged, flag still on top, and about ten feet of buoy line hanging off the bottom of it.

Toivo hooked it with the pike pole and brought it in through the side door. He held the end of that line up to the light.

It was not frayed. It was not chafed. It had been cut clean through with a sharp knife, one stroke, the way a man cuts a line who has cut a thousand of them.

Toivo handed it to me without a word.

I knew whose knife it was before I even turned the line over in my hands. I think Toivo knew too. But neither of us said the name out loud until we were back at the dock.