My neighbour Vern Bunton doesn t fish very much any more but when he was a kid, he roamed the length and breadth of Petunia Valley with a dog and a fishing pole and a Daily Mail tin full of earthworms.
As he grew older, Vern found the wait for Opening Day was worse than counting down to Christmas day and the last day of the school year at the same time. He just couldn t wait. And so he didn t. Wilf Smalley had pretty much the same problem and by the age of 14 the two of them had become terrible poachers. Every night, when other children were in bed dreaming about taffy pulls and Easter eggs, Wilf and Vern would sneak out across the muddy fields under cover of darkness to meet up on a remote bend of the Pine River. There they would fish and fish and fish until they brought home a lunker for the freezer.
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This went on every April until their final year of high school. They were well-known to the authorities, but they were so fleet of foot and they knew the river so well that no game warden ever caught them. One morning, Vern s father found an 18-inch rainbow in the fridge and threatened Vern with the belt if he didn t stop. He knew that the warden had the right to enter the farmhouse without a warrant and he was scared silly. But he was not a child beater, so he just sat down and ate the fish. And Vern disappeared again that night.
Shortly after that, a 50-year old warden collapsed while hoofing through the brush after the pair and had to be freighted out on a stretcher by the firefighters. He recovered but he made a statement to the local paper from his hospital bed that more resources were being brought in to police the alarming rise in illegal fishing on the Pine River.
Vern and Wilf kept fishing. One night towards the end of April they were sneaking through a pool about 200 yards from the McNabb Bridge just before midnight when they saw a pair of headlights pull up on the bridge. Doors slammed and two flashlights flickered down on the water below. Vern and Wilf froze.
They re just looking at fish under the bridge, whispered Vern.
There s two of them. Maybe it s the police, said Wilf.
Suddenly two more cars pulled up. More doors slammed and more flashlights danced on the bridge. Then three more cars.
Something s up, said Wilf. What are they all doing?
They backed slowly out of the pool to seek the cover of an overhanging willow, carefully watching the activity
on the bridge. Suddenly there was a shout and the
flashlights started moving in two lines down the steep
bank at each end of the bridge to the river bank. They
were moving fast.
Jeez! breathed Vern. It s a posse! We gotta get
outa here! They sprang out of the water like two
white-tailed deer, scampered up the bank and set off
across the field, trying to keep to the icy patches to hide
their tracks. They slipped and fell, struggled through
clumps of dead thistles, dashed through a patch of
prickly pear and vaulted over a stone fencerow. Then
they lay flat, breathing heavily and peering back across
the field to the river to see if any of their pursuers had
picked up the trail.
Lights were moving upstream and downstream from
the bridge on both sides of the river but none had ventured
out into the field.
There s a lot of them, whispered Wilf. There
must be more than 30! Who are those guys?
I don t know, hissed Vern. But if one of those
lights comes into the field, we head east down this fencerow
and go up through the gravel pit to the rail line.
That ll take us to the back of the farm.
They watched the lights intently for a few more
minutes without speaking. Then Vern said, What
day is it?
It s Friday, the last week in April, I think it s
the 26th.
Vern sighed and put his head in his hands. It s
Opening Day. We re fishing legally. They stood up
slowly, turned and walked back to the farm in silence.
The funny thing is, remembers Vern, we didn t
go fishing anymore after that. It just wasn t any fun if no
one was chasing us.
