You will find short stories on this site. Most are autobiographical. Some are fiction.

FISHING TRIP

Prince Helfrich was the patriarch of a family of McKenzie River guides. He and his family made their living taking clients on whitewater fishing trips. Prince was a man who was dedicated to the preservation of the Cascade Mountains, rivers, fish, and lore. For several summers Helfrich took a group of 9 to 11-year-old boys into the Oregon Cascade mountains for a week of living in the wilderness. On the summer that this event took place, Prince and the boys had set up their camp next to Ilene Lake at the foot of Husband Mountain.

One evening, while sitting around the campfire Helfrich suggested a challenging task for the the following day. The boys hesitantly agreed to try to accomplish it.

The project started after breakfast the following morning. Each of the ten boys took a bucket, or a pot from the cook’s tent and headed down the creek which drained Ilene Lake. In July this creek ceases to flow. By August, when the boys were there, all that was left of the creek was small pools. Trout fingerlings were trapped in some of these pools. These fish were doomed to perish as the last of the water evaporated or was absorbed into the soil.

The boys spread out along the creek looking for these small pools. When a boy would find one, he would lay motionless on the bank watching to see if there were any fish in the pool. If there were, he would take off his shoes and socks and wade into the ankle-deep water to chase the fish to the shallow end where he would grab them. He would then put the fish in his container with water. Some of the boys were successful and carried their buckets containing a few fingerling trout, back to camp. It would have been a worthy effort were the boys to release their trout into Ilene Lake, but that was not the plan. These small fish had a far more important destiny.

Heldfrich, and his wrangler, Veltie Prewit, had prepared sandwiches to take on the hike up Husband Mountain to their destination, a pristine high mountain lake on the shoulder of that inactive volcano. A crystal clear lake, among Douglas firs which had no fish. The creek which flows from the lake has waterfalls that prevent fish from swimming up to it.

Carrying buckets of water with tiny fish is difficult work, especially for children. There was no trail and if a boy were to stumble and have his bucket tip over the fish would likely die before they could be found among the brush and rocks to be put into another bucket. The hike up the mountain was risky, but by taking turns with the buckets, Heldfrich and ten boys managed to get all of the fish up the rocky slope and down to Husband Lake. There each bucket was then ceremoniously emptied into the lake where the little fish cautiously swam away into their new home. The boys celebrated their success in this heroic venture with lunch on the bank of Husband lake, before carrying their empty buckets back down to camp. Many years later a college friend told me that he had hiked into Husband Lake. He said that “it was teeming with enormous trout”.