An enlightening winter trip pays off in a bounty of fish

ON SEAGULL LAKE, Minn. -- It's difficult to say why Jeff Larson drilled that first fishing hole where he did. He had never fished this particular spot on Seagull Lake before.
"I just had a feeling," he would say later.
The two of us were camped in early March on this island-studded lake near the tip of the Gunflint Trail northwest of Grand Marais, hoping to catch a lot of silence and a few lake trout.
Larson, who lives in Cook, had fished lake trout on Seagull when he lived in Grand Marais in the early 1980s, though he hadn't fished this particular spot. It was a sun-drenched afternoon when he tied one of his homemade airplane jigs on his line, tipped it with a whole cisco and watched it spiral down the hole.
The jig was a homely thing, with an orange body, two roundish copper wings and a tuft of deer hair sprouting from its tail end. It must have weighed half an ounce.
"Got one," Larson said before I could even get my line down a nearby hole.
I watched his rod tip twitch, and I could imagine the laker 20 feet down, mouthing the cisco, tearing at its firm flesh. When the fish finally made a definitive run, Larson knew what to do. He raised his rod tip toward the sky. The 4-foot rod bent double.
"Oh, this is a nice one," Larson said.
I sprinted over from my hole and pulled up my sleeves. Larson's line danced around the hole as the fish made a couple of strong runs. When Larson worked the head of the fish into the hole, I squeezed the fish and lifted. A 4-pound laker got its first look at the canoe country. As Larson admired the fish, he must have been thinking about earlier times here.
"My old haunt," Larson said. "It's nice to be back."
A dream come true
What unfolded in the next 50 minutes is the kind of thing anglers dream about. The sun rode low in the western sky, sending long spruce shadows over the snow. And the fish never stopped biting.
Giddy like kids yanking chubs from a creek, Larson and I baited and re-baited. We hooked fish and lost fish. Once, we both had fish on simultaneously until I lost mine. But I dropped down a new offering, and he was back. He soon joined us topside on the ice, a cold and firm 3-pounder. I was using a carbon copy of the nameless airplane jig Larson was using. He had given it to me a few years ago.
Then it was Larson's turn, and within minutes he had another 4-pounder on the ice. Same jig. Another chunk of cisco.
There was rarely a moment when one of us wasn't hooking, losing, playing or photographing a fish. The last one, a thick and powerful 6-pounder, put us at our four-fish limit. The fish made two or three reel-singing runs before giving up.
We would speak later of the feeling you get in your belly when you feel the power of a fish like that.
"It's primal," Larson said.
When the cream-dappled flanks of that 6-pounder caught the March afternoon light, we called it a day. We strung our rods, laid our fish in a sled and headed back to camp.
But not before Larson wondered aloud what every angler has thought after stumbling on a fishing bonanza.
I imagined them down there, milling about on the drop-off, sleek torpedoes propelling themselves with those deeply forked tails. I could still see them later that night, zipping myself into a Quallofil cocoon as the temperature headed below zero.
Came for more
But that wasn't all we had come for. Most of us wouldn't haul 80 pounds of gear four miles by skis and sled just to catch two lake trout.
Always, we hope for good fishing, but what Larson and I sought was the simple life on the trail. Larson had toted along his canvas wall tent and a wood stove. We weren't going to suffer.
We made a snug camp on an island and didn't move for three days.
Somewhere along the way, Larson recalled the Japanese Buddhist saying what seemed to describe what we were up to: "Before Enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After Enlightenment, chop wood, carry water."
We make no claims about where we are on the enlightenment scale, but we made plenty of wood and carried water from a hole in the lake.
It was a good life.
We were not alone in this lobe of the million-acre Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. But it was quiet. We saw just seven other people -- other campers or skiers headed for distant bays. Summer in the Boundary Waters is a state park compared to winter travel.
What you have here in winter is the vast plane of snow-covered ice, a thin strip of dense forest on the horizon and an extravagance of sky.
By the snow, you know who has passed this way. Moose tracks meander down the lake. A fox has checked out the shore of an island. Wolves have trotted single-file along a portage trail, their yellow sprinklings still fresh in the snow. An otter -- hop-hop-hop-swoosh -- has cruised the narrows near camp.
And above all, you have quiet.
One evening I walked down to the lake to have a look. When I stopped, I thought I heard a low thumping sound. I did. It was my heart.
Lying in the tent in the morning, a raven passed over, sawing the sky with his wings. The lake rumbled and moaned, making ice. The stove pinged and popped, expanding with the morning's fire.
As always, we happened on to surprising little discoveries that brightened our days. Along the shore of an island, we found cedar sprigs encased in a globe of ice, the product of big waves at freeze-up last fall. Stepping out of the tent at night, we spied the crescent moon turning the snow silver. Following a portage, we came upon a ruffed grouse roosting in the snow on a south-facing slope. He walked a few steps and settled in again.
In the intervals between these pleasant discoveries, we chopped wood and carried water.
Sam Cook writes for Knight Ridder Newspapers.