This story, “Giants of God’s River,” appeared in the April 1960 issue of Outdoor Life.
I felt like a sardine in a can. My knees were drawn up almost to my chin, and I was hunched forward awkwardly. I’d been that way for hours. Frank Gilbert, beside me, was equally uncomfortable. We were cramped atop the luggage behind the front seats in the de Havilland Beaver. My legs ached, my back felt twisted out of shape, and I had a record pain in the neck.
That morning we’d left The Pas, a town on the extreme west side of Manitoba, and had flown cross-country nearly due east to Norway House, a bush village just north of Lake Winnipeg. Now we were on the last lap of our trip from Norway House across roadless wilderness to God’s River in the northeastern section of the province, about 160 miles from Hudson Bay. For a time I’d dozed, but I awoke when the cricks started in my legs, back, and neck.
Finally John Bell McPherson, the pilot, pointed out the window and nosed the plane down. I looked out and saw a broad, clear river full of rapids and boulders. It was God’s River — and suddenly I didn’t hurt any more.
God’s is one of the last streams in North America having giant native brook trout. If things are right, you should get many of two to 3½ pounds. Here a fisherman of modest experience can catch five-pound squaretails. With luck, he may take a six or 6½-pounder, and seven-pounders are possible.
My God’s River visit was the climax of a long Manitoba tour I made last June. With Wilf Organ, Frank Gilbert, and Earl Kennedy, I’d been fishing for pike and lake trout in the Cranberry Portage country north of The Pas (see “Pike Carnival,” OUTDOOR LIFE) March, 1960). Wilf is Manitoba’s promotion man, Frank is his assistant, and Earl is a photographer. They live in Winnipeg, and I’d come up from Chicago to fish with them. Unfortunately, business had called Wilf home when the rest of us left for God’s River.
McPherson, though only 22, is an experienced bush pilot. He can do things with a float plane that would make a jet pilot shudder. We skimmed the treetops, zoomed over the river, and spotted a couple of canoes with Cree guides and fishermen.
God’s River is so big and fast in places that it’s almost impossible to fish by wading. So fishing is done from outboard-powered, freight canoes, and from rocky islands.
Although God’s is remote, and accessible only by air, three modern camps operate in the area. Barney Lamm has one on the southwest side of God’s Lake; Ed Bush runs a camp on the east side of the lake, and Tom Ru minski has one at the north end, where God’s River tumbles out of the lake.
As we flew low, we saw where a great fire had roared through the bush and then died on the river bank. John spun the plane around, buzzed Ruminski’s camp, put down, and taxied up to the dock. Ruminski was waiting. He beckoned to some guides to get our gear, and soon we had our duffel stashed away at the lodge. We changed to fishing clothes, wolfed through dinner, grabbed our tackle, and ran for the river. Jonas Yellow back and Amos Ogemon, two Cree guides, were ready with canoes. Frank and I jumped in with Jonas; Earl and John went with Amos. Neither guide spoke English, but we got along O.K. by signs.
There wasn’t time enough for a downriver trip that first evening, so we simply outboarded to an island in front of camp. The island was a mass of granite partly covered with brush and stunted trees. We tied up the canoes and started fishing from the rocks.
Peering into quiet pockets, I spotted boulders big as barrels 15 or 20 feet down. The river was exceptionally high following a late thaw. Although the time was mid June, most of God’s Lake was still ice-locked.
“The brookies are very deep,” Ruminski had said at camp, “and they’re not concentrated as they are during low water. Now they’re spread out feeding off the bot tom rocks.”
“What are they eating?” I’d asked. “Bugs.”
To me, bugs meant nymphs, so I tied on a No. 8 Gray Nymph with the barb filed off. Only single, barbless hooks are legal on God’s River. I added a couple split shot sinkers to take it down, and rolled out a cast. I dislike using lead, but there was no other way to get my fly down in that current.
I fished several places that looked good, casting up stream and letting the nymph wash down naturally. I kept changing flies, and added even more lead to take them deeper. Finally I reeled in and crossed the island to where the river flattened into a broad pool.
Replacing the nymph with a big, multiwing streamer, I shot a cast. I fished that cast out, then made another, hooking a northern pike of about three pounds. In God’s River, northerns — even big ones — are something to get rid of fast. I horsed it in, but before I could release it, Jonas grabbed it.
While Jonas twisted the head off the pike and opened its belly, Amos cut a sapling. They tied one end of a rope to the sapling and the rope’s other end to the mangled fish. They added a rock for weight, and then started dunking the crude rig in the river. Through signs and mumbled Cree, I gathered they planned to attract trout by “chumming” with the beat-up northern.
I searched the water carefully when Jonas started working the northern, but I didn’t see any trout. Jonas swung the fish out and let it sink. He held it in the cur rent awhile, then picked it up for another swing. Finally Jonas grunted. I looked, and saw the glint of a trout. Another showed, and then another. The white piping on their fins flashed like ivory.
Using casting tackle, Frank made a short throw with a lead-head bucktail. I watched the jig settle and held my breath as Frank jerked it past the squaretails. One trout shot forward, and Frank was fast to a good fish.
The trout fought deep. It held in a pocket to one side of the current, and went round and round in a tight circle, rocking from side to side Frank pulled hard, raised the brookie, and it took off. Now the fish had to fight the current too, so Frank soon worked it in. Amos grabbed a net and scooped — a fine three-pounder.
Next Earl tried swimming a spoon through the spot. A trout that looked to be about two pounds hit it and zoomed away. The reel handle spun out of Earl’s fingers and cracked his knuckles. Earl pressed a thumb on the reel spool, slowed the fish, and gradually pumped him back. Earl was so excited he didn’t wait for the net; he skidded the flopping brookie onto a rock and pounced on it like a kitten after a mouse.
Tom Ruminski, who had seen all this from the lodge, came out in a canoe.
“Not bad,” he said, looking at the strung fish, “but not good. Tomorrow you’ll catch big ones.”
In the morning we set out in two canoes — two fisher men and two guides in each. This is the safe way to travel God’s River. Even though the Crees seem to know every hidden boulder and twist of current, a bow man is needed. He parries boulders with his paddle, and helps the stern man paddle when the rapids are so bad that the outboard can’t be used.
From its start at God’s Lake, the river winds north ward through desolate bush to join the Hayes River which drains into Hudson Bay at York Factory. For most of its brawling, winding 300 miles, God’s is passable by canoe. Much of the river is smooth, easy-going; much is shallow riffles singing over gravel. In other sections, however, God’s River is a roaring torrent that treats a canoe like a matchbox.
Most of the rapids can be taken with four men in a canoe. But at some, the guides put you out to walk around while they make the run. The worst rapids thwart even the Crees, and there’s nothing to do but portage.
The rapids make God’s River fishing, for it’s in this rough, wide, cold water that the brookies hang out. Fishing the slick runs between rapids usually gets you nothing but northerns.
A few fishermen have floated the length of God’s River, and many have made short float trips. Still it’s said there are certain remote stretches that no one has fished.
A surprising thing about God’s is that you’re as likely to get a lunker right in front of camp as you are 100 miles downstream. When we started the second day, the guides took Frank and me to a sloping rock in mid stream right in front of the lodge. We beached the canoes and started casting.
The current was so heavy I couldn’t get a fly down, but Frank scored with his bait-casting outfit. Still using that lead-head jig, he took two beauties in half an hour. One weighed 4 3/4 pounds, the other 3 1/2. Since we’d just started, the fish were weighed, measured, and released. The limit is only two trout a day.
Frank’s largest squaretail was a beauty. Its belly was brick-red fading to white. Its sides had orange spots surrounded by bluish halos. The fins were red, black, and white, and olive “worm” markings crawled all over its back. Its chunky build showed that God’s River speckles live high. In most Eastern streams of the United States, it takes three years to produce a brook trout of seven or eight inches. But I’m told a God’s River trout in that time will grow to around three pounds.
Best I could do at that first spot was a six-pound northern. It plucked my streamer out of a patch of still water that probably had too little oxygen to keep a brookie comfortable. Jonas took the pike, got a pole, and started “chumming” again. But it didn’t work. So we climbed back into the canoe and headed downstream.
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We bumped our way through a series of rapids. In places, white water shot four feet high. Some rapids were as wide as the river, 1,000 yards, yet often there was only one place where the guides could work the canoe through, and that might be only six feet wide.
Sometimes we’d plunge headlong into rapids, start sweeping through, and suddenly Amos would gun the motor and turn the canoe broadside to the current. Then he’d swing it the other way, following a zigzag course that he knew was the only way through. I kept hoping Amos wouldn’t zig when he ought to zag.
As we hurtled past a half-acre island, Amos gunned the motor and turned the canoe at just the right moment. We eased into the eddy behind the island while the canoe with John and Earl continued downriver.
Frank fished from one side of the island while I tried a streamer in rapids on the other. I had a nine-foot, five-ounce glass rod with G-A-F line. I’d shoot a 90 or 100-foot cast, hoping the current would belly the long line and take the fly down where it might do some good. The water was about eight feet deep, but the current was so strong it swept the line and fly along on top. I kicked myself for not bringing a sinking fly line.
I kept trying, though, and cast repeatedly to spots that looked good. I thought that if a trout saw my fly often enough he might rise and hit.
All this time, Jonas had been walking around, peering into the water. At last he came and touched my arm and pointed to a long, flat rock slanting into the water. I walked over and looked. At first, nothing. Then I saw a big squaretail 10 feet down in a pocket of clear water. He’d sidle back and forth, and once in a while would swim into the current, or he’d disappear under the rock we stood on, then reappear.
I flipped the streamer out and twitched it back and forth. The trout paid no attention. I looked through my flies; I needed something I could get down to that fish, and something that would appeal to him. What I wanted was a fly that looked like natural food and was big enough to interest a fish his size. Then I spotted a 1½-inch stone-fly nymph on a No. 4 hook tied by my friend Dan Bailey of Livingston, Montana.
I tied the nymph on, pinched on a split shot a foot above it, and made a short cast straight upstream. As the line and fly came rushing back, I stripped line fast and raised the rod high. The nymph was swinging toward the flat rock at my feet. I guided it out of the current and into the hole where the brookie lay. The fly line hung almost straight down from my rod tip as the nymph drifted into the pocket.
All at once the fish must have spotted the fly, because he seemed as nervous as I was. He’d jerk around, turn, roll, swim forward a foot, and drop back. The nymph came down slowly and passed him. He acted then, swimming below the fly and opening his mouth. The nymph floated right in.
Jonas nearly had a fit. He started jumping up and down, waving his arms and laughing. He got a real charge out of our fooling that trout.
The brookie ducked into the current, swept line downstream. I backed off, trying for a sideways pull to get him out of the rapids. He lay out there in the white water until the rod pressure and the current were too much for him. Then he swam into the tail of the eddy and sulked. I tightened up and prodded him.
This time he came straight toward me. I reeled fast and held a tight line. Twenty feet out, he stopped, glared, and made a sidelong dash into the rapids.
Line once more peeled from the reel, and again he ended up at the foot of the eddy, 100 feet away. But I soon had him coming in, and this time he couldn’t make it back to the fast water. Jonas netted him, then hung him from the scales; he weighed an ounce under four pounds. I gave him back to the river. When he got his breath, the brookie swam slowly along the rocks, found the pocket where I’d hooked him, and sank back to his hiding place.
After that we hustled downriver and came to John and Earl. They were on another island. and John. our pilot, was just beaching a squaretail he’d hooked on a spoon. It was the stockiest brook trout I”d ever seen. with broad shoulders and tiny head. It weighed almost five pounds, and we kept it for lunch.
This island was about 100 feet from the mainland. Standing at one end we could cast far out into the main flow. From the shore side we could make long casts and fish a shallow, bumpy stretch.
I tied on a five-inch streamer I’d made for pike. It had a thick, yellow chenille body, red head, and yellowish green bucktail wing. I filed the barb off the big 3/0 hook. touched up the point, then started casting shoreward. On my first cast, the fly dropped near the bank, and I pulled it only about a foot before a trout shot up and hit the streamer so hard his head and shoulders came out of the water. He sank back with the big fly in the tip of his lower jaw.
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For a time the fish hung in the current; then he started shaking his head, and I leaned into the rod. He took it for a while, but at last started slowly upstream. High bushes to my right would snag the line if he kept going that way, so I walked away from the bushes and into the water a bit, reach ing out with the rod as far as I could. The fish kept moving upstream, taking my line toward the bushes. I lowered the rod tip to gain some line, then pulled back hard. That turned the trout’s head, and got him coming down stream.
He passed me slowly, then spurted and ran out another 50 feet of line. I reached a long, smooth rock where I could play him, and he began rolling and turning on top. I was afraid he’d twist the barbless hook out, so I slacked off. He quit rolling and went down.
I played it gingerly, and finally the fish came up, half on his side. I pumped and got him close. When he saw me he righted himself and bolted off 20 feet. but I pulled him back. The butt of the 14-foot leader was only inches from the rod tip, and the fish was circling on his side almost at m• feet. I dropped to one knee, slid him close, got a hand under a gill plate, and hauled him out. Then I lugged him away from the water and weighed him — 5 1/2 pounds.
Here it was not yet noon, and I’d caught two squaretails on flies — this 5 1/2-pounder, and the earlier one of nearly four. Frank had taken two (4 ¾ and 3 1/4 pounds), and John had his five-pounder. I recalled how Ruminski had said the fishing was poor, and I wondered how good it could be.
We fished another half an hour from that island. I lost a trout when my leader nicked a rock, and Earl took a 3 1/4 -pounder with a jig.
Until recently, jigs were unknown on God’s River. They’re effective when you cast quartering upstream and allow them to bounce through rapids and into holes bordering heavy current. Jigs get down fast, stay down, and — when pumped — have lifelike, tantalizing action. In high, rough water they’re unbeatable.
It was nearing noon, so we crossed the river to a clearing where the guides prepared lunch. With eight men to feed, we’d kept three trout. The Crees built a fire and filleted the fish. They curt green alder saplings, fastened a slab of the bright-red meat to each one, and pushed the saplings into the ground by the fire. In 20 minutes the fillets were done. Each piece was then smothered with butter and broiled some more. The butter made the fish crisp and brown. We had the trout with beans, bread, juice, and coffee.
The Crees add spark to a God’s River trip. Unlike some backwoods guides, the Cree is a woodsman who knows his stuff. Our guides didn’t understand or care about the techniques of modern angling, but he knows where the trout are and has good stream sense.
The Crees are never talkative, always amiable. They’re attentive and interested. They observe your every move, and try to anticipate your wants and needs. Most of them like Jonas and Amos — have Biblical names as the result of early missionary visits.
We hit the river again after lunch, but the trout were down. An hour or so of hard fishing got us nothing but a couple of northerns, so we beat our way upriver to camp.
That evening we sat around talking and looking to the river, which was glowing yellow under a sky ablaze with the northern lights. Tom Ruminski said the best fish of the season so far were a 7 1/2-pound brookie taken a week earlier, and a 50-pound two ounce Jake trout that Aaron Karchmer of Centralia, Illinois, had caught while trolling along the edge of an ice mass in God’s Lake.
“In 1958,” Ruminski added, “we had the best squaretail fishing in 10 years. We had extremely low water that season.”
Ruminski says he pioneered God’s River fishing 19 years ago when he went into the area to trade with the Cree for the Hudson’s Bay Company. He says the best brookie fishing is always in July and August.
“In July they start feeding on the surface,” said Ruminski, “and can be taken easily on flies.”
“Dry flies?” I asked.
“When the water is low,” he said, “we paddle along the bank and toss popping bugs onto the shore. We pull ’em off with a splash and a gurgle. The poppers attract a couple trout; then we catch them on dry flies.”
Next morning we fished mostly from the canoes, and I found a new way to take those high-water trout on streamers.
We anchored at the edge of some rapids. I was in the bow making short casts up and across stream with a yellow-and-red multiwing streamer. As the fly swung below me I gave line and let the current wash the fly deep. To give the streamer action I raised the rod tip in jerks, at the same time strip ping the fly along a few feet. Then I let it wash down for a yard or so. The fly worked at the edge of the frothy water, in the strip of current brookies like. Each time I twitched the fly, its wings closed and opened, giving it a fluttering action. Gradually I was covering all the water for 100 feet below me.
I’d been fishing the streamer for 10 minutes when, well below me, I saw a shadow pass under the fly. I dropped the streamer back, yanked it up, dropped it back. I let it wash down dead, without action, then started bringing it back again. Thump!
I raised the rod, the line tightened, and the brookie came up waving his porcelain-white fins and broad, square tail. He kept darting back and forth, his colors flashing in the water. Finally he weighed in at three pounds. A bit later, fishing the fly the same way, I took his twin.
I’d been fishing the streamer for 10 minutes when, well below me, I saw a shadow pass under the fly.
Once John and Earl were anchored below Frank and me. I’d made a cast and was bringing my fly past their canoe when Earl hollered, “One’s following your fly.”
I cast again. Again Earl saw a fish behind the fly. It happened four times, so I changed to a red-and-white streamer. The fish hit that, but I tried to hold him too tight and the hook pulled out.
The four of us caught 11 giant trout that last day, keeping two apiece, which we had cleaned, iced, packaged, and shipped by air to our homes. Next morning we flew out.
The usual fly-in route is from either Winnipeg, Manitoba, or Fort Frances, Ontario. A week’s package trip — including round-trip air transport from Winnipeg, meals, lodging, gas, motor, canoe, and one guide — is $625 for one person, or $1,005 for two. Two guides are normally required on God’s River, and the second guide gets $15 a day. Flights to and from God’s are handled by Trans-Air, a Canadian airline. For details, write Department of Industry and Commerce, Winnipeg 1, Manitoba, Canada.
On the day after I flew out, I was having lunch in Chicago with a friend, Ned Payne. I said I’d just returned from God’s River.
“God’s!” said Ned, who’s fished it often and knows the area well. “That river’s dangerous.”
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“You mean the rapids?” I said.
“No, I mean the fish,” Ned replied. “Once I was wading the river wearing a hat covered with flies. A trout jumped and knocked my hat off, and as it floated away he poked his head out and tried to pick a fly off the hat. He couldn’t, so he came back and ate the whole hat.”
Ned may have been exaggerating a bit, but not too much.