Greatest fishing story ever told, Part Two

The year was 1961, the first that my parents had taken over Bow Narrows Camp.
There were few people other than my parents and me at the west end of the lake, and that included customers. My Dad spent most of his time fixing up the old cabins and my Mom and I would often go fishing by ourselves.
Most of the outboard motors that had come as part of the purchase of the camp were 10-year-old-or-older models. These old motors had been produced before the invention of the gear shifter. When you started the motor it immediately propelled the boat forward. If you pushed the throttle lever a bit too far on start-up, the boat shot out from underneath you and you were pitched over the back into the water. It was quite a dangerous operation for a 7-year-old kid and his mom who was new to living in the wilderness.
So we opted to just paddle a boat that had no motor. We didn't need to go any farther than the other side of the narrows anyway; the northern pike were so thick in the lake back then you could almost walk on them.
There is a small island at the entrance to a small bay across from camp. Mom cast her Dardevle up beside a deadhead in the water there and immediately a fish started pulling out her line. Her old Pflueger Summit reel didn't have a drag, no bait casting reel did back then. So she thumbed the braided Dacron line trying to slow down what was obviously a big, big fish.
It went behind the island right into the little bay. Mom couldn't stop it without freezing on the reel; she just had to let it keep taking line, right to the knot at the arbor.
The boat then started moving toward the little bay -- the fish was towing us!
We were excited beyond belief. We yelled and screamed for my dad to come help but he was busy mowing the grass with the old Lawnboy mower he had brought with him to Red Lake from our cabin on the Pickerel River in Eastern Ontario.
Mom was wedged into the bow holding onto her rod for dear life and the boat was moving at a pretty good clip. The fish had turned away from the little bay and headed toward the deep side of the island.
This cedar-strip boat wasn't exactly like the boats we have today. It was a 16-foot Nipissing and resembled a square-stern canoe more than today's wide aluminum boats.
It took about 10 minutes before the fish had taken us a complete turn around the island and the fish had run right back to where Mom first hooked it. She slowly reeled in her line, pulling the boat right up to where the fish lay in a few feet of water.
It was enormous, at least five feet long and eight inches thick across the back.
It had wrapped the line right around the deadhead.
"Grab my line and unwrap it," said my Mom.
I did as she said but made sure my hands never went into the water. In fact I never took my eyes off this monstrous fish for fear it would grab me and pull me overboard.
Once free, the fish took off for the little bay, stripping off line just like before.
Again we screamed. Again my Dad couldn't hear us.
And again the fish towed the boat completely around the island and right back into the same log.
"This time," said my Mom, "pull the log into the boat when you unwrap the line.''
I unwrapped the line and grabbed the log and we were probably half-way around the island before I managed to pull the waterlogged deadhead over the stern and into the boat.
When the fish had finished its third tour of the island, it went right to where the log had been but of course, it wasn't there anymore. So instead it ran into a big tangle of logs at another spot on shore and this time, before I could get it out, it broke the line.
We paddled back to camp and hysterically told my Dad the entire saga, over and over. We still had the log in the boat. I'm sure he believed we had latched onto a big pike, but five-feet-long, 60 inches? That would have been a world record.
About a week later, Gus Forslin, the old commercial fisherman who once fished Red Lake, stopped his old inboard boat at the dock on his way back to town. He would go by camp at dawn to lift his whitefish nets up in Pipestone Bay.
"Just thought you'd be interested in something we saw," said Gus. "There was a really big musky sunning itself on the rock by the green buoy in front of camp this morning. It was the biggest fish I've ever seen."
THAT was our fish.
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