Adventure at Spyder Lake.

We drive down a gravel road and there is Spyder Lake*, just brimming full of fish for Adam, the obsessed fisherboy. He has made his own rod and reel and has a large artificial worm on his hook and immediately starts fishing among the minnows at the water's edge beside the yet to be launched canoe. At six coming on seven he is an inventive boy, probably pretty much like me at that age ( and continuing) .

 We slide the canoe in and head out on this calm, overcast early morning among a maze of small, gravelly, pine-clan islands. “Can I go ashore here to fish”? “Could you stop the canoe so the lure will sink?”and on and on..... So I decide to put aside my own wish to paddle around and look at things and let Adam satiate himself fishing. It takes some time, and while he fishes unsuccessfully from an island I have time to look around more carefully and get a feeling for the subtleties of this landscape. It feels very much like an eastern Canadian lake, something Tom Thompson-like, and when a pair of loons pause from fishing to call across the bay that seals it.

At long last Adam declares he is “Done fishing!”and I am free to paddle around with the boy plying his new paddle in the bow. An eagle screams from the top of a tree. Bass jump, but never into the canoe. Later Adam's dad will tell us that this eagle has learned to swoop down over fishermen's shoulders and steal their fish just as they are about to lift them into the boat.

Imagine getting a brush from an eagle's wing as your lunch flies away! Worth it!


* Spyder lake is north of Nanaimo, on Vancouver Island.