I OFFER this account of tragedy and hair-raising excitement as a warning. Before you get the idea to try ice-fishing, please keep a few things in mind. One, never take a new truck to the ice. Two, never mix explosives and animals.
Ice fishing can be, well, an interesting sport. You drive onto a frozen lake, set up a tent, drill a hole through the ice with a tool called an auger, and fish through the hole. I imagine there was some point in the distant past where this type of food gathering was a matter of life and death for the natives of northern Canada or Siberia, but nowadays it is mainly a sport for fishermen who just cannot bring themselves to put their poles away for the winter, like those desperate golfers who try to squeeze in 18 holes in February.
I had been ice fishing a couple times, and I mainly did it for the isolation of sitting on a frozen lake far from civilization. Beyond the fishing, it has all the joys of camping. In the winter of 2005, I invited my friend Rick to go ice fishing with me and my dog, who we will call Abo to protect the innocent. I just bought a new Dodge Ram pickup truck and wanted to see how it handled the snow and ice of a Canadian winter.
When we arrived at the lake, we drove out to a spot that sat directly above one of my favorite fishing holes. We fixed up the tent, fired up the stove to make coffee, and prepped our fishing gear. As I pulled out the auger to drill a hole in the ice, Rick said, “don’t waste your time with that thing. It’s too much work.” From his bag he pulled out several sticks of dynamite. “Let’s just blow a hole in the ice with one of these.”
At first, I thought he was joking. “I don’t know, Rick. With the auger we get a small, nicely rounded hole. It seems to me that the dynamite will just make a big crater surrounded by unstable cracks. Have you done this before? And where did you get — ”
Before I finished my sentence, Rick lit a stick of dynamite and threw it, yelling, “There’s one way to find out!”
At that point, my faithful dog of six years, Abo, thought we were playing fetch, so he took off running after the stick of dynamite, and our yelling only encouraged him. I could just see that thing going off in the poor creature’s mouth. But before I could think of how to discourage him, he did what dogs do: he ran back towards us with the dynamite between his teeth, proud that he had retrieved it so quickly.
Now we were in real trouble. All I could think of was to grab my pellet gun from the truck and shoot at the dog to warn him away. The pellets would not harm him but may get him to drop the explosive where it was, already too close for comfort. The pellets got his attention, all right, but instead of dropping the dynamite, Abo ran for shelter under the truck, still clutching the stick, and the fuse was getting dangerously short. I leaned over and shot several more pellets at him, at which point he ran out from under the truck, leaving the dynamite right under the gas tank.
We learned several useful things that day. One is that dynamite will, indeed, blow a hole in the ice, about the size of a truck, actually. So now you know why I no longer keep dogs as pets, I no longer go ice fishing, and I own a truck that sits at the bottom of a lake in Canada.
BC Cook, PhD taught history for over 20 years. He lived on Saipan and travels the Pacific but currently lives on the mainland U.S.
BC Cook
