Leroy Frame slammed the tailgate of his 1979 Ford pickup and dragged his 6” Strikemaster auger over the snow to the frozen Yukon River, upstream of Dawson.
Every year the Yukon appeared frozen solid, but the council wouldn’t build the crossing to replace the ferry until they confirmed the ice was thick enough to take the weight of vehicles. But Leroy just wanted to push his ice hut out onto his river, drop his fishing line through the auger hole and stay there all winter.
For seventy-nine winters he had pushed his grandfather’s beautifully crafted ice hut around the horseshoe bend to his secret fishing spot. No council upstart was about to say he couldn’t. And those lazy environmentalists, picketing the council building, were just scaremongers who had never done an honest day’s work in their lives. If they had fished the Yukon as long as he had, they’d know that these warm years come and go in a never-ending cycle. Just because that tree-hugging engineer at the council had declared the ice too thin to build the crossing two years running, wasn’t proof that the world was coming to an end – what would he know?
Leroy dragged his auger across the frozen water, gouging a little furrow in the ice that the police would follow later that day. He honed in on his spot carefully, triangulating the landmarks, the time of day and the stretching shadows. Years of experience weighed up the subtle conditions of the weather to pinpoint his favourite fishing pool. Those fir trees on the north bank shaded his pool for a few weeks longer than on the south, slowing the ice melt. He inched forward and back, refining his bearings, locating where he would tilt the auger vertical and begin his coring.
The Strikemaster was the best manual auger you could buy. Sure, it was heavy, but with that came durability. The extra weight and the keen edge cored beautifully, piling pleasing shavings of ice around the mouth of the hole. Leroy would never give in and buy the petrol-driven models the young fishermen preferred.
Pretty soon he had a straight-sided, 6” shaft through to the frigid water whispering downstream below the quiet ice. The painted marks on the shaft of the Strikemaster told him that the ice thickness was a little less than the comfortable 20 inches recommended by the “experts”. But that was no less than in January ’48. That summer had loitered three weeks into November – no one fell through the ice that year. He dragged the auger back to the pickup, frowning a little at the depth of the twin gouges it had made. The ice did seem a little softer this year.
