Some Observations from the Hill
by HH Hub Brown

Just saw a car towing a row boat up the road. With all our hills and fields covered with snow, seems kinda early in the year to be getting your boat out.

Some years ago, while I was still working for Endicott Johnson, Bob and Jack Carman, who used to live right up the road from Bob on Route 26 above Maine, New York, and a cousin of Jack's, Jerry Lindsey, and Don Ohls and Perly Lewis used to take a fishing trip in Quebec. All of them but me were members of a club called the "22 Club." That was the limit of members that could belong at one time.

At that time, EJ used to give us the first week of July off for a vacations. Though Bob and Jack worked for IBM and got two weeks off, they invited me to go along with them. Jack depended on Bob as a mechanic, gunsmith, and guide. We used to put the boats in Bark Lake up on the Ottawa River where there was a government owned camp where for $2 a night you could put up a tent and use an outlet from an overhead wire. We would stay overnight there and go on across the lake the next day and then go up a river that emptied into the lake. Not far up this little river you came to a portage which was long enough to strain out all but the serious campers. We seldom saw any campers above the portage.

One year when we got to the upper end of the lake, there was a group of fishermen from Pennsylvania who had had a mishap and had lost some equipment. They told us a young bear had been getting too close to them and they had driven him off. I had a movie camera and thought I might get some pictures of him, but as soon as I leveled the camera, he was gone like a shot. Once before we had seen a bear inspecting garbage cans near a hotel on our way north.

One year Bob had a poor spell and a nervous breakdown so we decided not to go on up the river but to find a good camping spot on the lake. Some moose hunters had built a wooden framework which they would cover with plastic when they came back in the fall. We had put our tent up in this framework. We only fished for walleyes and if someone hooked a northern pike, Bob would warn them "snakes in the boat." Then he'd hand them a long handled hook disgorger and see that they dropped the fish in the water.

One noon we had gotten back to the tent for lunch. I had just finished filleting what fish we needed for lunch and buried the offal in a sandy spot when we looked up there and a young bear was digging them up and eating them. Perly came from Pennsylvania and had helped his father bring a bear down off the mountain once so he was a qualified bear hunter. He said, "All that bear has to do is associate pain with us and he'll leave us and not come back."

So Perly went to the water's edge and gathered up several baseball sized stones and went nearer the bear. When he missed with the first two the other fellows started calling him famous baseball pitchers' names. He finally hit the bear in the ribs and he went woofing down the side hill. Perly said, "We won't see any more of him." But in about fifteen minutes he was back. We had to leave for home the next day so they hung the fish that we were taking home, high up on the framework. If you clean fish out good, put them in a burlap bag, dip them in water, and hang them out of the sun in a breeze, they will keep for some time. That's the way they kept the beer cool. The next morning there was one sandy paw print in a tub of oleo. Bob said, "That bear was smart enough to know that oleo isn't that good."