The Rainy River runs along the top of Minnesota like a property line nobody ever argued about, Ontario on one side, the United States on the other, and a great deal of very old fish in between. Lake sturgeon live here the way furniture lives in a grandmother’s house. They were there before you came and they will be there after you leave, and they do not much care what you think of them. September is when they start feeding hard again, fattening up for a winter they have already survived fifty times.
Sturgeon fishing is not a sport for people who like to be busy. You anchor on a deep hole below a bend, you put a gob of nightcrawlers on a circle hook with a sinker heavy enough to hold a small boat, and then you sit. My guide for the day was a lean fellow from International Falls who had fished this river since he was a boy, and his main piece of advice was to put the rods in the holders and eat a sandwich. The bite, he said, would be a tap. Not a tug, not a pull. A tap, like somebody at the door who is not sure they have the right house.
It took two hours and most of the sandwich. The rod tip twitched once, sat still, then twitched again, and the guide said now, very quietly, the way you might tell someone there is a bear behind them. I set the hook and the rod bent and nothing happened. It felt like I had hooked the river itself. Then the river started to move upstream, slowly and with complete confidence, and I understood that I was attached to something that had never once in its long life been in a hurry.
The fight went twenty minutes. The fish jumped once, which a sturgeon is not supposed to do and which it did anyway, all five feet of it clearing the water like a gray log that had changed its mind about floating. When we finally slid it alongside, it looked up at me with that small, sleepy eye and a face out of a museum drawing, rows of bony plates down its back and whiskers under its snout. The guide guessed it at forty pounds and about as old as my father. We measured it, took one picture, and held it upright in the current until it swam off without any drama at all.
I asked the guide how many he had caught over the years. He thought about it and said a few hundred, and that he figured some of them had caught him more than once. On the ride back he pointed out that the fish I landed was likely born before the boat, the motor, the guide and the rod. It was a humbling thought. The sandwich had been pretty good, though.
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