My brother and I had decided we would take an entire morning to see how many Tadpoles we could catch. It was sort of a contest and an adventure wrapped up into one event.
Out in our garage that morning we gathered up our gear for the safari outing.
My brother had his trusty small green goldfish net in one hand and a red plastic bucket in the other.
I went with the traditional tin Minnow bucket and a Cool Whip container.
I also thought I’d try my luck with an ice fishing skimmer ladle that was built to skim ice from the tops of winter fishing holes.
Before we left the garage we sprayed each other from top to bottom with bug dope, being careful not to spray the fog into eyes, noses and mouths.
Counting Blackfly bites was not a part of the contest that would add or detract points from the Tadpole aggregate score.
The adventure began with planning where we were going to find Tadpoles together as our mother was counting on me to keep a close eye on my five-year-old brother.
I decided we would start with the creek on the beach as it slipped away from Limekiln Lake near the Turner camp.
We took up our tools and headed down to the creek.
That’s when my brother made up the famous hunting Tadpole song of 1975.
The song had seven words that he sang into a reel as if it was a microphone.
Never destined to be a hit, he kept repeating the words: “Tadpole hunting, we are going Tadpole hunting.”
I could not wait till we could start our capture of slimy black swimmers.
When we both squatted down to peek into the water. It was alive with the slender black creatures darting back and forth in layers and it looked as if the bottom itself was moving.
We began the countdown from my Mickey Mouse watch and started pecking at the water with our wog-trapping devices.
I made a pretty good haul when I dipped it slower.
Each time I brought up four or five dark brown wrigglers to transfer over to my Minnow bucket.
I looked down from time to time and shouted out the number of minutes remaining in our half-hour contest.
My brother was silent and steadily filled his bucket.
My bucket got darker and darker with every catch.
When I started counting down the last remaining 10 seconds of the the contest, I lost some when I dipped my pail into the water.
I dragged the bucket over to where my brother was.
When we peered into each other’s buckets, we realized there was no way to count the hundreds of active Tadpoles quickly swimming back and forth.
“What now?” asked my brother.
“It’s a tie. I guess we find a place to let ‘em go where they’ll be happy,” I said.
“How ‘bout my goldfish pond behind the house?”
So off we went. Two brothers…with me toting the buckets and him singing his new song, The Tadpole Scooping Winner.
Mitch Lee, Adirondack native & storyteller, lives at Inlet. ltmitch3rdny@aol.com