North Shore Journal: Gull Eggs

The day of paddling had been long.  Hands of the men began to cramp in near unison.  Pipe bags, hanging off of the belts began to stir and all could feel the long of the pipe for they had decided to pass over the last session for the prospect of gull eggs for dinner.  The dried pemmican before noon hour tasted just the same as the rubbaboo they stewed only a few hours before.  They had been skirting the shore closely until they could see that the storm was following behind them and not to come ahead of

them.  This gave them some relief, for the paddle, if all clear, was nothing more than nightfall before they reached the Great Bay, at Duluth, and then overland to reach the fur machine north of Saint Anthony Falls.  One of the Canadians, a round shouldered fellow, larger than the rest, at least six foot three, had been the one who yelled out that they should wait for what he remembered as a gull island, a great rocky island which rose up from an easily landable shore.  There, he said, they could find the gull eggs and use them for his own concoction of galette, or bread, made by mixing the eggs with flour, then frying the dough in a pan.

From there, on a full belly, only another hour at a swift paddle until the great shore, where there would be rest of the arms for many days.  They drifted off the shoreline some and although the sawtooth mountains atop were clear in their crisp green jagged shapes, the shoreline had lined some with night's coming mist so that it looked like, if a paddler chose such distraction, as though the mountains were afloat, a sort of green roof to the world.  One sternman began to sing a common lyric to pass the time.  A small wind twirled behind them as if an accompanying whistle.  Afloat on a jewel, one of the men remarked that they could still see down to the bottom through the aqua green ripples where a flash of

 silver moved.  "Salmon,"  one man replied, not the large Canadian, but a metis, mixed blood, from the Montreal Lachine, and he held his hand up high in a motion to stop despite the rush to the gull egg island.  It dawned on the men that the salmon could be caught and smoked alongside the gull eggs on the pan in only a short while.  The fur packs loomed large on each man's mind.  The pipes nearly sung from their neck ropes.  Feast had not been a part of this life for many moons.  A third man, a quiet leader from out of the Grand Banks, the fishing shore of the Atlantic, pulled out his thread and a homemade spinner made of true hammered silver.  "There is one that will be mine," he said, with an arrogance that only a born fisherman can boast, and threw out his line as if by strong magic alongside of the birchbark...

A Gull Island off the North Shore near Lutsen