I admit it; I wasn’t having the same amount of fun that Mike was having. Something in his blood drives away mosquitoes. In fact, I think it angers them. It’s probably something like your friends taking you out to the bar and talking you into doing a shot of Extra Sharp Ginger Brandy. You only do it once and you instantly look for someone to take it out on following the roar of laughter.

So anyway, Mike makes the skeeters mad and they come vampire the hell out of me just for kicks before they lay their eggs and die. I kept slapping and scratching and itching and waving my arms and spitting and praying to the dragonfly gods to save me. And slowly, day by day, the combination of reflected sunlight and super DEET was turning me a weird shade of orange-red and puffing up my face and neck until I must have looked like some kind of crazed, half dead clown with long matted hair and shabby clothes. Mike, on the other hand, always looked just like Mike always does. A tad unkempt from not shaving, maybe, but five minutes in a civilized crapper and a change of clothes would have made him ready to meet the President. I, of course, with the same five minutes and a similar change of clothing would have been met with a hail of Secret Service bullets, men in full Level A protective suits and spray bottles of that stuff from the X Files that dissolves you into pink foam in thirty seconds.

So Mike and I find our way into this dead end lake I talked about in a previous story. Mike always recalls exact timelines and such better than I do, but I think it was Day 5 or 6 when we got in there, and it was as if the dragonfly gods had prepared the place just for us. There truly was only one way in and out, and the lake was small enough that there was only one campsite on it and the lake had an interesting feature - a huge hump of rock that stuck above the surface like the rounded shoulder of some sleeping giant. There were mercifully few mosquitos and plenty of dragonflies to snap them out of midair around our campsite and I suppose now you’re waiting for me to tell you that the fish in the lake were whales. Well, they were. We could hear them jumping and splashing all the time and while exploring we even found the leftovers of one that a bear had obviously feasted on and it was pretty good sized. The only problem with the fish in that lake is that they didn’t like Mike. He took the canoe out a couple of times over the next two days that we spent there, but I’m pretty sure he never caught anything in that lake.

You also might have noticed I haven’t told you the name of this pristine Eden. Stop waiting, because I won’t. I’m taking it to the grave. I believe that I was actually in a blood-loss induced coma and Mike merely dragged me from malarial swamp to the next portage, and that I hallucinated the whole thing about Lake X; but I’m fine with that because it was one of the best times in my whole like in the outdoors. The sweet dream didn’t last long enough though, because we struck out of our little paradise only to encounter Brule Lake. For those of you not in the know, Brule (we renamed it “Brutal”) is a big enough body of water to have waves. So when you’re on a lake, in a canoe, and it’s windy, and the person in the back seat (me) can see that the person in the front seat (Mike) is half-the-time so high up in the air that he couldn’t have dangled his paddle over the side and even gotten it wet - it’s time for a little epiphany… that is: shut up, dig in deep and keep going for the far shore until your arms are going to fall off. I did, we made it and Mike paddled us through the shallow, protected backwaters while I laid out in the back and had my minor heart attack.

I’m not sure of the exact sequence of events and might skip a day here (the one that I think was when we camped next to the biker dude with his two biker dude-ettes and where we tried Mike’s solar shower bag that didn’t work worth a damn) so that I can get on to the last night of the canoe trip. Mike was catching more fish here, toward the end, having pulled up a couple of nice Northerns and then, shortly before we pitched out last campsite, a really nice walleye. We decided instantly to keep the walleye on a stringer for breakfast and found a nice spot that had just recently been cleared, judging by the huge pile of branches next to the site that weren’t even moldering yet. The site was, unlike all of the others, completely devoid of large rocks or old tree trunks that usually made for our seating arrangements, but while Mike was getting the fish secured for overnight storage in the lake I was able to fashion a bench next to the fire with a bunch of branches lashed to three pines. It was my final ‘man conquers the wilderness’ attempt and it turned out to be pretty comfortable.

We slept well that night and I awoke to the sounds and smells of Mike preparing breakfast, and I have to say it was one of the top five meals I’ve ever had in my life. Mike had been able to keep one big potato and a couple of eggs secure through the trip, and topped off with that walleye only minutes from the water was something I’ll never forget. We broke camp with a tinge of sadness mixed with the knowledge that at the end of our half-day of remaining paddling and portaging we would get real beds and hot showers back at Mr. Binoculars’. We made it out without further adventure (either bad or good), hauled our gear out and packed the back of Mike’s truck and settled into the cabin. I was irritated that I hadn’t been smart enough to leave some clean clothes in the truck for our return, but after ten days of smelling like sweat, DEET and woodsmoke one more wouldn’t kill me. I did, though, finally get to scare the hell out of myself by looking in a mirror for the first time in over a week and suddenly came to the realization that I should never again be without sunscreen and should never again use high-powered mosquito repellent. Next time maybe I’ll just coat my exposed skin with mud like the natives used to.

We took a photo of ourselves next to the outfitter’s sign on the way out and made our way back to civilization the next morning. At this point I imagine you sitting there, understanding that the story is over except for the long drive back home and feeling a little let down by it all. The good news is that we saved one of the best adventures for the last day and unfortunately, you’re going to have to wait for the final installment to follow soon.