Sport

I can’t decide whether to think about catching frogs as hunting, fishing or something else. There is more than one way to skin those particular cats. I’ve shot them with a .22, caught them on fishing rods, gigged them, and simply grabbed them as they sat looking dour and self-satisfied.

Shooting frogs certainly is effective, but not all that much fun, and I don’t care to shoot bullets around water. Gigging requires a bit more skill and stealth; you don’t throw the gig like a spear, but rather reach out and stick them, so you have to get close. Grabbing can be hair-raising at times. More on that later. Force me to choose a single approach and I’d have to go for a fishing rod. More on that later, too.

However you do it, frogging is largely a nocturnal affair, at least in my mind. They’re out and about during the day, of course, but those are targets of opportunity. Serious frogging always raises for me images of clear, starry skies on sultry summer nights. In Missouri, where I lived for nearly 30 years, the frog season opened on July 1. If there’s a more miserable time of year to be outdoors, I couldn’t name it. Heat and humidity do not combine into an environment that’s comfortable to me. But the prospect of frogs makes up for the sweat.

Probably the oldest form of frogging is simply grabbing them as they sit on a riverbank or the shore of a pond.

Absurd as it may sound to our ears, historians contend that Snakes and Ladders was originally designed to teach us about liberation from the transmutations of karma, with the winner being rewarded with moksha; namely emancipation from the endless cycle of death and rebirth.

Known as Moksha Patam, the game in its original form was intended to teach children about the Hindu philosophies of both Karma causality — centred around committing good or bad deeds — and Samskara, which are ritual life events.

The game sounded a lot more sinister back then. The snakes sent players tumbling into the clutches of power-hungry demigods, asuras, whereas the ladders, thankfully, allowed participants to clamber closer to God or one of the Hindu variants of Heaven known as Kailasa, Vaikuntha and Brahmaloka.

Tall fish tales follow every angling method and species of fish, but they may be a bit weightier with noodling since the practice didn’t see statewide legalization until 2011. For most of its modern history, it’s been practiced in the shadows, hidden from the watchful eyes of the law. Noodlers fished primarily at night, wading through dark waters, quietly coming up for air like Martin Sheen in Apocalypse Now. Many homeowners were happy to turn them in. More than a few noodlers were arrested, ticketed, or socially scorned for their troubles.

One such instance is legendary within the East Texas noodling community. I kept hearing the story of the “East Texas Toe-Biter” from the 1980s, when a man at Lake Tyler got into some legal trouble for supposedly throwing a 122-pound flathead out of the water because it bit him in the foot. The kicker, though, was that the fish was still alive and well, just lounging around the aquarium at the Texas Freshwater Fisheries Center in Athens. The second part of the story is not only false but also caused a bit of confusion when I called the Fisheries Center to ask about it. Turns out the world-record blue catfish, caught on a rod and reel, was actually the fish held in their aquarium for a time. All that said, the 122-pound flathead did exist, as did the legal troubles that followed the man who caught it.

Because of all this, many modern-day noodlers are former outlaws of the waterways who have broad-shouldered themselves into polite fishing society. You won’t find these outdoorspeople donning waders and fishing fedoras, then fiddling with custom-made flies between picturesque back casts. You certainly won’t catch them bedding down at places called The Moose Elk Lodge, unwinding with a bottle of Chablis. Noodlers are more likely to sleep in their boats, rally with Red Bulls and honey buns, then barrel into the water to scavenge under boat docks. One of the biggest of these former outlaws is Jimmy Millsap, a longtime Lake Tawakoni noodler who is, according to some, “the Godfather of Texas Noodling.”

“I had paved the game warden’s driveway one day and got caught by him the next,” Millsap recalls. “I told him when he caught us, ‘I guess you’re tryin’ to get your driveway money back.’”

This wasn’t a football tournament, though the similarities are uncanny: there were corners, offsides and 11 players per team. The sport of bandy is played on vast swathes of ice, up to 110 metres long and 65 metres wide, with curved sticks and a hard pink ball. To the untrained eye it seems like a variant of ice hockey, but the closer you look, the more the differences emerge.

It’s a global game: in Russia, Sweden’s counterpart as a great bandy power, it’s a national sport played by about a million people. Elsewhere it’s growing: India, Japan and Mongolia are members of the Federation of International Bandy (FIB).

So is Great Britain. Bandy originates in the villages of the Fens, East Anglia. But like so many things invented or codified in England it fizzled out, thriving better in the places where it was exported. I went to meet the enthusiasts, undaunted by obstacles and accidents, who have kickstarted the revival.

[I]t was the Camino that set my mind on fire and the matter of relics that gripped my imagination and nagged at me during the COVID-19 pandemic, when New Zealand’s borders were shut to international flights from March 2020 to August 2021. By the time Kiwis were finally free to move and tickets vaguely affordable, I felt like a shaken bottle of sparkling wine ready to pop its cork. I had ruminated on all aspects of pilgrimage and was about to explode with curiosity and the need to escape.

An ancient walking path across the top of the Iberian Peninsula to its northwestern corner was the perfect place to abscond to. For over a thousand years, Christian pilgrims have traveled multitudinous miles to the town of Santiago de Compostela to worship at the shrine of St. James. Many began their journey outside Spain, in places such as France, Germany and the United Kingdom. Medieval pilgrims often followed the trail on foot for months, sometimes years. The dangers were myriad, and many never made it back home.

The huge commitment of time and resources, the risk — I was fascinated to know what propelled these pilgrims. I wanted to understand what these journeys meant to them, and why, in this world of virtual reality, people still travel in increasing numbers to sites of pilgrimage. Why do shrines and their relics, which should be anathema in modern times, still draw people? Why, when human experience is increasingly digitized, coded and uploaded, do people still feel the imperative to be present in a place and to walk?

So my partner Sue and I joined the throngs of pilgrims seeking answers on the Camino. While we were actually walking the trail, The Daily Telegraph published an article predicting that 2024 would see nearly half a million pilgrims journey to the shrine of Santiago (St. James), the greatest number ever. The article also pointed out the exponential increase in traffic between 1984, when just 423 pilgrims claimed the Compostela (certificate of completion), and 2023, when numbers hit a record 440,367 — a number that is about to be exceeded because 2024 figures are up 12.5%.

But, fortunately for those averse to crowds, the Camino is not just one pathway. The map to Santiago de Compostela looks like the crazy cracks a flicked stone creates on a car’s windshield. Every line radiates out in a jagged pattern from the central point of impact. In nearly a thousand years of pilgrimage, many routes have been traveled. From their end point of Santiago de Compostela, nestled in the far northwest of Spain, the routes spread out across the country — heading upward along the west coast of Portugal, hugging the northern border of Spain, or cutting straight across the country to the Mediterranean. Today, however, the Camino Frances — the one we chose — has emerged as the most popular. In the 1980s, the route was marked out by a local priest who made it his mission to reignite people’s passion for pilgrimage.

The run, in a 14-foot fishing boat pushed by a 25-horse motor, took the better part of two hours. Measured by the human experience of time, it was interminable. The main body of Black Lake feels oceanic, its iron seas plunging to fathomless depths, its illimitable reach stretching so far it seems to swallow the sky. There are no landmarks; there is nothing to reckon by. There is only the drone of the motor, the slap of the water on the hull, the boreal chill of the rushing air. Time passes, yes, but without any sense of distance being closed. It is as if you are crossing the void.

Then, at last, a bump appears on the horizon. Indistinct at first, unidentifiable, it slowly resolves into a fist of lichen-painted rock surmounted by jagged firs and spruces, their rough trunks thrusting at impossible angles toward the pale light of the sun. It is like watching the approach of a ghost ship, a derelict man of war, and for reasons that are as mysterious as those depths, it sends an icy shudder of apprehension down your spine.

But then another island looms, and another and another. Suddenly the world feels familiar again, space and time reconnected and made congruent. The vague fears ebb, the expectant, anticipatory thrill of the day’s fishing welling up to replace them. You’re almost there.

That morning it was overcast. A cool mist hung in the air, not falling so much as simply condensing, like breath on glass. My father, Harlan, was my fishing partner; our guide was a stolid and inscrutable Chipewyan named Moise, a man who, in the absence of a direct question, might go hours without uttering a word. We rounded a bouldery, reed-stippled point and saw, in the middle of one of the Cree’s lake-like widenings, another boat from Morberg’s. It was circling something in the water, something moving, swimming, alive.

A bear.

Coming closer, we could make out the broad dome of its skull, the tan, doglike muzzle, the erect, almost cartoonish ears. The occupants of the other boat, a pair of jowly retirees from Duluth named Bill and Clarence, were blithely snapping away with their Instamatics; their guide, a lean, self-satisfied Chipewyan who was Moise’s polar opposite — the Wolf, I’ll call him — stood in the stem with the outboard’s tiller in his hand, hazing the bear, keeping it in open water. It did not appear especially large, as bears go, but it was large enough.

As our boat came alongside, the two guides began to converse excitedly. Even the stoic Moise was unusually animated. I thought nothing of it, at first. But then something in their tone brought me up short, and I realized, with a kind of awful, epiphanic clarity, that this was not merely a photo opportunity for us “sports,” like easing up to a loon carrying its chicks on its back. The guides saw the bear as a windfall. The old imperatives — atavistic, tribal — were still in force.

I turned to Dad and said, “They’re going to kill it.”

He arrived in Lewiston as beat up as ever — breaks in his left leg and foot and right ankle — and he drew an old bull named Arctic Assassin.

He lowered into the chute for his first go-around.

Arctic Assassin spun and kicked out of the gate, and Mauney “sat down on my ass.” That mistake, as subtle as it was, knocked his timing out of sync. He started to fall, and then one last kick launched him into a backflip.

“I just round-assed off the thing,” Mauney says now, describing a predicament that makes more sense seen than heard.

He landed on the side of his head and rolled onto his knees. When he pushed down to stand up, he felt it: His neck had broken.

“Felt like somebody stuck a hot knife right in the back of my neck,” Mauney says. “I’d broke my back before, so I knew. I was like, ‘Son of a b—-, I just broke my neck.”

Mauney continues explaining the rest of it: the trip to the hospital, the surgery, the doctor’s orders — no more bull riding, at the risk of paralysis or death — and, finally, his decision a week later to retire from bull riding for good.

Then he walks across the front pasture at the XV Ranch, and calls out to an old black bull.

“C’mon, biggun!” Mauney shouts as he kicks over a bucket of feed.

After one more call, Arctic Assassin lumbers over.

May 2019. She is hard to miss. Her ankle-length dress is a flash of deep maroon against the chalky concrete sidewalk. Her French braid, thick and graying, sags as if trying to pull her down. She has to be miserable, running in the 90-degree heat of a southern Utah summer with a collar buttoned up to her chin, sleeves down to her wrists, in a dress with huge puffy shoulders.

She lumbers up the hill, grimacing as she reaches the top, and then turns and charges back down, the hem of her dress swishing over dirty white Reeboks. At the bottom, she turns around and does it again.

Hill repeats. In a prairie dress.

The old-fashioned uniform is unmistakable. She is a member of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the FLDS. But running? My previous encounters with fundamentalist Mormons in the area had given me the impression that exercise, much less running alone, isn’t something women are supposed to do.