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"Junberg offered that the brook trout had spawned, that he had seen them, some nice ones too, in a small brook, just the week before. He didn't say where. He was a game warden, he said, not a fishing guide."S

Uncle Matti was the first husband of my father's sister, Gracie. Uncle Matti and Gracie had two sons, and my contact with the family was mostly through these older cousins, though Uncle Matti would stop at the house himself sometimes, when he had had too many beers, or when he needed a couple of beers. He had been born and lived most of his life in Salo Township, and was known as a deer hunter. He hunted, according to the Finnish custom, only in months with an "r" in them. My father said this included the months of "Julry" and "Aurgust." He shot some deer, but he was never caught with an outlaw deer, though attempts were made to catch him.
   Officer Junberg pulled his tan Plymouth into the raspberry canes that choked the dirt driveway at Karl Schmidt's abandoned cabin, got out of the car, and listened for a moment. He knew Uncle Matti's Dodge would be a half mile away, behind the screen of trees and brush. Into the pockets of his green coat he stashed an apple, a sandwich, and a small thermos, and he began to walk quietly into the woods, as he calculated Uncle Matti's path toward the hardwood ridge to the northeast. Junberg had a reputation as a formidable woodsman himself. He was tall and lean with big arms and hands, and a short gray crew cut. He was seasoned by the outdoors, and people said he would arrest his own mother if she took one brook trout over the limit. He quietly enjoyed that reputation, along with the prospect of adding Uncle Matti to his trophies in the county courthouse files.
   So the two hunters proceeded on their respective pursuits through the forest. Uncle Matti was in the lead as he traveled toward the hardwood ridge. He crossed over the ridge and then moved slowly through aspens, balsams, cedars and alders, to the creek. He crossed the creek by stepping across a newly active beaver dam, and worked up the opposite hillside, peeking under trees and through the brush. He came to a small brook that was tributary to the creek, continued up the watercourse for a time, and then swung west, into the wind, and finally south over the creek and over the ridge again, back to the Dodge. As he drove out toward the asphalt, he smiled at the familiar Plymouth run up into the raspberries.
   Junberg followed a path he knew would be parallel to Uncle Matti's. The warden knew his prey as well as Uncle Matti knew his. He didn't want to be seen, but he wanted to be within a quarter mile if there was a shot from the old .30-.30, so he could hurry over to make his pinch. Once he thought he smelled cigarette smoke, and he sat on an old log, eating his apple and drinking a cup of coffee. After he took up the hunt again, he found a discarded square of waxed paper where Uncle Matti had stopped to eat his lunch. Junberg found fresh boot tracks across the beaver dam and followed them over the dam. There were no shots, and he returned to the Plymouth late in the afternoon.
   This was how the hunters spent their day. Uncle Matti stopped at the house and asked for a couple of beers, then went home and took a nap. Junberg went home to finish his paperwork, and he drove out again at nightfall, to the other side of his territory, to watch for deer shiners working in that township.
   When Uncle Matti stopped at the house, my dad wasn't home, but I knew the routine well. One bottle of Blatz from the refrigerator. Wait fifteen minutes after that one was gone, then a second bottle. But no more after that. After Uncle Matti left, I replaced the cold beers from the case in the pantry, and put the empties in the case. I got Uncle Matti to give back the crescent wrench he borrowed on an earlier visit. We had our crescent wrench back, and I had evidence that Uncle Matti had been there to drink the beers and I had not taken them for myself.
   While he waited for the second beer, Uncle Matti told me that an old beaver dam on West Branch Hyttynen Creek had been rebuilt, and that on the other side of the pond, he had flushed three partridges into the trees. He didn't have a proper gun for small game, he said, so he let the birds go. This information I filed away for possible future use.
   Eight days later, Junberg appeared at our door, and we invited him in. He asked Dad if he could sit in his Plymouth behind our barn, where he could watch our field and pasture and the neighbor's field for deer shiners. Dad agreed. Junberg offered that the brook trout had spawned, that he had seen them, some nice ones too, in a small brook, just the week before. He didn't say where. He was a game warden, he said, not a fishing guide.
   Late the next spring, I walked over the hardwood ridge, down to the beaver dam, which was large and deep enough to protect the trout in the winter, then upstream to the pools of the little creek. With wet flies I caught a beautiful basket of wild brook trout.
   As they hunted slowly across and over the hardwood ridge, Uncle Matti missed his quarry, and Junberg missed his. But by sitting quietly in the kitchen, I got mine.
   Uncle Matti and Junberg are both gone now. I once saw them nod to one another across the hallway during the intermission of a high school basketball game. They didn't go out of their way for one another. They were not friends. Uncle Matti was never arrested for poaching, but he didn't take any special pride in that. He was just trying to make a living, that's all. And if Junberg grieved for not catching my uncle, he never mentioned it to anyone. He may have ground his teeth in his sleep over it, but he never said so.
   There was a time when Uncle Matti came across the warden stuck in the ditch, in the middle of winter. Uncle Matti stopped to help, and pulled the Plymouth out of the snow bank with a rope he had in the Dodge. When he was back on the road, the warden looked at the bloody rope, recently used to hang up a deer, and then he searched the Dodge, but there was no fresh venison to be found.
   They are gone now. They both lived some years in the senior apartments in town, nodding across the room to one another, but nothing more. Uncle Matti died of a heart attack on a hike to the liquor store during a February blizzard. Junberg died quietly in his sleep a few months later, at the age of ninety four.
   I still walk over the hardwood ridge to visit the West Branch and its brook trout. The beaver dams have come and gone, and come again. There are always brook trout waiting over the ridge, where Uncle Matti and Officer Junberg told me to look for them.