“Take a deep breath. Hold. 1 … 2 … 3 …” I attempted to talk myself back down to an unemotional, ‘adult-like’ reaction – all the while my heart was fibrillating, as if it was about to launch from my chest cavity. "Oh come on, you pansy!! Why not? It’d make him happy and I can grin and bear it for a day – even if it does feel like it’s sub-zero outside and the wind has been howling like a hungry lion for days on end! I can do this!!” So forcing – what I hoped, looked like an enthusiastic smile – I turned to the man of my dreams and through gritted teeth, heard myself say, “Ohhhhh … I’d just love to go ice fishing with you, honey!!” The Cheshire smile I received for those simple words were worth far more than a day’s discomfort and thus began a day of frenzied preparation. Digging around for the minnow buckets, the poles, the tip-ups, oh yeah … where did we put that ice auger when we cleaned the garage after the rummage sale, last summer? The alarmed query, “You didn’t sell it, did you?” The warm mittens, the extra layers of insulation – and no, my recent accumulation of 10 pounds that came along with our first year of marriage didn’t count. The next morning after some stiff coffee, lunch packed and a good ole hearty Wyoming breakfast, we hopped into the pickup and headed out to the nearby reservoir and my first ice fishing adventure, some 30 miles away.

Relying on my "Montana outdoors-woman" background, I made sure I was well dressed and multi-layered to accommodate varying temperature fluctuations. True, I may have closely resembled the Pillsbury Dough Boy, but at least I was warm. I was confident I wasn’t going to be running into many strangers out there on a day like this, anyhow. Having now gotten into the excitement of the hunt ( 'er fish) I was full of questions.

"What does a person do all day?"

"Isn't it bore-ring?"

"I brought a book, so when I got cold and tired, I would have something to do."

"Do you think I could take a nap?"

"Do you ever sit down?"

"Do you run out of minnows?"

"How big are the fish we are going to keep?"

"How many do we get to keep?"

"What kind of fish will we catch?"

"How long will we stay?"

And on and on, until I think the man of my dreams was definitely beginning to regret he asked his wife to accompany him out on the ice.

We picked up the minnows and headed off to our destination. We brought the dogs, too. After all this was a family adventure. We have three of them – Oggie, the handsome, half Border Collie/ half Australian Shepherd who pretends to attack large vehicles from the back of the truck – but runs and hides under the desk if someone knocks on the door, at home. And then there is Tillie, the beautiful, papered Border Collie who doesn’t know what a sheep even looks like, but chases grizzlies away from our camps in the wildernesses (while Oggie tries to find a log to hide under) and she thinks people come to visit her when they come to the house. And then, there is precious little Daffee, short for Daffodile. She is supposedly half Lassa Opsa and half Shih Tzu, but looks more like someone’s Terrier managed to sneak a peek, too. Daffee might be a little spoiled, and even though her baby-sitter used to say she had "permanent PMS", we love our little Daffee. Although only a fourth the size of the other two, Daffee is definitely "the boss" and the other two snap to attention when she decides to assert her authority.

When we got to the lake, I learned there were spots that are called ‘soft spots’. A person doesn’t want to step on a ‘soft spot’, cuz then your day has ended rather abruptly – and before you even get a chance to say “ice fishing”, you are zooming back down the highway in a desperate attempt to get home before your body freezes into a permanent icicle. Therefore, we gingerly skirted the ‘soft spots’, and began drilling auger holes in the ice. This was an interesting process, and we (he drilled – I supervised) here and holes there and holes over there and way back up here, until it began to remind you of swiss cheese ala ice cube. I wondered how many holes one could drill before we turned our frozen paradise into a floating island, but thankfully, it appears hubby knew what he was doing and just when to stop, as we never did set adrift.

After that, the fun began. He showed me how to measure the depth of the water and then place the bobber ‘just so’ on the line, and to how to load up a minnow on the hook so it was still able to swim a bit and how to let it down into the near-freezing water without spooking the fish. Then we set the tip ups – which were little flags on a tension bar that would flip up when the bait was seized from below – and retreated to our lawn chairs – which we had to run down and tackle, as the wind was carrying them away – and prepared ourselves for an enjoyable afternoon in the ‘balmy’ winter weather. Just as I settled into the chair, oops! One of my tip ups had raised it’s little flag to full attention, so I waddled (dough boys can’t run, see …) as quickly as I could over to the hole, seized the line with my bare hand and gave a quick little jerk to set the hook and voila! I pulled out a fish!! It was a nice fish – a beautiful, fat trout and my lips could already taste Trout Almandine that hubby prepared so sumptuously. While he solicitously put another minnow on my hook, I dumped my trout into the cooler and oops! Clear down on the opposite end of our hole-ridden paradise, I noticed another tip-up was waving in the breeze. I hurried best I could to the other end, set the hook and pulled out another nice trout. By then, hubby had finished hooking up the minnow, dropped it down the hole and hurried over to my new catch. I again hauled my catch and slipped it into the cooler as he began to load up another minnow. Oops! There went another flag and another … I believe it was about then, hubby decided I could load my own bait (‘newly-wed’ lasts only so long … and I gathered our time was now about up). Deserting me, he hurried over to care for his own tip-ups, which were vying for his attention.

I soon discovered the ‘bore-ing’ sport of ice fishing was a pretty good workout and was about as boring as anything else this man of my dreams had suggested doing so far – like hunting for antler sheds, right after I moved to Wyoming, the year prior. On that occasion, I discovered I had a latent ability for the high jump, when my mind screamed out to a rather lethargic body, “That ‘stick’ you are about to step on – that ain’t no stick!!” It was none other than a ‘rattler’ snake stretched out across my path, enjoying a nice leisurely afternoon in the sunshine – at least until I disturbed it with my blood-curdling scream and impressive launch. Coming from up ‘North’, there were few such critters in Western Montana and I had decided I was deathly afraid of them. My fear comes naturally, I must add. It’s kind of an inherited thing. My uncle, who was a Dallas policeman for 20 years, would stop and let the air out of his tires whenever there was a ‘snake’ call over the radio. I wonder if they ever figured out the correlation between snake calls and flat tires?

Anyhow, life with my husband was proving to be anything but ‘bore-ing’ and this day proved to be the same. We ended up catching so many fish – we were just tossing them back and wishing we hadn’t been so greedy about keeping the first ones. I swear the little buggers would just swim back around and get snagged again. Fish never were known for their smarts, I don’t think. After a day out in the cold and wind, catching multitudes of fish, we headed back home. That nap I thought about taking? I don’t think we made it to the highway before my eyelashes came to rest on my rosy cheeks and I was dreaming about our next adventure.