Chilton Lake, north of Frazee, Minnesota.When I was thirteen, I was gung ho about making money. I caught frogs and sold them to bait dealers. I mowed lawns to make a few dollars a month. And I got an allowance of 50 cents/week. The coffers weren't full and making chump change couldn't slake my yen to amass a goodly pile of loot.
One day at school a classmate mentioned that he and his father trapped leeches, but he wouldn't tell me any details. I told my dad about it and he asked an acquaintance of his, the uncle of a bait dealer in town, if he knew how it was done. This kindly old guy did and he made free with the sage (which I will pass on in another post to anyone interested in making some extra money).
So I obtained, or made, the requisite stuff, homemade traps and bloody meat, and the hunt was on that Spring. After a few initial failures, I hit pay dirt. I set traps every evening, and checked them every morning. Within a couple of weeks I was catching up to fifteen pounds of leeches, an entire five gallon bucket full of the awful little creathers each day. Seven days a week, I would drag myself out of bed at four in the morning; ride my Solex moped to the lake; check the traps in my little pirogue; and ride home with my leech bucket strapped to the child seat on the back of my moped. If I had school, I was half asleep all day. Every evening, I would put out the traps again baited with fresh bull liver or kidneys the town butcher was generous enough to give me.
For the first month or so, I took my catch to a bait dealer in nearby Perham who always paid me $3.50/lbs in one-dollar bills, which I kept in piles hidden in my underwear drawer between trips to the bank. Then, my dad helped me land a deal to supply all of the stores at a large retail sporting store chain in Fargo, North Dakota. Every week I'd package three hundred dozen leeches in individual styrofoam containers. My dad and I would drive thirty miles to drop them off at the home of "the Gun Man," who gave me six-five cents a dozen for my labors. And, I hung out my own shingle to boot. I put out a sign in the front yard emblazoned with one word, "leechs." By mid-summer, I was clearing $350/week, a vast fortune to a kid from the sticks, living in Northern Minnesota during the late 1970s.
I have many vivid memories that I still conjure up when, if I can't help it, I'm up before the sun rises. I hated cutting up liver. I hated the smell of leeches and the fiberous blobs of bloodless organ meat remaining in the traps. I loved the brisk early dawn moped ride down the old county road and the bumpy, swooshing, windy ride through the hilly farm fields, past the lowing cows, at full throttle. I loved walking through the tussocks in the meadow by the lake and watching the sun rise and set while mucking around in my little boat.
