Portrait with Fish

My sister Barb arrived for American Thanksgiving Day bearing a special treat:
a photo album borrowed from my sister Donnie containing some treasured family photographs.

So this holiday weekend I have learned to scan photos onto my computer.
In the album is one of my most favorite pictures of my siblings and myself.
It was taken in the summer of 1961.

Left to Right:  Barbie (5), myself (11) with Bertie (2), Roy (10) Donnie (7), 

and three lake trout barely out of the waters of Lac Seul.

My mother, my brother, my three sisters, and I
were living in a log cabin at an Indian fish camp
at Two Point, on Lac Seul, in northern Ontario.

We had been living in Lansdowne House on Lake Attawapiskat
an isolated, fly-in Indian village about three hours north of Nakina,
also in northern Ontario;
but we had been driven out with just a few hours of notice,
by a huge forest fire.

The forest fire did not threaten Lansdowne House,
but we had been living in a forestry department emergency fire fighting station,
and we had to move so that the firefighters could use it as a base to tackle the forest fire.

Roy, Donnie, Bertie, and me

We had nowhere to go.

It was in early June near the end of the 1960-1961 school year,
and my dad was the teacher at the one room Indian school.

The nurse, Mike, at the nursing station was married to Anne, an Ojibwa-Irish woman.
Two of her brothers, Fritz and John, were fishermen on Lac Seul,
and they had a spare log cabin.
Using a short wave radio, which was our only communication with the "Outside,"
Mike and Anne arranged for us to stay at the fish camp
with her brothers and mother for the summer.

Donnie (7) with John (23)

A Different Day with a Different Trout

Thus began one of the most formative chapters in my unusual childhood.