The Lake Winnipesaukee Ice Run
Dr. Wilkins tells how winter keg sleds ran from Pittsfield up through Barnstead to Alton Bay and out across the frozen Lake Winnipesaukee. He covers sharp-shod horses, the practice of choking out a horse that falls through, and the night Constable Hiram Dodge of Gilford went through the ice by Rattlesnake Island and came out the wettest lawman in Belknap country. Retired Federal Revenue Officer Captain Donald Vance tells new stories: a petticoat-rigged ice-boat smuggler, kegs frozen inside ice-house blocks, a fishing-shanty still that sank itself, and the night a smuggler pulled him out of Moultonborough Bay and then billed him for the rope. Wilkins also explains cider brandy, the hidden danger of freeze-jacked applejack, and the copper in the vapor path, then answers Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, NC, about hickory ashes and red oak shavings in the thump keg and debunks the old blue-flame test.
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Full episode transcript
♦ Audible wax cylinder surface crackle, slow drip of clear distillate into a glass jar
♦ Barnaby the black bear grunting and chain clinking outside log cabin window
Wilkins: Barnaby! Settle your carcass down! It's January, you great hairy sack of bad decisions, you're supposed to be asleep in your hole like a Christian bear. Lie down before I pull every tooth in your head and sell them to a Concord widow for a necklace.
♦ Bear huffs, a long sullen groan, chain drops heavy into packed snow
Wilkins: There. Lord, his breath could etch glass. Thank you, Your Majesty.
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth, swelling then settling under
Wilkins: Good evening, neighbors, sinners, and the two of you from the county I can hear breathing through the knothole. Welcome to Radio Moonshine with Alchemist G. G. Wilkins, broadcasting from Fort Wilkins, my log fortress on the Suncook Valley Turnpike, Route 28, in Pittsfield, New Hampshire. Tonight, by the light of a whale-oil lamp and a jar I won't tell you the contents of, we're going out on the ice: the Lake Winnipesaukee Ice Run. Keg sleds, sharp-shod horses, ice that talks back, and the wettest constable ever to crawl out of New Hampshire water alive and complaining. But first, a word from the fellow I pay in coin and cordial.
♪ Theme fades
Announcer: A quick word, friends! Do you hunger to learn the old craft proper, cuts, copper, and fire, from the masters of Fort Wilkins? The Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Master Distilling Course awaits you at moonshinestill.com. That's moonshinestill.com! Now, back to the Doctor!
♦ Wax cylinder crackle; wind moaning across a frozen lake
Wilkins: Segment the first. History. Now, Winnipesaukee. Largest lake in this state, seventy-some square miles of water and better than twenty miles end to end, lying up north of us like a great blue hand somebody dropped among the hills. Folks will tell you it has three hundred sixty-five islands, one for every day of the year, and that count was made by a man who'd been drinking every one of those days. There's a good many islands, but not that many. Count them yourself sober and you'll come up short and disappointed, which is how most things look sober.
Wilkins: From May to the freeze, the lake is a water road. The side-wheel steamer Lady of the Lake has been churning those waters since about 'forty-nine, carrying summer folk and freight between Alton Bay and the Weirs and Wolfeborough. Come December she gets tied up at the wharf like a fat alderman, and from then till spring the ice does her job for free. And it charges no fare, keeps no manifest, and has never once in its life spoken to a revenue assessor.
Wilkins: Since Mr. Lincoln's men started counting every gallon this side of the Potomac, a man who wants to move a few kegs north to the lumber camps and the island farms and the thirsty gentlemen of Meredith wants a road without tollgates or eyes. So he waits for the cold. From right here in Pittsfield you go north along the Suncook, up through Barnstead, over the hills to Alton, and you come down onto Alton Bay at the bottom tip of the lake. From there it's open country, flat and white as a dowager's bedsheet, all the way to anywhere.
Wilkins: But the ice is not a road. It is a living thing, and it has opinions. Let me give you the arithmetic the old ice-cutters gave me, and they are men who don't guess, because guessing on ice is how you end up decorating the bottom. Under two inches, you stay off it, I don't care if your mother's on the other side. Four inches of good clear black ice will hold a careful man on foot. A horse and a loaded keg sled wants about a foot of clear, hard ice under it. And if the ice is white and milky, or there's snow lying on it, you want twice that, because white ice is half the ice it pretends to be. Snow is the worst liar of all. It's a blanket. It keeps the ice warm and soft beneath and hides every rotten patch like powder on a pockmark.
Wilkins: Then there's moving water. Wherever a brook comes in, wherever a spring bubbles up from the bottom, and above all wherever the lake squeezes through a narrows like the channel at the Weirs, the ice stays thin and gray and rotten even in a thirty-below week. You can walk a mile on good ice and put your next foot into a springhole that's nothing but a skin over a grave.
Wilkins: So a man running kegs had his kit. First, he'd have his horse sharp-shod, which means the smith sets calks on the shoes, little steel teeth, so the beast can grip. I've forged a thousand of them on that anvil there and I'll tell you a calk is a molar for a horse's foot, and I've pulled worse-set ones from deacons. Second, he'd have a long ice chisel, a spud we call it, and he'd tap ahead the whole way. Good ice rings. Bad ice goes thunk like a melon. Third, and this is the one that'll surprise you city folk, he carried a rope to choke his own horse.
♦ Wax crackle; a horse whinnying in panic, ice cracking
Wilkins: Here's how it works, and I've seen it done. A horse breaks through, and a horse in ice water thrashes itself to death in no time, its legs going under the ice shelf, its head going down. The ice-harvesters learned to loop a rope round its neck and haul it tight. The horse stops fighting, the breath swells up in its chest, and the critter floats up high like a bloated cider bladder. Then the team on the solid ice heaves it out on its side, and the second it's out, you loosen that rope, quick, before you've saved it straight into the grave. Sounds cruel. It isn't. It's the kindest strangling a creature ever got.
Wilkins: And a man who goes through? The first minute he'll gasp like he's being born again, and he must let it pass and not drink the lake. After that he's got only minutes before his arms turn to cordwood. The way out is back the way he came, because that's the ice he knows held him. He gets his arms up on it, kicks his legs flat behind like a frog, slides out on his belly, and rolls away. He does not stand up, not till he's a long way off, because standing up is exactly what the ice is waiting for.
Wilkins: Now that's the history and the safety. Next, the sinning.
♪ Short fiddle sting, comic and sly
♦ Wax cylinder crackle; anvil ringing once in the distance
Wilkins: Segment the second. Legends, outlaws, and runners, and I'm sorry to report I'm in it.
Wilkins: The winter I took to the ice was the winter of Lemuel Fogg. Lemuel was a Barnstead man with a nose like a corn auger and a mouth that ran downhill to the nearest listening ear, and he'd let it be known in three taverns that he meant to see the inside of my still-house and report what he found to the gentlemen in Concord. Now, January is the deep of the bear's sleep. Barnaby was curled in his straw by the window, snoring like a sawmill with the croup. Lemuel figured it was safe.
Wilkins: But we got a January thaw. Two days of warm south wind, dripping eaves, and a bear waking up hungry and confused and in a mood. Lemuel came over the woodpile at midnight, bent double, his backside up high like a hen at a puddle, and Barnaby rose out of that straw like Judgment Day in a fur coat.
♦ Bear roar, chain snapping taut, a man's high shriek, cloth tearing
Wilkins: You have never heard a sound like a pair of wool britches tearing in a bear's jaws. It's like ripping a wet quilt down the middle, slow. Barnaby came away with the seat of those britches and a good pound of what had been in them, and he sat down and ate it right there in the moonlight, looking thoughtful, like a man tasting a questionable oyster. Lemuel went over the woodpile faster than he came in, shedding blood and wool and every word of a prayer he'd learned as a boy. I caught him in the road and stitched him up on my anvil by lantern light with dental silk, him face-down hollering and me working like I was darning a stocking, and he's sat sideways in church ever since, which is the most attention he's ever paid a sermon.
Wilkins: Still, a man who's been bit is a man who'll talk, so I reckoned my kegs had best travel by the ice road that winter. I had a sled built with wide runners, like a bobsled for a giant, so the weight spread broad. Six kegs lashed under a load of salt hay, and a big patient gelding named Deacon, sharp-shod on all four. Up through Barnstead by night, down onto Alton Bay at the gray of morning, and out across the Broads toward a gentleman on the Gilford shore who had a lumber camp of thirsty Frenchmen and Irish and Yankees all wanting the same thing.
Wilkins: And along comes Constable Hiram Dodge of Gilford. Hiram had heard something from somebody whose britches were sore, and he came out across the ice at a gallop on his little bay mare, waving a paper and hollering 'Halt in the name of the town!' Now I'd been tapping my spud all the way and I knew where the bad ice lay. There's a springhole off Rattlesnake Island where the ice never sets right. I went wide around it. Hiram, God love him, went straight. He was taking the shortcut to justice.
♦ Galloping hooves on ice, a deep crack like a cannon shot, a huge splash, a horse screaming
Wilkins: The mare went through first and Hiram went over her ears like a sack of meal off a wagon. Gone. Then up he come, gasping like a landed pickerel, his hat floating off on its own business. Well, I'm a sinner, but I'm not a murderer. I threw him the keg rope and Deacon dragged him out on his belly across that ice like a seal being hauled to market. Then I went back for the mare. Choked her out just like I told you. She went still, floated up round as a barrel, and Deacon and I and two ice fishermen who'd come running hauled her out onto the good ice, and I slacked the rope and she sneezed and stood up and looked at me like it was all my fault, which, being honest, it was.
Wilkins: Now the constable. His mustache had frozen solid in the time it took to save the horse, and when he sneezed it snapped clean off like a candle in a cold chapel. His trousers froze so hard that when we got him into the fishermen's shanty I stood them up by the stove on their own, and they looked more like a lawman than he did. And the water had been so cold that his manly parts retreated up into his chest, and as far as I know Mrs. Dodge is still waiting for them to report back to their station.
Wilkins: I gave him two drams to bring the blood back, purely medicinal, from the very kegs he'd come to seize, and by the second one he was singing and calling Deacon his brother. He never did take me to court. How could he? To swear to the kegs he'd have had to swear to the drams, and to swear to the drams he'd have had to swear he'd been drunk on duty in a fish shanty without his trousers. I saved the constable and I saved his horse, and to this day the horse is the only one of the two who's thanked me.
♪ Fiddle flourish, a slow banjo vamp underneath
Wilkins: Now, I've got a man in the studio tonight who has chased more sleds than Santa Claus has driven and fallen through more ice than any sane man ought to have climbed out of. He's a retired federal revenue officer from Manchester, twenty-eight years tracking copper through these hills, and he is fair to an old-timer who builds a clean pot, though he'll still look in your woodpile. Captain Donald Vance, welcome to Fort Wilkins.
Captain: Thank you, Doctor. I'll say this, it's the first time I've come through your door without a warrant in my coat and a deputy behind me pretending he wasn't afraid of that bear.
Wilkins: Barnaby only eats men with paperwork, Captain. You left yours home, I trust?
Captain: I left it home and I left my good trousers home too, having heard tonight's subject. Water and you seem to go together, Wilkins.
Wilkins: Captain, you've got the face of a man who's been through the ice more than once and the disposition of a man who blames the ice personally. Tell me about the lake. Did you ever chase a sled out there?
Captain: Not a sled, Doctor. A boat. On the ice.
Wilkins: Now you're telling stories.
Captain: As God is my witness. A fellow out of Meredith Neck had built himself an ice boat, the kind they race down on the Hudson: a plank cross, three runners, a tiller, and a sail. He ran kegs at night with the wind behind him, flying down the lake at a speed I'd not wish on a train. We'd see him on moonlit nights only as a shadow, gone before you'd finished saying 'there he goes.' My men and I chased him three weeks on horses and lost every time.
Wilkins: How'd you catch him?
Captain: His sail. He was too cheap to buy canvas, so he'd rigged it from his wife's red flannel petticoat, laced to the mast. One night the wind backed around and blew that petticoat inside out, and the moon lit it up red as a barn, and every man on the shore saw it. My sergeant said, 'Captain, that's either the smuggler or the Devil's laundry.' We set ourselves up on the point where the wind would carry him, and when he came round the point the wind died and he coasted right up to us like a sleigh to a church door.
Wilkins: A revenue man chasing an ice boat is like a dentist chasing a tooth that's already fallen out, Captain. The outcome was decided before you put your boots on.
Captain: You're right, and it was the wind that decided it, not me. I'll tell you though, he wasn't sorry about the kegs. He was sorry about the petticoat. He'd have to explain to his wife where it had gone, and that's a sentence no magistrate could match.
♦ Wilkins laughing, wax crackle
Wilkins: What else did the ice hide?
Captain: The ice house. There was a man near the Weirs who cut ice every winter, honest work, good blocks two foot thick. He'd pack them in sawdust in a big barn, and sell ice to the summer hotels come July. We had word he was hiding whiskey, but we searched that barn in February and found nothing but ice. Blocks and blocks, every one chalked 'lake trout' in a neat hand, as if he were keeping fish in them.
Wilkins: And you didn't think a man who chalks 'trout' on his ice is a man with a secret?
Captain: I thought he was eccentric, Doctor. I've met eccentrics. I'm looking at one now. Come June, a farmer's boy came running to tell us the ice house was full of fish. We went over. The blocks had been melting down in the summer heat, and out of that sawdust, bobbing up like apples in a tub, were little five-gallon kegs. He'd been cutting a hollow in the blocks, setting a keg in, and flooding it with lake water so it froze up solid around it, a keg in a block of ice. Nobody's going to find a keg inside a block of ice in a barn in February. But you can't fool the summer.
Wilkins: I respect that man, Captain. Did you?
Captain: I did. I fined him. But I respected him while I did it. Now, the one I didn't respect was the shanty.
Wilkins: The fishing shanty?
Captain: The fishing shanty. On Moultonborough Bay. One shanty among twenty, but it smoked like a locomotive day and night. Far too much smoke for one old man and a few pickerel. So I went to look. He'd set a little pot still on a sheet-iron stove inside that shanty, and here's the clever part, he'd run his condenser worm straight down through his fishing hole into the lake. Cold lake water cooling his worm all day for free. Spirit came up out of the hole like a well.
Wilkins: Now that's an engineer. That's a man who reads.
Captain: He was clever about everything except physics. That stove was hot all day and hot all night, and the heat went down through the floor into the ice. Every week the shanty sat a little lower. By the time I arrived, it was sunk to its windowsills, the old man was sitting in water to his shins, and he said to me, 'Captain, I believe the lake is rising.' I told him the lake wasn't rising, his house was sinking. We got him out, got the still out, and the shanty went on down with a sigh, like an old cow lying down.
Wilkins: A shanty that sinks itself is the only distillery in New England that ever arrested itself, Captain.
Captain: I wrote that in my report, Doctor. Very nearly those words. 'Defendant's premises have self-confiscated.'
Wilkins: Now I know you've been through the ice yourself. Don't lie to me, I can see the frost still in your eyes.
Captain: Once, Doctor. And I'll tell it, though I'm not proud of it. Same Moultonborough Bay, different winter. A runner went out on a sled, and I went after him on foot, being too proud to wait for a horse. He went round a pressure ridge. I went over it, and on the far side the ice was gray as an old dishrag. I went down to my chin and the cold hit me like a blacksmith's hammer, all the breath going out of me in a whoop.
Wilkins: And who saved you?
Captain: Him. The man I was chasing. He turned his sled, threw me a keg rope, and his horse dragged me out on my belly. He wrapped me in a horse blanket smelling of sweat and mash and gave me two drams. Saved my life. Then, two weeks later, I received at the Bureau a bill, itemized in his own hand: 'One rope, wet. One horse blanket, ruined. Two drams, administered medicinally, one dollar.'
Wilkins: Only a smuggler would pull a federal man out of the lake and then itemize the dram! Did you pay it?
Captain: Out of my own pocket. And I never chased that man again. Some debts you settle in coin and some you settle by looking the other way down a frozen bay.
Wilkins: Captain Donald Vance, you are a better man than your profession. Stay with us. After this word, we go into the copper.
♪ Bright banjo break, carnival patent-medicine flourish with a snare roll
Announcer: Step right up, ladies and gentlemen, step right up! Have you ever stood before a gleaming copper pot and felt the ache of not knowing what it's whispering to you? Have you watched the drip and wondered where the heads end and the hearts begin? Wonder no more! The Fort Wilkins Academy presents the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Master Distilling Course, a full eight-week historical and technical distilling academy! Master the thermodynamics of vapor! Learn the art of cuts: foreshots, heads, hearts, and tails, and why the careless man pays for his shortcuts! Plumb the deep history of American spirits from colonial cider brandy to the Whiskey Rebellion to the war tax! You'll learn directly from master distillers, coppersmiths, and historians, with over thirty hours of detailed modules, blueprints, and live question sessions! See how a proper still is raised from heavy-gauge, pure electrolytic copper, the very metal on display in the showroom at Fort Wilkins on Route 28 in Pittsfield, New Hampshire! And all for the modest sum of one hundred ninety-nine dollars! Enroll today at moonshinestill.com/course, that's moonshinestill.com/course! Or set your pen to fortwilkins.com/course! Reserve your seat before the Doctor's bear eats the enrollment ledger! Once more, friends: moonshinestill.com/course!
♪ Patent-medicine flourish resolves into fiddle theme
♦ Wax crackle, a copper pot ticking as it heats, steady drip
Wilkins: Segment the third. Copper and the craft. Now I'll say plain what I say every week: making distilled spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against the law of the United States, and everything on this program is for history and education only. Captain, you'll note I said that while looking you square in the eye.
Captain: I noted it, Doctor. I'm also noting the jar at your elbow.
Wilkins: Tooth tincture, Captain. For the patients. Now, since we're on the ice, let's talk about cider, because this was the drink of New England before any corn ever saw a still north of Boston. And there's a trick our grandfathers played with cider that ties straight to the cold, and it's the most dangerous trick in this whole book: jacking.
Wilkins: You take a barrel of hard cider out in the January cold. The water in it freezes first into ice, and you pull the ice off, and what's left in the bottom is stronger, browner, meaner. Applejack. No fire, no copper, no still. Now that sounds like a gift from God. It isn't. Freezing takes out water and nothing else. Every bit of the bad stuff, the methanol, the fusel oils, all the harsh, headachy volatiles the still-man would have cut away, all of it stays in the barrel and gets stronger along with the spirit. Our grandfathers called it the apple palsy: a headache like a turnkey twisting your skull, the shakes, and worse for the man who made a habit of it. Freeze-jacked cider is like a Belknap County politician: you take out the water and what's left is the same poison, only stronger.
Wilkins: And cider is worse in that regard than corn or rye. Apples are full of pectin, the stuff that makes jelly set, and in the fermenting, pectin breaks down into methanol. A fruit wash makes more methanol than a grain mash. So the man who makes cider brandy must cut the heads with more care, not less.
Wilkins: So here's how I'd do it proper, step by step. First, the apples. You want a mix: sweet apples for sugar, sharp ones for bite, a few bitter crabs for backbone. Grind them and press them, and get your cider into clean barrels. And I mean clean, scalded, sweet-smelling, no vinegar ghost in the wood. Second, the ferment. You want a cool cellar, not a freezing one. Yeast works sluggish in the cold, and below a certain chill she just sulks. In a cool cellar the cider will work two, three, four weeks, bubbling quiet, till it goes dry and still. I've pulled molars that put up less fight than a barrel of December cider that doesn't want to finish. What you've got then is a wash of a few percent alcohol. Rack it off the dregs, the lees, so you don't scorch that mud in your pot.
Wilkins: Third, the stripping run. Charge the copper pot, fire it gentle, and run it all off without fussing over cuts. You get the low wines. Fourth, the spirit run, and this is where the craft lives. Charge the low wines, fire low and steady, and set out a row of small jars, not one big crock, because one big crock lets the bad mingle with the good and then you've no way to separate them.
Wilkins: The first runnings off the worm are the foreshots. Throw them away. I don't care if your brother-in-law is coming. On a big charge I pitch a full quart or better before I keep a drop. Then come the heads, in jar after jar, and you'll know them by the nose: a cobbler's glue pot, turpentine, a sharp sting up behind the eyes. Heads smell like a cobbler's glue pot, and if you drink them you'll know how the shoe feels. They do not get drunk, they do not get used as a mouth rinse, they get set aside. Then the smell turns. It goes clean and soft and you get the apple back, sweet as an orchard in September. Those are the hearts, and that's your brandy. Last, as the run goes on, comes the oil and the wet-dog stink and the cloudiness: tails. Set them aside to go back through next time.
Captain: And that's the part the dangerous men never bothered with, Doctor. A man in a hurry takes everything in one crock and sells the whole lot.
Wilkins: And the coroner gets a busy spring. Now, the copper. Folks think copper's just for shine. It isn't. Copper is the alchemist's servant, the true metal of Venus, and it eats the sulfur stink out of the vapor. But here's the part most men don't know, and it took me a dozen pots to learn it: the work gets done where the vapor touches the copper. The helmet up top, the neck, the arm, the first turns of the worm. A pot that's copper only at the bottom where the liquid sits does far less. Vapor is the patient and copper's the dentist. You've got to put them in the chair together.
Wilkins: And fire. Keep it low. Alcohol vapor is heavier than air. It doesn't rise up and away like smoke. It creeps along the floor like a cat, low and quiet, looking for your firebox. A dripping joint or a spout too near the fire, and that cat finds the flame and your still-house goes up like a hayloft in August. Keep your spout and your collection jars well away from any open fire, keep the joints tight, keep a bucket of water and a bucket of sand by the door, and never, ever leave a running still alone to step out for a pipe.
♪ Low fiddle sting
♦ Wax crackle; a phonograph needle drop, a crackling call-in tape hiss
Wilkins: Segment the fourth. Myths, slang, and the mail. We've got a call-in tape from the far south, from Wilkesboro, North Carolina. Roll it.
♦ Tape hiss, distant crackle
Cletus: Alchemist, my uncle swears old-timers used to throw hickory ashes or red oak shavings into the thump keg to clean out bad heads. Is there any truth to that, or was he just making swamp medicine?
♦ Tape click off
Wilkins: Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro! A fine name and a fine question, Rabbit, and I'll answer it with the anvil going so the bear knows we're serious.
♦ steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Now, the ashes. Wood ash is potash, the very same stuff your grandmother leached in an ash hopper to make lye for her soap. It's alkaline, which is the opposite of sour. So could a handful of hickory ash in a thumper knock back a little vinegar sourness from a run gone off? Maybe a hair. But methanol is not sour. It isn't an acid, so ash has nothing to grab hold of. And if you overdo it you get a caustic, soapy taint, and lye in liquor is nobody's medicine. Rabbit, your uncle's ash in the thumper won't clean a bad head, but it'll get you halfway to making soap, so at least you'll come out of the hangover with clean hands.
♦ steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Now the red oak shavings. Oak has tannin and color and a woody sweetness. Put shavings in the thumper and the vapor drags a little of that along, and your white liquor comes out with a blush and a taste of the barrel, like it's been aging in a cellar three years when it's three hours old. That's a fine trick for a merchant. But it filters nothing, and it doesn't touch methanol. Red oak shavings in a thump keg are like rouge on a corpse: a fine color that fools nobody who's close enough to smell. The only way to get the bad heads out is with your nose and your jars: cut the foreshots and the heads and throw them out.
Captain: I'll second that, son. I've poured out a lot of pretty brown whiskey that had a bellyful of heads in it. Color is a costume.
Wilkins: And since we're debunking, Rabbit, here's another of your uncle's cousins: the blue-flame test. You'll see a man pour a spoonful on a saucer, put a match to it, and if it burns a pretty blue he'll call it pure and safe. Nonsense.
♦ steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Good spirit burns pale blue, sure. But methanol burns pale blue too, about as pretty, and some say prettier. And the old saw that lead shows a red flame is no test you'd bet your life on either. A blue flame proves the liquor will burn, and so will a widow's letters, and neither one proves it's safe to swallow. The only honest test is an honest cut by an honest man in a still with no lead solder and no salvaged junk anywhere near it.
♦ steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: There. One fresh copper cent, stamped G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H., and that one's going to Rabbit Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, if the mails can find you. Rabbit, you and your uncle are welcome at Fort Wilkins any time. Bring a ham bone for the bear, because Barnaby only takes coin with my stamp on it, which makes him the only sound bank in Merrimack County.
♦ Bear grunts approvingly outside the window
Wilkins: One more for you on the lake, Captain, since it's the ice-fisherman's season: the cusk. We pull them up through the ice on Winnipesaukee alongside the togue, the lake trout. Some call it the burbot, and up here the old-timers call it the lawyer fish.
Captain: And why is that, Doctor?
Wilkins: Because it lives on the bottom, it's covered in slime, and its heart sits closer to its liver than anybody's comfortable with.
Captain: I've known three lawyers who'd take that as a compliment.
♪ Fiddle and banjo turn toward the closing theme, gentle
Announcer: Another quick word, friends! The Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Master Distilling Course: eight weeks, thirty-plus hours, cuts, copper, and history from the masters themselves! Visit moonshinestill.com to learn more. That's moonshinestill.com!
♦ Wax crackle; wind outside, a log settling in the stove
Wilkins: Well, neighbors, the lamp's low and the jar's lower. My thanks to Captain Donald Vance of Manchester, who came in with no warrant and leaves with no trousers wet, which is a first for him on any subject touching that lake.
Captain: Thank you, Doctor. And if any of your listeners are out on the ice this winter, tap ahead with the spud, stay off the snow-covered ice, keep away from the springholes, and don't chase anybody across it. Not even a petticoat.
Wilkins: Wisdom from a federal man. Mark the date. Now if tonight's talk of cuts and copper has put an itch in you, the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course will scratch it better than any bear against a pine tree. Eight weeks of history, heat, copper and cuts from the best hands I know. Look it up at moonshinestill.com/course. And remember: no one is fooled by ashes in the thumper, the blue flame proves nothing, and frozen cider keeps all its poison.
Wilkins: Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low. Goodnight from Fort Wilkins.
♪ Parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme rises warm, then fades into crackle
♦ Bear grunt and final drip into jar