The Day of the Bats by Jon Hedin Wyoming, Mn

In August 1995 my good friend Rick and I were camping and fishing in a remote spot near Virginia, Minnesota. This is a great a great area surrounded by tall old pine trees and a 200 acre lake. The only way in is through two mudholes, each about 100 feet long and two feet deep, and that's if it's been an average rainfall that year. We definitely needed a four wheel drive to get to the camping spot. But remember the more times in and out, the deeper those holes get. Fortunately, it's sand underneath and a well kept secret.

So anyways we're out in the duck boat and the lake's like glass and we're catching bass and sunnies. Nice big ones, and a lot of them too. Just then I looked across the lake and it looked like a flock of tweety birds were coming over the trees right at us. Hundreds of them, and as they got closer, they didn't look like tweetys anymore. They looked like bats, they were bats, and they were heading right for us! I froze. I don't like bats. I never did. Not since I accidentally grabbed one in my friend's treehouse 30 years ago. I never want to do that again.

Hear the Bats

When they got to the boat they circled and swooped and dove right at us, probably eating the mosquitoes and flies that were riding along with us. The noise was deafening. A noise that sounded like a thousand pagers going off at the same time. Rick tried to swat at them with his fishing rod, which only confused them into flying into us, bouncing off of us and each other.

They stayed for probably five minutes, but it seemed a lot longer. And then they were gone, the cloud disappeared. I looked at Rick, he looked at me (still frozen), then he laughed and threw his frog to the edge of the lily pads.