Deer stand in the shallows pausing for a morning drink, their heads and white tails popping up as we appear like ghosts out of the morning mists in our canoes. They leap nimbly into the brush and are gone. Great blue herons are already poised on rocks and low branches, stone still as they prepare to snatch breakfast. Each one lifts like an angry little dinosaur, croaking with annoyance, yet flying only a hundred yards downstream where we can scare them up repeatedly until they circle around upstream. Eagles perch in the upper branches and we spot several of them each day. We hear beavers in the evenings, banging the earth like a hollow log. Fish jump and stir and turtles slide off their rocks or drop like cannonballs from higher perches on downed trees leaning over the river. We are on the final 30 miles stretch of the Namekagon River, before it flows into the St. Croix….