We set out from Two Harbors one frosty summer morning, determined to find the legendary Lake of Many Bigfoots, which had been a popular tourist destination at the turn of the last century. We had with us several canoes, provisions and supplies for an extended trip, rifles, shotguns, and several Quebequois trappers, all named Pierre. The cold when we awoke on the first morning was so intense that, as I now sit in a warm place sipping coffee, the entire camp was frozen---tents, boxes of provisions, even our fire had turned into a solid flame-shaped lump of ice, and one Pierre was flash-frozen right in the middle of lighting his pipe. We started a fire using several sticks of dynamite (which in the cold burned as feebly as candles), and with this thawed out our campfire and Pierre and set off across the frozen tundra.
Around noon the day became warm. Without warning we heard a loud buzzing sound and felt a gut-wrenching jerk! We sent one of the Pierres up to climb a tree and have a look around, and what did he find? nothing but that what we had taken in the night for a hill off of MN-61, and on which we had made camp, was in reality the back of an enormous deer fly! The sun's warmth had evidently thawed the monster out, and it had taken off flying with us still on it! It was all we could do to hold on to what seemed the boles of trees, but which we now knew to be the brute's hairs, as we were taken who knew where!
The air began to thin, and we started to fear that we would go so high that we would bump our heads on the bowl of the sky, or be attacked by the Man in the Moon, whom I understand to be a crack shot with the bow, and so we determined to bring the beast down, no matter what it took. Accordingly, we bound a wooden hogshead which we had used to store raamen (can't have too much raamen!) in the base-camp with strong ropes, to reinforce it, packed its bottom with gun powder from our shot shells, and tamped the spare tire from one of our trucks on top for a ball, and aiming this improvised weapon at where we imagined the creature's brain to be, let fly. The shot was only partially effective; while we were unable to penetrate the monster's shell, we did stun it enough to send it spriralling down, and eventually we landed softly on a patch of true ground.
We dismounted from our conveyance and consulted a map, but could not determine our location. Upon consultation we realized that all of our compasses were out of commission. Some pointed in one direction and others pointed in another, while others still spun around crazily.
Once more we sent a Pierre up a tree, and he saw---off to the west (or maybe the south; it was hard to tell)---an enormous bar magnet, sticking several hundred feet out of the ground. (This might have fallen out of the pocket of some enormous lumberjack, with whom the North Woods are said to be infested, or perhaps we had been flown as far as the Magnetic North Pole.) We started walking toward this, checking our progress by climbing a tree every so often, since of course our compasses could not help us, and about a half-hour later arrived at the place. It seems that the bar magnet was a particularly strong one, as in addition to iron nails and ore freighters and other things that one would expect to be stuck to it, it had attracted (being a bar magnet) several taverns and public houses as well. We were just beginning to feel hungry, so we stopped for a mince pie and a pint at a small place that had just come over from somewhere in Yorkshire, complete with dart board, cricket bats above the fireplace, and an elderly man wearing a cloth cap and smoking a pipe. The barkeep attempted to convince us to try Marmite, but we fended him off with some lutefisk, which we'd brought along for just such an occasion, and so made our getaway.
We made our best efforts to locate ourselves without our compasses.
Unfortunately, the moss on the trees was also disoriented by the strange local magnetic field, and was no help, and the sun happens to have chosen just that day to go into a total eclipse, so we couldn't find north using it either. To make matters worse, the tire which we had used in our improvised cannon when shooting the horse fly had caught fire from the burning powder, and set the entire forest ablaze.
Not only that, but as we stood there we were confronted by a pack of ravenous wolves, who were clearly considering roasting us over the forest fire and making a meal of us. Fortunately, I had a flash of inspiration. Quickly, before they realized what was happening, I siezed the wolves by the tail, about a half-dozen in each hand, and used them to beat the fire down. Once the wolves had had their fur singed they were no longer so eager to eat us, and they ran away.
The fire having consumed all the trees for miles around, we were able to locate a small river which was going our way. The day was getting late, so we all got into the hogshead which we had before used as a gun, and which the exploding powder had expanded into quite a comfortable little raft, big enough to hold us all, and set off downstream. I will not bore you with all the foaming rapids we encountered, or the time we went over a waterfall and were only prevented from dashing ourselves to pieces on landing by the enormous horizontal speed with which we flew off, and which allowed us to skip like a flat rock for a good two miles down the river when we hit. We did run into an old gentleman named Munchausen one time. We didn't talk to him too much, though; we suspected that he sometimes makes things up.