It’s a perfect mid-May morning. Blue sky, golden sunshine, a beckoning backwoods stream bright with the promise of discovery. There’s a lone issue. How best to enjoy it: Canoe?

Or kayak? Rob Weston and Bill Kerr are unanimous. Take the kayak.

“You’ll never go back,” Kerr urges. “It’s like the difference between a sports car and a double-decker bus.”

•Green.Indy.com

Kayak it is, a 9 1/2-foot Swifty, but an hour later it wouldn’t have mattered had I been riding a log. Wildcat Creek was the star of this show.

Three streams have been deemed worthy of inclusion on Indiana’s “Natural, Scenic and Recreational River System.” They are Cedar Creek, the Blue River and Wildcat Creek.

The North Fork of the Wildcat originates in southwestern Grant and northwestern Madison counties and flows westerly, through Greentown, Kokomo and Burlington, on into the Wabash River near Lafayette. All its 82 miles are navigable and about half its length has been declared “natural and scenic.”

We’re on that stretch. Ours is an 8-mile reach that requires 1 1/2 to four hours to float, depending on stream flow and how earnestly and frequently you want to dip your paddle. We put in near Pyrmont at an 8-acre campground owned by Weston. Takeout will be at Wildcat Creek&Kayak Too, a livery located east of Lafayette, near Monitor. Its fleet consists of 25 kayaks and 25 canoes.

Weston, 42, is the owner/operator and an outspoken advocate of Wildcat Creek. He and Kerr, 43, grew up nearby. They grew up on the creek. They were on the water as many as four times a week from the time they were 11-year-olds.

“I’ve got people on the Internet coming from all over the place, and a lot of local people don’t even know it’s here,” Weston said. "I had a Russian woman the other day. I’ve had people from China. People drive over from St. Louis.

“This is like it was 100 years ago. The Indians saw what we’re seeing.”

Your first thought as you push off is the name. Creek is a misnomer. This is a river.

More important, it’s a world apart, a ribbon coursing between walls of hardwood forest with silvery sycamores leaning in from both banks.

The water is down five feet from a couple of days earlier, but spring rains remain evident in the creek’s sprightly current and mud-brown tint.

Birds sing their early-morning songs. The creek burbles. A crow caws. Soon enough, high banks loom, blue clay carved 40 and 50 feet deep, their faces pocked by swallows’ nests. Dozens of the birds flit, dart and dip overhead.

Twenty miles from Lafayette, another century exists. Conversation is quiet and intermittent. Kerr gestures toward the bank.

This is the area, he indicates, where Tenskwatawa “The Prophet,” brother of the Shawnee chief Tecumseh, retreated after the Indians were defeated by William Henry Harrison’s U.S. Army force near Battleground in 1811.

A woodpecker rat-a-tat-tats. Turtles slide off logs and banks; plop. Canada geese await, scolding, around almost every bend. Spring is sweet. There are no deerflies. No mosquitoes. No bugs. No cares. Sunshine and stream sounds lull.

The kayak is nice, and yes, even “sporty.” It’s more tipsy than a canoe, but also more nimble, responsive and maneuverable. More comfortable with the backrest and foot pegs.

“That’s why my wife and I got into kayaks,” Weston offered. "In canoes, it was ‘Right, right! No, left. Go left!’

“We’d fight like heck for four hours and then say, ‘That was fun. Let’s do it again.’ Now we take kayaks. You go where you want to go.”

The North Fork is the longest and best known, but Wildcat Creek’s South and Middle forks are navigable, too, and a stretch of the South also is included in Indiana’s Natural, Scenic and Recreational River System.

The confluence of the South and Middle is northwest of Monitor. The South Fork then flows on into the North at Wildcat Park near Lafayette.

The North Fork and its channels, sand and gravel bars change with the seasons. After heavy spring rains, when it’s “bankfull,” as Kerr puts it, you’re riding a quick current at forest floor level. That requires a degree of proficiency. The creek becomes lower, clearer and more docile as water levels diminish in summer and early fall.

Our May day is perfect. We hear an engine but once, a farm tractor in a field unseen beyond the rim of woods that insulates the creek. We see only four or five buildings.

Here a muskrat works its way upstream along the south bank; a sprig of greens trails from both sides of its mouth. There a blue heron glides downriver, its shape prehistoric, its blue-gray striking in the morning sun. A red-tailed hawk rides the high currents, hunting. A turkey vulture flushes from a creek-side roost, its broad wings thrashing to escape the canopy of branches.

Wildcat Creek carries us through it all, strong, smooth, steady, beguiling.

Too soon it is over, the trance broken, and the question raised anew: canoe or kayak?

I grew up in Northern Michigan, in a canoe, but the kayak, yeah. It’s fun. Next time? Dunno. Wildcat Creek? Definitely. That’s easy.