Brook Trout Today

In hushed twilight, 100 miles from any road, a brook trout rose. It was the vanguard of a run from the sea. It journeyed inland 50 miles from Hudson Bay to catch my eye, and a little spoon plopped into the flow among dissipating rings, just beyond the point of the rise.

It was August in northern Manitoba, at the brink of the tundra. We spent most of the day fishing for sea runs that were not there. After pounding an 800-yard stretch of water guaranteed to produce trout on every cast, we made a drift in one of our canoes. Peering through picture-glass flows revealed a long, empty pool. The guides were confused, not quite understanding the dynamics of the run.

A brook trout blasted the little spoon as if it represented the last meal in the river. After taking pictures we worked the pool again, to no avail. A dejected pair of guides and my fishing companion fell into their respective tents, exhausted from paddling and fishing all day. I wasn’t tired, so I waded across the river and found a tributary. Walking along it, I peered down to see what looked like the edges of clam shells peeking out of a silty bottom. As I looked closer, the “shells” slowly materialized into the white trim of fins, attached to the largest brook trout I’ve ever seen.

A large pike intercepted the first fly right in front of a rising and obviously interested trout, which waited patiently for me to return with a second fly. She liked that one, too, and took it. Then she dragged me tripping through the gathering gloom back to the main river, stripping line like a small steelhead. I yelled across the river, but no one woke to help me capture the 25-inch beauty on film, so I slipped her back into the inky flow of the river and continued back up the little stream to a waterfall.

We paddled through boreal forest for 2 days without encountering any brook trout to reach this place. The guides didn’t know why the trout fishing “started” (from the perspective of traveling downstream) on the bend where this stream joined the river. Not having walked the little stream, they were unaware the gravel-bottomed pool at the base of the waterfall provided perfect spawning habitat, giving rise to these miraculous fish. Brook trout born here, I thought, roam thousands of miles, frolic with beluga whales, feed at sea under rising moons and northern lights for several years, then return through tight rapids and dark forests to this tiny, hidden place to complete another cycle in a series dating back to the dawn of the ice ages.

Speckled trout circled the pool in growing numbers as I stood and watched, wondering if I was the only person on earth to know their secret. If so, who would picket when the prospectors, miners, and loggers arrived? I’ve watched brook-trout fisheries wink out of existence in the U.S. due to pollution, farming, development, or a combination of factors. Those fish had advocates. The brook trout at my feet had only the guttering candle of secrecy, where the heavy tread of prospecting grows louder every day.

What Once Was

Ichthyologist Nick Karas, in his invaluable book Brook Trout, recounts the tale of American statesman Daniel Webster and the 14.5-pound specimen he battled and eventually subdued in front of a veritable grandstand of witnesses on the East Connecticut River of Long Island, New York. That was in 1827, before records were kept and long before department stores, interstates, and high-rise condos. Miraculously, brook trout persisted in the East Connecticut the last time Karas visited. But the Environmental Protection Agency recently reported that urban sprawl eats up 1,200 acres of “open space” every week in New England alone. “Open space” is where brook trout thrive, so it should come as no surprise that brook trout have been eradicated from thousands of streams, rivers, and freshets in North America over the past 300 years.