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.

Webster’s trout was probably a “salter,” a brookie that runs to the sea to live out most of its life, returning to freshwater rivers to spawn. The recognized world-record brook trout, also 14.5 pounds, was a “coaster” from the Nipigon River. In the Great Lakes, brookies with salter tendencies are called “coasters.” Both varieties were once abundant in the U.S., and both are in dire straits today. Brook trout have vanished from many inland waters as well. Eastern Brook Trout Joint Venture (EBTJV), a unique organization comprised of 17 state fish-and-wildlife agencies, several federal agencies, and various non-profit groups, estimates that brook trout were extant in nearly every coldwater river, stream, and creek in the eastern U.S. before Colonial times. Today, only 5 percent of those watersheds are considered “intact,” where brook trout still occupy at least 90 percent of their original habitat.

Salters and coasters, along with a variety of inland stocks inhabiting rivers and lakes, continue to thrive in the Far North. By hand count (as nobody really seems to have a handle on the real number), over 100 rivers entering Hudson Bay from Manitoba, Ontario, and Quebec entertain runs of salters. And hundreds more streams with salter runs flow to the Atlantic or St. Lawrence in Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick, Labrador, and Quebec. I’ve chased salters and inland varieties of brook trout in all those provinces. “Up there” it’s possible to see what once was. The view is stunning.

Many river systems between Labrador and the Rockies consist of relatively short river segments connecting a string of lakes, a feature that characterizes many Canadian inland brook-trout fisheries. When faced with large numbers of muskies or pike, brook trout often confine themselves to those river-like stretches of water between basins. When big, toothy predators are low in number or absent, and the lakes are cold, brookies range throughout the system. For the most part, salters return to rivers that act more like rivers, or they spawn in the lower reaches below waterfalls or cascades they cannot climb.

Up there, a flyrod is the way to go for a variety of reasons. Camps that offer brook-trout fishing tend to be open only during late spring and summer, when brook trout may switch focus, in the wink of an eye, from minnows or nymphs near bottom to hatching insects on top. Brook trout may not be as selective as browns or rainbows, but they can be selective enough to choose realistic imitations over flashing metal when naturals are abundant. Small, single hooks also make it easier to release fish (most provinces protect trophy brook-trout waters with quality regulations).

Anywhere among the best brook-trout waters of Canada, a flyrod in the 6- to 8-weight range is optimum to make long casts with heavy or wind-resistant flies. Because brookies thrive in rocky environments, use tough, 9-foot tapered leaders with a breaking strength of 6 to 8 pounds at the tip. With streamers, tie in 2 to 3 feet of 6-pound fluorocarbon. Since fluorocarbon sinks, use 6-pound mono for tippet material with a dry fly. When the water is really clear and the fish spooky, dropping to 3- or 4-pound tippets can be key.

With a little research, fly selection need not be enormous. In my travels, I’ve found a half-dozen patterns that work everywhere. My first picks, subsurface, would include the redoubtable woolly bugger and any kind of sculpin imitation. The timing varies, but salters tend to run upriver between mid-August and mid-September, after rivers build up quite a store of forage. Salters return to the Sutton River, in Ontario, in such number the schools can blacken the river for 100 yards. Where we stopped to fish, every cast with an olive-green woolly bugger produced a strike. Interestingly, a black woolly bugger produced a strike on 2 of 3 casts, a brown version worked on 3 of 5 casts, and a white version only once in 4 or 5 casts. Going back to olive green at any point would continue to trigger a strike on every cast. Seems like a silly thing to pay attention to, but it hints that even salter brook trout of the Far North, never having seen humans, can be somewhat picky.

Inland brook trout on the tributaries of Smallwood Reservoir in Labrador were often visible in deep pools, because the water was so clear. Jaw-dropping giants in the 8- to 10-pound range milled about, seldom taking a fly, but they rose ominously to eyeball large mouse patterns (lemmings that fall into brook-trout streams up there have short life expectancies). In faster water, 3- to 5-pound brookies were blasting red-bellied humpies on top with relish.

The Caniapiscau in Quebec is big water. Spoons and spinners worked very well, but a Royal Coachman streamer or Muddler Minnow allowed to swing along the upstream face of riffles and rapids produced several brookies over 5 pounds. A brook trout in the 3- to 5-pound range is a bulldog and easily underestimated. Heavy but seemingly nonchalant, they come in after a few short runs only to produce tippet-snapping speeds when faced with a net.

Several species of mayfly were hatching while we filmed for In-Fisherman TV at Eagle River Lodge in Labrador last year, making it difficult to discern whether brookies were being selective or not. In the fast-water stretches between basins, almost any kind of dry mayfly imitation produced noisy, bulging rises from brutes ranging 4 to 8 pounds when fish were rising.

In all these fisheries, a few streamers, a few dry flies, and a few “wets” or nymphs were all we required for tackle. But, for the larger picture, you needed a really big tackle box—one that could carry a broad sense of imagination.

What Could Be

Most people who fish began by chasing panfish. I began by crawling on my belly toward streams so small I could step over them. The only fish living in these streams were brook trout, and a real monster was 12 inches long.

All you need to know to be successful at this type of angling can be summed up in a paragraph: Use 4-pound line and a single hook, size #10. Thread on a tiny worm freshly dug from the ground. Walk softly. The banks of a forest stream can be undercut 2 to 5 feet. You’re crawling on their “roof.” The smaller the environment, the spookier the fish, so crawl slowly the last few feet. Rod length determines when you stop crawling toward the stream. If you can see the water, they can see you. Reel the hook and worm right up to the rod tip and extend it slowly to the edge of the stream. Drop the worm into the water, leave the bail open, and watch your line. If 5 or 6 inches of line suddenly shoots through the guides, you have a bite. Don’t wait to set the hook, or the trout will swallow the bait.

I didn’t know it at the time, but my forest brookies were pieces of a fragmented population that, historically, joined with a larger population in Michigan’s Muskegon River. The Muskegon River population is long gone, victimized by dams, deforestation, development, overharvest, and neglect.

“Almost no rivers have wild, viable populations of brook trout, only headwaters and small streams. The populations are fragmented and no longer in contact with one another,” according to Nathaniel Gillespie, a fishery scientist for Trout Unlimited and part of the EBTJV. Though he’s referring to conditions faced in New England, the same thing happened in Michigan’s Muskegon River and throughout the native range of brook trout in the U.S. Brookies have been driven upstream, into the headwaters, by the need for cold, clear, highly oxygenated water. To preserve some of those fisheries, all we had to do, as farmers, landowners, taxpayers, and voters, was leave a few trees along the banks of the river, for shade, for food, and to hold the banks together.

“Water quality has been degraded in many watersheds,” Gillespie says. “Poorly managed agriculture, urbanization, invasive species, acid rain, abandoned mine drainage, and a host of other factors have left us with brook-trout populations that are now small and fragmented, which doesn’t bode well over the long term.” Despite all that, Gillespie sees a light at the end of the tunnel. “I’m hopeful for brook trout, because there’s a lot of recognition across the board among state agencies for the need to protect native species. We need to increase funding to provide incentives for local land owners to manage nutrients, improve riparian habitat, and prevent erosion, which is a big problem in the Driftless Region (parts of Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, and Iowa), where land management has such a poor record, historically. States throughout the East have developed brook-trout management plans for waters with degraded habitat and degraded water quality, and plans include reintroducing brook trout to restored habitat. Fairly large projects are underway in the Southeast to return brook trout to streams they haven’t inhabited for 100 years.”

Somewhere in Maine, fishery research biologist Merry Gallagher is gathering information about salter brookies in her state. “The salter is a fish of great lore and great secrecy,” she says. “People who pursue them don’t release their information to anyone. And, over the years, the salter brookie fell through all the regulatory cracks. No fishery agency has a handle on them. How many runs have we lost? Where? Historically, salter brookies extended all along the coast, but we don’t have records available to tell us if they inhabited every river. Maine was highlighted by the EBTJV as lacking in status information statewide, so we set out to sample streams all along the coast.”

Gallagher, who works for the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife, notes that salters come and go, entering and leaving the stream quite often before making a spawning run. “Our theory is they stay pretty close to home streams, not going out too far in the sea,” she says. “They come back and forth between the estuary and the sea, making their actual spawning run upriver sometime in September or October.

“I think the overall outlook is bright,” Gallagher says. “We’re finding trout in many coastal streams, which is actually a surprise. Maine is under extreme pressure from development, and we were surprised to find brook trout in so many coastal streams.”

Every fisherman should visit the brook-trout rivers that reach the sea in the Far North at some point, to experience, just once, what was. Perhaps most would be awed just enough to begin thinking trout are more important than numbers, bottom lines, and high rises. A monster was released alive in Manitoba a couple years back, a fish estimated to exceed the world record. Which leads us to believe that, somewhere in the world, moonlight still reflects from the eye of a brookie bigger than any yet caught by man. That’s one definition of hope.