The dark form that slid from beneath the clump of overhanging willows to inspect my fly was impossibly long. For the few moments that I watched it hang in the gentle current, my mind almost wouldn’t let me believe it was a trout. The flow in which I stood wasn’t much wider than the length of my rod, and on top of that, Brooks Hansen and I had spent most of the morning with nary a confirmed sighting of a cutthroat. And yet, when the fish turned in the clear water to go back to its lair beneath the willows, I swore I saw a rose-colored gill plate and big black spots on its tail.
“Did you see that!” I gasped. “What was that?”
“Huge fish,” said Brooks, just as excited. “Huge cutt.”
When I had regained enough composure to keep my foam ant out of the willows, I cast again, but nothing moved in the water under the bushes. Two more casts brought the same result.
“Change flies,” advised Brooks.
I followed my pal’s suggestion and swapped the ant for a smaller caddis pattern. Nothing. From the caddis I went to a parachute green drake. The fish wasn’t interested, if it was even still there. Who knew how far the water continued under those willows; with the current pushing behind the branches, the bank was surely undercut. The trout may have seen me when it turned, may have run 20 or 30 feet upstream or downstream, under the bank and out of sight.
The pool above the willows lookedd deeper and inviting, and earlier thatt morning Brooks and I had seen a few fish rising there. We couldn’t tell if they were Colorado cutthroats—the subspecies this small stream supposedly harbored, according to reports from the Wyoming Game and Fish Department—but we wanted to believe it. We didn’t hook a fish from the pool that morning to know for sure what they were, and when Brooks caught a brook trout not far upstream, we started to have doubts about cutthroats. We were, after all, well above the stretch where Game and Fish had confirmed their presence.
Still, that big fish under the willow couldn’t have been a brook trout, and now, several hours since we had tried
