Brookies. In every inch of this small stream where a fish could be — brookies. Fat, strong, eager. Blackjawed beauties with red bellies so bright I thought they were bleeding. Strikes so aggressive I could only imagine they were starving. Yet each stomach was swollen with grasshoppers, crayfish and stoneflies. The fish were ravenous, commanding every pool in the lowland creek choked with willows. Even as I fought the trout back through a run, others rose to mayflies that floated down the current.
It was fantastic fishing.
As a professed apostle of the church of brook trout, I felt blessed by the size and number of fish, immersed in a fantasy of dropping a fly in any stretch and watching it disappear in a swirl brushed by a speckled side. But here in the Rocky Mountains, half a continent away from where these creatures evolved to swim in the spring creeks of the Midwest and tumbling waters of the Appalachians, the day had turned nearly apocalyptic, a fever dream: I was drowning in brook trout. They were jumping into my net. I couldn’t keep them off my fly. They’d populated themselves out of proportion and beaten down the native Arctic grayling, the fish I’d come for, which were nowhere to be found.
We’ve all heard this story.
