We followed that string of alders along the boggy upstream course of the brook. It was good-looking cover, and Burt hunted it well. But the brook kept distracting me. It snaked through some swamp, curved around the edge of a meadow, and eventually dissipated in a hillside that was wet with springholes. It ran slow, narrow, and deep in most places, with dark undercuts, rock-rimmed pools, a few quick riffles. Willows and alders grew thick along its banks, and a lot of old blowdown deflected the current and gouged out deep holes. It was a typical New England woodland brook. In most places I could jump across it. In a few places it widened to ten or twelve feet.
When I got home, I took out my topographic map and drew a red circle around my new woodcock cover. The thin snaky blue line that wandered through it was labeled Porcupine Brook. It eventually ran into a larger stream, and that stream emptied into a river that joined up with another river and on to the sea.
I remembered those quick shadows I’d seen panicking over the sand bottom and thought, hopefully: Wild New England brook trout.
The Hillsborough county trout-stocking records did not list Porcupine Brook. However, the stream it ran into, and the river that stream emptied into, were both stocked. So those shadows probably weren’t pure natives, uncontaminated with hatchery genes. But I figured I’d spotted some wild trout, fish that had had been born right there in Porcupine Brook, and I promised myself that come spring I’d explore my new woodcock cover with a rod instead of a shotgun.
* * *
Porcupine Brook reminded me of the little brook that my father and I fished ritually every Patriot’s Day, April 19, which was a state holiday in Massachusetts, when I was a kid. When Dad and I talked about it, we called it Trout Brook, secure in the knowledge that anybody who overheard us would never find it by that name on any map. Dad had stumbled upon Trout Brook during the woodcock season, the same way I found Porcupine Brook.
We parked on a dirt road and intercepted Trout Brook deep in a swamp after a twenty-minute trek through the woods. Then we leap-frogged each other, alternating pools, working our way downstream to where the brook passed under the road near where we’d left the car. Like Porcupine Brook, Trout Brook ran slow and narrow and dark, and its brushy banks precluded any kind of casting. So we dug some worms, impaled one just once (to give it plenty of wiggle) on a Size 10 wet-fly hook, pinched a single small split-shot six inches up the tippet, and steered it through the likely-looking trout holes with a fly rod.
We didn’t wade. We slogged along the muddy banks and poked the rod through the openings in the bushes. We worked mostly from our knees, because the trout that lived there were plenty spooky. It took a lot of concentration to detect a bite. The leader would hesitate or twitch, or you might just sense something vibrating up the fly line to your fingers.
Dad believed that the brookies we caught on Patriot’s Day were pure natives. Maybe, maybe not. But they were certainly wild fish. Their spots glowed like drops of fresh blood and their olive backs were sharply vermiculated. They were slim, but not skinny, and they felt muscular in your hand. They mostly ran from finger-sized to six or seven inches. We always kept half a dozen six-inchers for supper and threw back those that were smaller or significantly larger. Once I derricked in a fish from Trout Brook that measured eleven inches. Dad proclaimed that one a monster, and we returned it carefully so that it might pass its monster genes on to new generations.
Alas, one Patriot’s Day we found orange surveyor’s stakes scattered through the woods and along the banks of Trout Brook, and a year later the forest had been clearcut and the hills bulldozed level. The brook ran warm and dirty through a straight muddy ditch.
* * *
The April after Burt and I stumbled upon Porcupine Brook, I went back. I suppose I was trying to relive some old and happy memories of fishing with my father when I was a kid. I also wanted to learn what manner of fish lived in this brook. But mainly, I just felt like going fishing on a nice April afternoon.
I brought an old 7½-foot fiberglass fly rod, a 4-weight forward-tapered floating line with a seven-foot leader, a spool of 4X tippet, some Size 10 wet-fly hooks, a few split shots, and a Zip-Loc bag full of freshly-dug worms.
I hadn’t fished with worms for many years. When I was growing up, I fished every way that I could for every species of fish that lived, but I had the most faith in worms. No freshwater fish would pass up a worm, but you had to put it where the fish was living in a manner that appeared natural, and that took skill and knowledge. Fishing a trout brook with a worm demanded a stealthy approach, an accurate reading of the water, and a careful presentation of the bait. It had to tumble along with the currents at the right depth. I didn’t know the term “drag,” but I learned all about it by drifting worms in trout brooks. The fish told you when you’d done everything right.
My only rod back then was a clunky three-piece 8½ foot Montague made from split bamboo. I learned the feel of a fly rod by lobbing and roll-casting baited hooks. Casting flies came easily and naturally to me after doing that.
I caught a several pretty little brookies from Porcupine Brook that April day, working my way downstream from pool to pool the way Dad and I did it fifty years ago. I got muddy and scratched and bitten by bugs. It was a wonderful afternoon of fishing. It reminded me of where I’d come from and how I’d gotten to where I am.
A few days later I told one of my fly-fishing buddies about it.
“You didn’t keep any fish?” he said.
I nodded. “Put ’em all back.”
“But didn’t they swallow the hook?”
“Nope. I debarbed it and tightened on the fish as soon as they hit the worm, just the way you do with nymphs. They were all lip-hooked.”
“You used a fly rod, though, eh?”
I nodded.
“But you didn’t try casting flies?”
“You can’t cast on Porcupine Brook. Impossible. Too narrow and brushy.”
“So you used your fly rod just to steer your, um, your bait into the holes.” He pronounced the word “bait” as if he were naming a disgusting waste product.
“Exactly.”
“Hm,” he said. “So tell me. Why didn’t you use nymphs? I mean, a caddis pupa or even a San Juan worm . . .”
“I suppose I could have,” I said, “but what’s the difference?”
He frowned for a minute. Then he said, “Well, at least you would’ve been fly fishing.”
* * *
The fly-fishing snob was famously lampooned on the cover of the Spring 1933 L. L. Bean catalog in a painting which depicted a barefoot boy with a sapling for a rod showing a string of trout to a portly gentleman with a fly rod under his arm. The portly gentleman—he’s smoking a pipe and wearing a bow tie—is glancing around furtively and reaching for his wallet.
H. T. Webster responded to this clichéd scenario in a 1940 cartoon that appeared in the New York Herald Tribune. Webster shows a smug even-more-portly gentleman holding a fly rod with half a dozen fat trout laid out on the stream bank and a barefoot boy gazing longingly down at the fish. In case the message wasn’t clear, the gentleman is saying, “Hm. You look like th’ boy in th’ illustrated calendars who always sells his string of trout to th’ old fisherman. Better take a couple of mine—I’d hate to see a nice youngster like you go home skunked.” And to drive home the point, the cartoon’s caption reads: “The fisherman with expensive tackle who is invariably humiliated by the boy with the hickory pole and a bent pin, finally comes through.”
Nowadays, the downfall of the fly-fishing purist is not that he might be outfished by a barefoot boy with a hickory pole and a can of worms. It’s that he’ll never spend an April afternoon catching wild six-inch brookies from Porcupine Brook.
17
The Natives of Minipi
From the window of our Twin Otter in the summer of 2004, the watery tundra of Labrador looked exactly the way it did from the window of Lee Wulff’s Super Cub in 1957—which was exactly the way it has looked since the gl
aciers retreated 20,000 years ago. It’s all flat and green and wet. No roads. No dwellings. Just 115,000 square miles of nothing but lakes and rivers, many of them nameless, and bogs and rocks and scraggly spruce forest and moss, from horizon to horizon.
From 1000 feet, the lakes of the Minipi watershed got Wulff’s attention. They are shallow—no more than 6 to 12 feet deep in most places—so the sunlight penetrates to the bottom, making them incredibly fertile. In the brief Labrador growing season (mid-June through early September) the Minipi system is a nursery for oversized mayflies—brown and green drakes and hexagenia in sizes 6 to 10—and for the biggest, healthiest, purest strain of wild native brook trout in the world.
Put the two together—brookies up to nine pounds sipping big duns and spinners (and any reasonable imitation tied to a 2X tippet) off a flat lake surface—and you’ve got a unique and precious resource and a fly-fishing experience that Wulff called “the greatest brook trout fishing in North America.”
It’s as good today as it was in 1957. I have fished there twice in the past decade, a total of twelve full days and evenings. Both times the guides were complaining about the spotty hatches and the slow fishing. I landed an average of slightly more than two brook trout-of-a-lifetime per day, all but one of which weighed over four pounds (Minipi fish are weighed, not measured). My biggest, a 7¾-pounder, inhaled a deerhair mouse (the guides call it a “moose”). Most of the fish I caught had been spotted gulping drake duns and spinners, and they sucked my big dry flies off the flat lake surface with unforgettable kissing sounds.
Slow fishing? Compared to what? I’m not sure I’d want to catch more than two trophy brook trout a day although, according to the three camps’ meticulously-kept log books, their guests do it routinely.
One of my partners, Steven Cooper, released a brookie that weighed 8½ pounds. Elliot Schildkrout, fishing from the same boat on the same day, landed an 8-pounder. Both fish ate dry flies.
* * *
When he realized what he had discovered, Wulff lobbied the Canadian and provincial governments to protect the Minipi waters with special regulations. “A trout is too valuable to be caught only once,” he famously said, “and that goes double for the giant brookies of Minipi.”
The governments responded by granting an exclusive license for outfitting the Minipi watershed to Wulff’s friend, local guide Ray Cooper. In 1967 Wulff helped Cooper set up a fly-in camp on White Lake, which Cooper renamed Anne Marie after his daughter. In 1979 Cooper sold the operation to Jack and Lorraine Cooper (no relation), who have run it ever since. The Coopers built another camp on Lake Minonopi, at the headwaters of the watershed, and a bigger lodge on Lake Minipi. All three facilities are accessible only by float plane. From these outposts, for the brief Labrador trout-fishing season, come all of the angling pressure on the Minipi brookies: About 100 anglers a year catching and releasing fish on single barbless hooks from 250 square miles of lakes and rivers.
The Coopers allow each fisherman to keep one trophy trout per week, presumably for mounting. The guides told me that they don’t remember the last time anybody actually killed a trout. It would be tolerated, but it’s clearly not encouraged.
The guides are reluctant even to let anglers handle the fish they catch. They weigh and unhook them in the net, handle them with gloves, revive and release them lovingly. When you want a photograph, you better do it quickly and respectfully. These trout are treasures.
* * *
In late July, darkness falls on Labrador around ten PM. The three hours after dinner are prime. If the wind lies down, the spinners will fall, and if the spinners fall, the big trout will come to the top to eat them.
We motor up to Big Hairy Lake, the headwaters of the Minipi system, sharp-eyed guide Gene Hart at the motor, anglers Andy Gill and I with our 4-weights locked and loaded. The lake has gone flat. A damp, chilly mist begins to fall. Typical of Labrador in July. We pull on rain jackets.
Gene cuts back the motor and we peer into a cove. “We got some bugs,” he announces. There are spinners on the water, big brown drakes, dark wings still upright, silhouettes against the glassy glare. It’s not a blanket spinnerfall. It rarely is, with the big mayflies. This is better. It’s enough to bring up the fish, but not so heavy that our imitations will be lost amid the multitudes.
We chug around behind the islands, we drift through The Narrows. We are looking for the swirl of a feeding trout. One swirl will jump our adrenaline.
Then Gene grunts. He is pointing. Andy, from the bow, says, “Oh, yeah.” I don’t see it. Gene throttles up the motor, sprints a quarter of a mile across the lake, then cuts it, and we glide silently into the cove.
There’s another swirl. I see it. It’s about 100 feet away. “Comin’ this way,” mutters Gene. He turns us broadside to the fish with a flick of his paddle. Andy and I stand up and strip line off our reels. We’ve done this before. He’ll drop his fly to his side of the swirl, leaving me a clear shot at my side. We will bracket the fish with our flies. We hope it will eat one of them. Neither of us much cares which one.
The trout swirls again, about 40 feet, two o’clock. Andy’s drake spinner lands about two feet to the left of the swirl. Mine falls about four feet to the right. I sense the fish is headed my way, though I couldn’t say why. Something about the shape of the swirl, the angle of the tail. I am tense, ready.
But instead it turns, lifts its back out of water, and eats Andy’s fly with an audible “slurp.” Andy tightens. His rod bends. “Heavy fish,” he mumbles. The trout slogs and bores down, but Andy gets it into Gene’s net after just a few minutes. On 2-X tippets we play these fish aggressively and try to net them before they’re exhausted. We’d rather lose a fish than injure or weaken it.
This one is a fat female. Gene weighs her in his net. Seven pounds even.
We chase two more swirls before darkness spreads over the lake. The first one comes up a few times before we’re in range, then disappears. That happens. We get two good shots at the second fish before it, too, stops playing our game.
We motor back to the lodge in the darkness, huddled in our parkas against the damp chill. We are satisfied. It was an excellent evening of trout fishing.
Around midnight we take a break from the poker table to watch the Northern Lights flash and flicker overhead.
* * *
In 1973 a biologist from Cornell studied the Minipi fish and concluded that they are comprised of two unique populations of brook trout. One group spends their lives in the rivers that connect the lakes. They mature at two years and rarely live more than four.
The other group, the lake dwellers, don’t mature until they’re four or five years old, and they often live for nine years. These fish typically grow to seven or eight pounds. Ninepounders, while remarkable, are caught every year. Some experts believe that a trout to eclipse Dr. Cook’s 14-pound 8-ounce Nipogon record presently lives somewhere in the Minipi drainage.
Nine IGFA line- and tippet-class world-record brook trout have come from the Minipi system, including the 10-pounder taken by Sal Borelli on 4-pound tippet in 1987.
The Minipi brookies have evolved their long-lived heavyweight genes over tens of thousands of generations in a perfect brook-trout environment—limitless cold clean water, abundant forage, few predators, no competitors. Best of all, humans have left them alone. They are not pellet-fed hybrids or hatchery made DNA freaks. These are natural, utterly wild creatures, perfectly adapted to their harsh world.
I keep coming back to their size because, after a few days of fishing for them, it’s tempting to begin taking them for granted, to yawn at the 5-pounders, to feel disappointed that the 6½- pounder didn’t drag the scale down to 7.
That would be a terrible mistake. Every single giant Minipi brook trout should be cherished.
The biggest brookie I ever caught in half a century of fishing in New England measured 15½ inches. It had no doubt been born in a hatchery.
The very first brook trout I hooked in Labr
ador weighed 2¾ pounds by the guide’s scale. It looked to be about 18 inches long. It was a gorgeous fish, and the biggest brookie of my life.
The guide snorted as he tipped the fish out of his net. “That one don’t count,” he said. “Book fish gotta be three pound. Under three pound, just a baby.”
It turned out to be the smallest Minipi trout I’ve ever caught.
* * *
Our camp is equipped with a satellite phone that occasionally works and a woodstove that throws out plenty of heat, which we appreciate after the sun sets. No telephone, no Internet, no television. It takes a day or two for busy men with high-stress jobs to adjust. We play poker every night. We tie flies. We read. One day merges into the next. Gradually, we relax.
Every morning after breakfast, three boats, each containing a guide and two anglers, disperse. Some head for the short portages to Big or Little Hairy. Some head down to the rapids at Shearpin or Big Red. Some decide to cruise Minonopi itself, or Green Pond. At different times of the season one or the other place heats up. The week before we arrived, the brown drakes were swarming on Green. Now the hatch seems to have moved up to Big Hairy.
We rarely spot rising fish in the mornings. Usually a breeze riffles the water, and it’s too early in the day for mayflies to hatch anyway. We throw deerhair mice and streamers in the moving water at the lake outlets and in the mouths of feeder streams. Sometimes we add six inches of wire to our 8-weight outfits, tie on a big foam gurgler or yellow bass popper, and catch a bunch of pike. The pike are vicious, the perfect antidote for a slow morning of trout fishing. Average big ones range up to 7 or 8 pounds, and there are plenty of double-digit northerns in these lakes. We have no qualms about keeping a mess of pike. Andy knows how to filet the bones out of them, and Elliot and Steven, our gourmet cooks, usurp Sylvia’s kitchen to prepare them for our table.
Trout Eyes Page 10
