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Coldwater Brook Trout

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Illustration by Adelaide Tyrol

Under the hemlocks, our brook takes on a wildness, tumbling down terraced ledges, rushing around boulders, fretting over rocks. In the tree-cooled waters, I see brook trout fingerlings, no more than a few inches long. During the summer they gathered in grottos beneath the overhanging bank and patrolled nearby pools for terrestrial insects trapped by the surface film or mayflies just leaving the water. Where the brook rushes over stones, they check for larva of caddisflies, for nymphs of mayflies and stoneflies, for damselflies, and maybe even sculpin fry. Now, suspended in the current, hungry trout wait for what little November has to offer them. Spotting me, they’re gone, passing through my field of vision so quickly that I’m not sure I’ve seen a fish or a speck of sunlight.

I’m not a fisherman as are most of the people who try to sneak up on brook trout. Lying motionless on the bank, I see the trout’s distinctive white stripe on the leading edge of the lower fins and dark squiggles covering an olive-green back. If it moves into the light, the large yellow spots that pepper a trout’s sides become visible. But when a live brook trout rests in someone’s creel, I can see the subtler colors: the iridescent aqua-blue sides with small, blue-haloed red spots, the orange-tinted fins.

Brook trout aren’t actually trout: they are char, members of the genus Salvelinus, which includes lake trout. Brook trout and lake trout descended from a common ancestor in eastern North America during the Pliocene epoch, about two to five million years ago. According to the fossil record, lake trout have changed very little since then, confining themselves to relatively stable, deep-water lakes across the northern half of the continent from coast to coast and above the Arctic Circle. Native brook trout remain an Atlantic drainage fish, yet they have adapted to a much wider range of habitats than their lacustrine cousins: they live in beaver ponds and cold-water lakes, and in streams ranging in size from our jump-across brook to the Connecticut River. In Maine and the Canadian Maritimes, an anadromous race of brook trout comes inland from the sea to spawn.

The trout I’m watching line up in the current behind the half-submerged trunk of an old white pine. One. Two. Three….Eleven. Twelve. They wait for food, paying no attention to me. Water spills over the smooth, bare wood. The fish remain suspended in place, inhaling the current as it pours over them.

Because they live in swift-flowing water, these brook trout must be adept at holding their position in the current or they’ll be swept downstream. A streamlined body, tapered at both ends, widest just in front of the dorsal fin that is little more than a third of the way down its length, makes for perfect ballast in water. The trout undulate their bodies against the flow and fan their broad, square tails, while their fine scales form an almost frictionless surface in the rushing water. Each trout extends its dorsal fin, which billows in the current, stabilizing the fish.

Brook trout capture prey in all levels of the water column. Their eyes furnish excellent binocular vision in front and above. Although laterally their eyes are largely monocular, they can scan the bottom too. But in November, there’s very little insect life in the stream.

Hungry trout would love cluster flies, I muse. I return home and pick 20 or so from my office window, where a congregation is assembled in the sun, and surgically remove a wing from each so that when the flies hit the water they will spin in a circle, broadcasting concentric distress signals as they float downstream.

The next afternoon, I gather up the flies in a baby food jar and drive toward the lake. Parking, I enter the woods, the flies buzzing in my pocket, cross a meadow, and intersect the brook below the smooth white pine. A hundred yards downstream stands a living pine. Its scoured roots bend around a cavern in the undercut bank. A seven-inch male whose belly and sides are washed in red and whose lower jaw is slightly enlarged, tends a smaller female. Amorous fish, the trout will eventually consummate their nuptials by depositing eggs and milt in the swift, cool water. Brook trout eggs adhere to gravel, which keeps them from being washed away, endure the winter, and hatch in spring, when their world is ripe and filled with things to eat. They see me and swim downstream.

I hang over the lip of the bank and peer into the water. Fourteen trout that range in size from two to four inches gather, two and three abreast. I shake out the cluster flies. A trout rises. Hits. Another rises. Hits. And another. Eventually, only two flies remain, then one. As I stare at the remaining fly, a trout shoots up from the grotto.

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