Brookies. In every inch of this small stream where a fish could be — brookies.
Fat, strong, eager. Beautiful black-jawed women with bright red bellies. I almost thought they were bleeding. The strikes were so violent that I thought they must be starving. Each stomach was filled with grasshoppers and crayfish. The fish were ravenous and dominated every pool of the creek in lowland, choked with willows. While I was fighting the trout through a run of mayflies, other fish rose to the surface.
Fishing was great.
As a self-proclaimed apostle of the church, I was overwhelmed by the number and size of brookies. I had a fantasy that I could drop a fly anywhere and watch it disappear into a swirl of water brushed by speckled sides. The day was apocalyptic in the Rocky Mountains. I was surrounded by brook trout. They were jumping into the 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.
