In a couple places there was just enough room for the canoe to pass in between protruding limbs and naked, sun-bleached trunks. They looked like old bones. Skeletons of the woods in their temporary resting places until higher waters would eventually move them again. They’d end up in the lake someday as smaller, whiter, polished driftwood stacked against a far shore.
With the temperature right around thirty-five degrees the precipitation coming down all day was wet. It’s an odd place to find yourself. Standing in water only a degree warmer than the air, looking at everything you see covered in snow, while rain soaks and adds four pounds of cold to your favorite hat.
Spruce traps are young Spruce trees bunched together tighter than a full dance floor in a Miami night club on a Saturday night, growing in the shadows of old spruce trees and on top of the fallen and tangled generation before them. The old generations of tree trunks and fallen branches lay in piles and crossed like natures own booby traps, covered with moss and rotting, and are so hard to navigate that even the deer and bears avoid them. The chances of broken ankles and legs are probably greater in a spruce trap than they are in a game of Twister with an MMA fighter. When you can, you go around at all costs.
A couple times as we reeled in to move on or to change the fly simply because we were bored with such easy fishing and wanted to try to find the wrong fly to make it more challenging, brook trout attacked practically at our feet just as the fly was lifted from the water and I decided that perhaps I should be doing a figure 8 with the dry fly at the end of my rod tip like you do for musky at the side of the boat.
As we walked the dirt road in the rain, felt soles beneath wading boots hushed our steps. We remarked about all the worms lying about on the road, joking about all the flies fly fisherman tried to force feed to trout. Someone said it and we all laughed. “Trout like worms. They like worms you know.” I laughed and we carried on comically about it, but I was thinking of something else in my mind.
Now I know I’m a fisherman. I’m very aware that the word of a fisherman is to be taken lightly, or to be taken with a grain of salt, or to be completely disregarded in some instances, say, when hands are held out and the statement “It was this big” is uttered. But...
Shopping Cart
Your cart is currently empty.
Enable cookies to use the shopping cart