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Bangor Metro >  May 2006 >  Back to Brookies

Illustration by: Brad Eden

I have a small brook that tumbles through my property. It’s born of a spring a mile or so west of my house and it chortles past my barn and spills into the Penobscot River/Marsh Stream watershed—a short skip and a jump downstream. This tributary is not much more than a trickle most of the year, but it rushes and swells with rain and winter runoff during the spring. I can hear the rumble from my bedroom window. Come May, the flow has settled down into a steady rhythm of water over rock and I can be found prowling the bank, kneeling down to peer into the deeper pools, looking for an ephemeral flash of mottled green.
I’m searching for the brook trout that had been hunkered down in the estuary all winter and are making their yearly pilgrimage upstream.

These stream squaretails, or brookies as they are often called, average six inches long, with the largest straining to reach nine inches. Occasionally you’ll find where an industrious beaver has built a dam on a small stream, creating a mini-pond for the trout, which respond by growing big by brook trout standards—12 inches being a real lunker. Regardless, these are native and wild fish, not grown in concrete hatchery tanks and fed by a timed feeder and later to be stocked into ponds and lakes. These small representatives have an olive-green upper back with pale vermiculations: a perfect camouflage pattern. They wear a series of purplish oval markings covering their sides. Their lower body is predominantly orange and sprinkled with yellow and red spots haloed with blue. The white belly supports fins of orange and yellow and white leading edges ahead of thin black lines. These colors, although somewhat muted during spring and summer, become brilliant during the fall spawn. They are simply special, like speckled jewels.

I spend considerable time in the spring fly-fishing on rivers, ponds, and lakes with fancy flies and spin fishing with an assortment of garish lure. But sometimes you need to use what works. In the case of a small brook with overhanging branches, that’s a gob of wriggling earthworms, or “garden hackle,” the term used by fly fishermen who reduce themselves to this primitive form of angling. It’s become a ritual with my daughters to head up to the garden with a shovel and a coffee can in search of garden hackle, and then to catch a few of our brookies for the frying pan. They are, in a word, delicious—with a salmon-like pink flesh that speaks of their wild, genetically unaltered heritage.

I’ve caught black salmon over 40 inches long on the fabled Miramichi River in New Brunswick, Canada, and I’ve caught a monster striped bass that towed the boat around a Down East harbor for close to an hour before I was able to land it. I’ve hoisted in heavy lake trout, hooked leaping rainbow trout, and boated the much-revered landlocked salmon. I’ve also caught trophy small- and largemouth bass, and pickerel the length of an arm. But it’s the relatively diminutive wild eastern brook trout that are dearest to my heart.
So go ahead and get back to basics. Grab a simple fishin’ pole, dig some garden hackle, and find where a brook passes under a country road. Follow it a ways until you find a hidden pool. Chances are there are some speckled jewels waiting for you there.


Brad Eden is an artist, writer, Registered Maine Master Guide, and owner/editor of the online magazine www.uplandjournal.com.