We sneak up to each spot, crawling from rock to tree and back, trying our best to see without seeing. Looking for the white of an open mouth flashing in the dark turbulence. Hoping for a glimpse of the white-edged fin of a brook trout lazily holding its place in the water. We moved a yard at a time, stalking the water like herons.Todd, a deer and turkey hunter at heart, said it felt more like hunting than fishing.
And it was. Nervous as deer, we still-hunted our way up this creek, trying to avoid even the lightest crunch of streambed gravel. Our very whispers seemed to echo through the mute forest like warning bells for fish whose simple survival instinct surpass the whole of our modern brains. The stifling quiet of this forest betrays the peaceful bubbling of the small brook.
We only fished few hundred yards, swapping triggers every couple holes and getting a strike every time we put a fly in the water. These fish grow up in relatively poor water and are eager to try anything that looks edible. They’ll strike an indicator so freely that you have to use a bushy dry fly or risk spooking the entire run trying to lodge a tuft of yarn into their gill plates. I fished a modest purple haze; Todd fished a dry-dropper with a small grasshopper suspending something small and beaded. It didn’t matter because those little bastards hit whatever we threw at them.