Salvenius Fontinalis

There few fish that are steeped in legend, tradition, and lore. For the fly fishing set, that fish is the Atlantic Salmon. A large, ocean-going salmonid (more closely realated to brown trout than pacific salmon) that enters rugged rivers and is difficult to catch, when hooked runs, jumps, and generally leads to the exhaustion of the angler. There are few places left to catch ocean-run Atlantics in the US. There are many rivers in the remote portions of eastern, maritime Canada, but those rivers don't come cheap. It has been called the fish of kings, Salmo Salar, the name given to it by Julius Caesar and means "The Leaper." Good populations still exist in Ireland, the UK, and northern Europe. But again, they don't come cheap.

In Minnesota the fish that writes the unwritten stories is the muskellunge. A relative of the pike that can grow to enormous sizes, is tough to catch, and is generally an impressive fish to look at.

But, for those of us who are truly crazy, we like to head to the North Woods, to the stinkiest, most mosquito and black fly infested swamp with a tiny and cold creek running through it to catch a fish that seldom grows larger than twelve inches: the brook trout.

For many years I have headed North to streams that don't see people anymore. The sort of streams that run red with tanic acid through shallows, black in the holes, and yellow through the rapids. It's those black, foam-flecked pools, the hiding places, that I look toward. Beneath a good riffle I will swing a black and white wet fly called a Pass Lake with my short, 3weight rod. The little fish show themselves immediately slashing at the fly, missing only to come back and strike it again. The first sign of the fish is the white tips of the fins. Only an oil painter can match the sides of he fish; the red dots haloed with blue rings. The moss back dappled with gold spots and the orange belly--the entire pallette enables the fish to disapear into the stream substrate as soon as the angler releases it.

For me, it always about the rivers, slithering through spruce swamps and muskegs, some nearly covered by the dense tag alder branches or blackened entirely by white and red pine branches. Usually your only company will be a black bear, otter, pine marten, or most often a moose. Ocassionally, there are the wolves, their yellow eyes, and their howl.

What makes these little fish so important is that the places that they live within are the most pristine places we still have. They are a sign of health and wildness, of good country.