There’s always a bigger fish
Advancements in the tripartite theory of cognitive motivation in trout
To help find fish in unfamiliar rivers, I have reduced trout behavior to three simple drives:
They are lazy, hungry, and occasionally, frisky.
This summer I added a fourth facet to my model.
I was lucky enough to visit one of the last great native brook trout fisheries in the world. To get to the Churchill River system and its many tributaries in central Labrador, you fly and fly. Then you wait for a break in the weather and eventually you load into a float plane and you fly some more. Then you land on a lake a hundred fifty miles from the nearest road and pull up to a dock where you change into your waders without even taking a bathroom break. Because oh my god you’ve been traveling for days and you’re really desperate to get out on the water and fish.
Then you get to stand in the same spot in a river and three times in a row you get to catch the biggest brook trout of your life. It’s spectacular.
I normally frequent little mountain streams where a ten-inch fish is a big deal. In Labrador, twenty-inch fish, each amazing and primal and profoundly unlikely, were nonetheless routine.
You’d be forgiven for thinking a trout that size would be a river-boss, lazing and snacking in slack water without a care in the world. But there’s always a bigger fish.
Enter the northern pike, a voracious, toothy carnivore. They’ll routinely pass the three foot mark, tipping the scales in the fifteen pound range. Some are even bigger.
Professional fishing guides, strong men inured to a life of outdoor adventure, shriek in fear and scramble back into the canoe if a pike that size takes a run at them during a fight.
Aside from eating the occasional professional fishing guide, pike like sashimi. They spend their time in slack water, watching, waiting, stalking. A single explosive burst from a long muscular tail gets them within chomping distance of most prey. The brook trout we caught had scars and bite marks on their haunches, reminders that danger lurks in the eddies behind every boulder.
Lucky for the trout, pike are sprinters, not marathoners. They can’t cut it for long in fast water. The trout, efficient and muscular, hide in the safety of the rapids.
Without the wisdom of professional fishing guides on my side, I would never have skated a dry fly across such frothy water. I would have applied my theory, cast into slack water, and missed out on some monstrous fish.
In these waters, lazy trout do not live long enough to become big trout.
It’s an incongruous data point. When that happens, you either ignore the data or change the theory. And those big brook trout were too pretty to ignore.
I have revised my tripartite theory. Factoring in fear of perdition, it’s starting to sound like a Thomas Hobbes treatise…
Not so much nasty brutish and short as lazy hungry frisky and scared.