The brook trout breeds in the autumn, favors eddies, riffles, pools, and deep spots under the banks of the stream, and near rocks and fallen trees, and feeds on flies, small fish, worms, and other small life forms.
Its shape, weight, size, and color are influenced by its food, its age, its activity, its habitat, and its habits. Its color corresponds to the color of the water bottom and will change as the water bottom changes. If removed to a new water, where the bottom color is different from the bottom color of its first abode—lighter or darker, as the case may be,—it will gradually grow to a corresponding shade, blending with its new habitat just as its colors suited the stones and grasses and earthy materials of its native domain.
In weight, the brook trout ranges up to ten pounds in large waters. There is a record of one weighing eleven pounds. This specimen was taken in Northwestern Maine. The species averages threequarters of a pound to one pound and a half in the streams, and one pound to three pounds in the lakes and ponds. It occurs between latitude 32-1/2° and 55°, in the lakes and streams of the Atlantic watershed, near the sources of a few rivers flowing into the Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico, and some of the southern affluents of Hudson Bay, its range being limited by the western foothills of the Alleghanies, extending about three hundred miles from the coast, except about the Great Lakes, in the northern tributaries of which it abounds. It also inhabits the headwaters of the Chattahoochee, in the southern spurs of the Georgia Alleghanies, and tributaries of the Catawba in North Carolina and clear waters of the great islands of the Gulf of St. Lawrence—Anticosti, Cape Breton, Prince Edward, and Newfoundland; and abounds in New York, Michigan, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Maine. Long Island, Canada, Wisconsin, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts.
My favorite rod for stream trout fishing is a cork-handled, all-lancewood rod of three or four ounces in weight and eight feet in length, or a rod of similar length weighing four or five ounces and made of split bamboo—the best split bamboo of the best workmanship. The cheap, so-called split bamboo of the dry-goods store bargain (?) counter, retailed for a price that would not pay for the mere wrapping of the correct article, is a flimsy, decorative thing, and would collapse, or, worse still, bend one way and stay that way, if used on the stream. The fly-rod material must be springy and resiliently so, and the rod must be constructed so as to permit of this condition.
The reel I favor is a small, narrow, light, all-rubber or narrow aluminum common-click reel, holding twenty-five yards of the thinnest-calibered silk, waterproof-enameled line.
My leader is a brown-stained one of silk gut, twelve feet in length. The leader should be fresh and firm, flexible and fine, not a dried-up, brittle, unyielding, snappy snarl of the salesman's discarded sample box that breaks at the mere touch, or releases the flies at the first cast or parts at the first strike—if by some miraculous mischance you get this far with it. The leaders, a half-dozen of them, should be carried, when not in actual use, in a flat, aluminum, pocket-fitting box between two dampened flannel mats (though not preserved this way in close season), so as to have them thoroughly limp from being water soaked, that you may more readily and more safely adjust them, for break they surely will if handled in a dry state.
The willow creel, in which the spoil of the day is deposited, should be, I think, about the size of a small hand-satchel. To this is fastened a leather strap, with a broad, shoulder-protecting band of stout canvas. This I sling over the right shoulder, allowing the creel to hang above the back part of the left hip where it will least interfere with me during the fight with fontinalis.
The landing net I use is a little one of egg shape, made of cane with no metal whatsoever, and it has a linen mesh about ten inches in width and eighteen inches in length. The handle is a trifle over one foot in length. To this I tie one end of a stout but light-weight flexible and small-calibered cord, or a stretch of small rubber tube, and the other end of this I tie to a button on my coat under my chin, throwing the net over my left shoulder to lie on my back until called into service.
The clothing should be of dark-gray wool of light weight. I wear a lightly woven gray sweater under my coat when the weather is cool.
I have plenty of pockets in my trouting coat, and I make it a practice to tie a string to nearly everything I carry in them—shears, hook-file, knife, match-box, tobacco-pouch, pipe, purse, field-glasses, fly-book, etc.—so that I will not mislay them ordinarily, or drop them in the rushing current during some exciting moment.