The rivers run low, flowing slow and cold in winter.
It amazes me, every year, that so much life could abound, dormant beneath the seemingly still currents that I see in winter. Even the water that gurgles and trickles over the riffles seems to run slower — although in my mind I know that physically it doesn’t.
There will be three, four, five times as much water running in the rivers in the spring when the trout are breaking the surface everywhere to feed on the myriad of bugs that like them now lie dormant, semi-comatose, and still except for enough motion to keep them alive, on the bottom.
It amazes me that the river in winter could contain so much life — even enough for one particular hatch with hundreds of trout showing themselves, breaking the surface to feed on the uncountable numbers of insects that seemed to miraculously appear on a particular day, in the moments I might watch them. And I think with amazement — this goes on and on, all through the summer and into the following fall, until again the water temperatures drop and this cold-blooded, invertebrate community of life again goes nearly dormant and seems to disappear.
During the depth of winter trout will manage to feed themselves but that’s about all. They won’t move further than necessary to take in nutrients. They won’t chase anything very far to catch it if something plentiful drifts by close, often enough to keep them nourished. They eat in a half-sleep and don’t jolt into wakefulness unless something jerks them out of their somnolence.
And then, when hooked and the harsh tug out of their lie wakes them up, the fight they put up can be sluggish. I often used to attribute this to cold water temperatures.
When I first came to the Bitterroot Valley in the mid-eighties, the skwala hatch was not the national phenomena that it is now. I was told, “This is a local hatch. Don’t be tellin’ your California friends about it or they’ll all be comin’ up here and ruinin’ it for us.”
I did as I was told. The hordes arrived anyway. My eventual bookings, when I got wise, didn’t add much to the traffic on the river.
The fish we caught then were sluggish. At last most of them were. They were skinny and out of shape. My presumption was that the trout were reacting to cold water temperatures, not feeding, and were therefore out of shape. There were ice shelves across the river in some places, most years, that apparently dropped the temperatures below to the point where trout would do no more than sustain life.
I was wrong.
The fires of 2000 produced years of healthy, robust trout from the first time they saw the hatches of springtime after their cold winters. These trout were well-fed, as fat as you’d expect to see them later in the season, and hard-fighting from the time the hook was set until they were in the net.
The difference? Nutrition brought in by the burns. Fire ash breaks down into potash, nitrogen and potassium, the same ingredients in Miracle-Gro. These elements feed the algae and plankton on the bottom of the food chain, which in turn feed the abundance of insects that feed the trout.
Roderick Haig-Brown was a magistrate judge in British Columbia and author of 30-odd books about the outdoors. His most enduring works are about the trout, steelhead and salmon of his native waters.
I’ve read a couple of Haig-Brown books but not all of them. His prose style is compelling, lyrical in places, and always carries his deep understanding and connection to his subjects — the magnificent fish in his native waters and their environs.
Haig-Brown, in my view, ranks right up there with writers like Aldo Leopold, John Muir and other conservationists whose deep-seated passion for their subject drives the prose style that conveys it.
I’ve read his classic “Fisherman’s Fall” and some of the others, his so-called season books including “Fisherman’s Winter,” “Fisherman’s Spring,” and “Fisherman’s Summer,” and have always been drawn to the title of his book, “A River Never Sleeps” but have never read it.
I’ve often wondered if that book is about what he knew of life beneath the water, especially in winter, that he seemed to absorb by osmosis?
What I’ve learned recently is that “A River Never Sleeps” is the initial expression of his conservation ethic and the dilemma he faced — we know what needs to be done, he states, but refuse to do it. The same is true here.
When I’ve recovered from a modest amount of holiday spending this winter I intend to order “A River Never Sleeps” and read it.
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