Let us now praise Forrest Bonney, the author of an instantly indispensable book about Maine’s beloved but beleaguered native trout, Salvelinus fontinalus, the brook trout, also known as the squaretail. For my money the brookie is the handsomest fish that swims, with its sunset-orange flanks, silver belly and ruby-red blue-haloed spots. The brookie is a fighter, too, more a brawler like Marciano than a Fancy Dan stylist like Sugar Ray or Ali. The brookie takes you deep into a corner and slugs it out, while the show-off landlocked salmon leaps and dances, as much in the air as in the water. The salmon is a visitor from away, a seagoing tourist who got stranded during a visit a few thousand years ago and couldn’t get home; the brookie is a native.

Bonney, the brook trout specialist of the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife, has rendered excellent service to all fans of the brookie with his book, Squaretails, and to anyone concerned with Maine’s natural resources in general. He answers questions many of us have pondered from time to time about the trout’s habits and habitat, and he also paints a distressing picture of what we have done to that habitat in the centuries since Europeans first arrived in Maine. Almost immediately after the arrival of the Europeans, deforestation began with no thought of the consequences to the rivers and streams and their populations of trout, or the consequences to the human populations downriver. With clearcutting came runoff, flooding and stream warming, all devastating to the brook trout, who likes his water clear and cold. Concurrent with the timbering came the dams to impound the water for the Spring log drives, and more dams to power gristmills and sawmills, and in the blink of an eye Nature’s work of many millennia was trashed, maybe irrevocably in some cases. Before the loggers arrived in great numbers, Benedict Arnold’s expedition to attack Quebec found brook trout aplenty in the Kennebec watershed. Bonney cites the journals of the expedition, which he borrowed from Kenneth Roberts’s March to Quebec: “...nothing being more common than a man’s taking 8 or 10 dozen in one hour’s time which generally weigh a half a pound a piece.” (Italics mine)

A century later, the “sports” who arrived in the North Woods to fish for the big brookies caught nearly as many, and killed every last one they caught. Habitat degradation, alien species introduced by amateur “biologists” and unregulated slaughter nearly did to the brook trout population what the buffalo hunters did to the American bison, until management and regulations saved what was left. Today, Bonney says, brookies are found in more than a thousand Maine lakes, though they’re scarce in many of those lakes; and in over 22,000 miles of streams. The brook trout is a precious Maine resource, but its value has come to be appreciated relatively recently, and it will require vigilance, cooperation, hard work and good science to keep the brookie swimming happily in Maine waters. If you want to help, you might start by reading Forrest Bonney’s fine book.

Does anyone fish with wet flies anymore? Besides streamers and nymphs, I mean. Time was when the wet fly was dominant in the flybox. Ray Bergman's classic volume, Trout, has many pages of color plates of wet flies, outnumbering the dries, but I hardly ever meet an angler who's using them. If I recall correctly -- and the odds are fifty-fifty here -- the first fly I ever fished was a wet, possibly a Parmachene Belle. The niceties of dry-fly fishing came a bit later.

The wet flies have history, and names to evoke it: Rich Widow, Montreal, Professor, Lord Baltimore, Beamis Stream, Cupsuptic, Dr. Breck and Dr. Burke, Jennie Lind, Lady Mills (no relation), Rangeley, Richardson, Roosevelt. And of course the aforementioned Parmachene, named for the secluded and very private water where President Dwight Eisenhower cast into the waters below Little Boy Falls to catch one of the many trout that had been dumped there in advance of the presidential rustication.

I'm thinking of wet flies because I caught a hell of a nice salmon on a wet fly last week. I'm not great on names -- I'll forget yours two nanoseconds after we're introduced -- but it was a pretty thing with a yellow body and a mallard wing, and almost as soon as it hit the water a fish hit it hard. Fifteen minutes or so later, I netted a 21-inch landlocked salmon that weighed, what, 4-5 pounds? I have a measuring stick so the length is accurate but no scale, so I guess the weight like the man at the carnival.

And this is not the first time the wet fly has proved deadly at the Dam. A summer ago a wet with a bright green body took fish on almost every cast before it was chewed to shreds.

As the days dwindle down and the leaves turn to gold (more cliches, anyone?), and the salmon and trout are fat and feisty, don't forget the wet fly. The pattern may go back to the dawn of time -- but so do the fish.

It always seems to me to be an act of blind faith, tying a #20 midge to a fine tippet and expecting to catch a fish of any size. I read Midge Magic by Don Holbrook and Ed Koch and I understand that a trout's diet includes a lot of tiny insects. But it's one thing to read about that and to understand it on an intellectual level. It's another thing to squint through a magnifying lens and with clumsy fingers attach a nearly invisible object to a nearly invisible line and toss it into the swirling waters of the dam pool in hopes that a fish will a) see it, and b) want to eat it. And yet, faith is often rewarded, as mine was with an acrobatic 18-inch landlocked salmon. When I netted the fish, the little fly simply dropped off his lower lip. I love it when that happens.

I also caught salmon on a slightly larger fly tied by my pal Doug Mawhinney, a #16 Straw Man, another example of faith over reason. The Straw Man is simply deer hair wound around a hook and clipped as close as a Marine's sideburns. The result is a tiny tan cigar on a hook -- no hackle, no tail, no wing, no beadhead. Does it catch fish? "It oughtta be outlawed," Doug says. After a few days of fishing I had to call Doug and ask him to tie up a new bunch for me, because so many big fish were wearing them as lip jewelry after breaking off my tippet.

Of course my overly exhuberant response to strikes had a lot to do with the breakage. That's a habit I've never been able to overcome. When I first started flyfishing, catching small trout in the Alder Stream, many a startled 7-inch brookie went sailing into the alders behind me after chomping down on what it thought was a tasty snack but turned out to be my Royal Wulff. I keep telling myself to be patient, controlled, to raise the rod as though I were picking up the phone. But then comes the tug on the line, and heart and reason stop simultaneously.

Farewell to two fine dogs. Doug Mawhinney's mannered little sheepdog Lucy, she of the astonishing vertical leap, and Tedd Brown's chocolate Lab Bailey, a loyal and lovable rascal, have trotted off this mortal coil, bound for pooch paradise. They're missed.