17

The Natives of Minipi

From the window of our Twin Otter in the summer of 2004, the watery tundra of Labrador looked exactly the way it did from the window of Lee Wulff’s Super Cub in 1957—which was exactly the way it has looked since the glaciers retreated 20,000 years ago. It’s all flat and green and wet. No roads. No dwellings. Just 115,000 square miles of nothing but lakes and rivers, many of them nameless, and bogs and rocks and scraggly spruce forest and moss, from horizon to horizon.

From 1000 feet, the lakes of the Minipi watershed got Wulff’s attention. They are shallow—no more than 6 to 12 feet deep in most places—so the sunlight penetrates to the bottom, making them incredibly fertile. In the brief Labrador growing season (mid-June through early September) the Minipi system is a nursery for oversized mayflies—brown and green drakes and hexagenia in sizes 6 to 10—and for the biggest, healthiest, purest strain of wild native brook trout in the world.

Put the two together—brookies up to nine pounds sipping big duns and spinners (and any reasonable imitation tied to a 2X tippet) off a flat lake surface—and you’ve got a unique and precious resource and a fly-fishing experience that Wulff called “the greatest brook trout fishing in North America.”

It’s as good today as it was in 1957. I have fished there twice in the past decade, a total of twelve full days and evenings. Both times the guides were complaining about the spotty hatches and the slow fishing. I landed an average of slightly more than two brook trout-of-a-lifetime per day, all but one of which weighed over four pounds (Minipi fish are weighed, not measured). My biggest, a 7¾-pounder, inhaled a deerhair mouse (the guides call it a “moose”). Most of the fish I caught had been spotted gulping drake duns and spinners, and they sucked my big dry flies off the flat lake surface with unforgettable kissing sounds.

Slow fishing? Compared to what? I’m not sure I’d want to catch more than two trophy brook trout a day although, according to the three camps’ meticulously-kept log books, their guests do it routinely.

One of my partners, Steven Cooper, released a brookie that weighed 8½ pounds. Elliot Schildkrout, fishing from the same boat on the same day, landed an 8-pounder. Both fish ate dry flies.

* * *

When he realized what he had discovered, Wulff lobbied the Canadian and provincial governments to protect the Minipi waters with special regulations. “A trout is too valuable to be caught only once,” he famously said, “and that goes double for the giant brookies of Minipi.”

The governments responded by granting an exclusive license for outfitting the Minipi watershed to Wulff’s friend, local guide Ray Cooper. In 1967 Wulff helped Cooper set up a fly-in camp on White Lake, which Cooper renamed Anne Marie after his daughter. In 1979 Cooper sold the operation to Jack and Lorraine Cooper (no relation), who have run it ever since. The Coopers built another camp on Lake Minonopi, at the headwaters of the watershed, and a bigger lodge on Lake Minipi. All three facilities are accessible only by float plane. From these outposts, for the brief Labrador trout-fishing season, come all of the angling pressure on the Minipi brookies: About 100 anglers a year catching and releasing fish on single barbless hooks from 250 square miles of lakes and rivers.

The Coopers allow each fisherman to keep one trophy trout per week, presumably for mounting. The guides told me that they don’t remember the last time anybody actually killed a trout. It would be tolerated, but it’s clearly not encouraged.

The guides are reluctant even to let anglers handle the fish they catch. They weigh and unhook them in the net, handle them with gloves, revive and release them lovingly. When you want a photograph, you better do it quickly and respectfully. These trout are treasures.

* * *

In late July, darkness falls on Labrador around ten PM. The three hours after dinner are prime. If the wind lies down, the spinners will fall, and if the spinners fall, the big trout will come to the top to eat them.

We motor up to Big Hairy Lake, the headwaters of the Minipi system, sharp-eyed guide Gene Hart at the motor, anglers Andy Gill and I with our 4-weights locked and loaded. The lake has gone flat. A damp, chilly mist begins to fall. Typical of Labrador in July. We pull on rain jackets.

Gene cuts back the motor and we peer into a cove. “We got some bugs,” he announces. There are spinners on the water, big brown drakes, dark wings still upright, silhouettes against the glassy glare. It’s not a blanket spinnerfall. It rarely is, with the big mayflies. This is better. It’s enough to bring up the fish, but not so heavy that our imitations will be lost amid the multitudes.

We chug around behind the islands, we drift through The Narrows. We are looking for the swirl of a feeding trout. One swirl will jump our adrenaline.

Then Gene grunts. He is pointing. Andy, from the bow, says, “Oh, yeah.” I don’t see it. Gene throttles up the motor, sprints a quarter of a mile across the lake, then cuts it, and we glide silently into the cove.

There’s another swirl. I see it. It’s about 100 feet away. “Comin’ this way,” mutters Gene. He turns us broadside to the fish with a flick of his paddle. Andy and I stand up and strip line off our reels. We’ve done this before. He’ll drop his fly to his side of the swirl, leaving me a clear shot at my side. We will bracket the fish with our flies. We hope it will eat one of them. Neither of us much cares which one.

The trout swirls again, about 40 feet, two o’clock. Andy’s drake spinner lands about two feet to the left of the swirl. Mine falls about four feet to the right. I sense the fish is headed my way, though I couldn’t say why. Something about the shape of the swirl, the angle of the tail. I am tense, ready.

But instead it turns, lifts its back out of water, and eats Andy’s fly with an audible “slurp.” Andy tightens. His rod bends. “Heavy fish,” he mumbles. The trout slogs and bores down, but Andy gets it into Gene’s net after just a few minutes. On 2-X tippets we play these fish aggressively and try to net them before they’re exhausted. We’d rather lose a fish than injure or weaken it.

This one is a fat female. Gene weighs her in his net. Seven pounds even.

We chase two more swirls before darkness spreads over the lake. The first one comes up a few times before we’re in range, then disappears. That happens. We get two good shots at the second fish before it, too, stops playing our game.

We motor back to the lodge in the darkness, huddled in our parkas against the damp chill. We are satisfied. It was an excellent evening of trout fishing.

Around midnight we take a break from the poker table to watch the Northern Lights flash and flicker overhead.

* * *

In 1973 a biologist from Cornell studied the Minipi fish and concluded that they are comprised of two unique populations of brook trout. One group spends their lives in the rivers that connect the lakes. They mature at two years and rarely live more than four.

The other group, the lake dwellers, don’t mature until they’re four or five years old, and they often live for nine years. These fish typically grow to seven or eight pounds. Ninepounders, while remarkable, are caught every year. Some experts believe that a trout to eclipse Dr. Cook’s 14-pound 8-ounce Nipogon record presently lives somewhere in the Minipi drainage.

Nine IGFA line- and tippet-class world-record brook trout have come from the Minipi system, including the 10-pounder taken by Sal Borelli on 4-pound tippet in 1987.

The Minipi brookies have evolved their long-lived heavyweight genes over tens of thousands of generations in a perfect brook-trout environment—limitless cold clean water, abundant forage, few predators, no competitors. Best of all, humans have left them alone. They are not pellet-fed hybrids or hatchery made DNA freaks. These are natural, utterly wild creatures, perfectly adapted to their harsh world.

I keep coming back to their size because, after a few days of fishing for them, it’s tempting to begin taking them for granted, to yawn at the 5-pounders, to feel disappointed that the 6½- pounder didn’t drag the scale down to 7.

That would be a terrible mistake. Every single giant Minipi brook trout should be cherished.

The biggest brookie I ever caught in half a century of fishing in New England measured 15½ inches. It had no doubt been born in a hatchery.

The very first brook trout I hooked in Labrador weighed 2¾ pounds by the guide’s scale. It looked to be about 18 inches long. It was a gorgeous fish, and the biggest brookie of my life.

The guide snorted as he tipped the fish out of his net. “That one don’t count,” he said. “Book fish gotta be three pound. Under three pound, just a baby.”

It turned out to be the smallest Minipi trout I’ve ever caught.

* * *

Our camp is equipped with a satellite phone that occasionally works and a woodstove that throws out plenty of heat, which we appreciate after the sun sets. No telephone, no Internet, no television. It takes a day or two for busy men with high-stress jobs to adjust. We play poker every night. We tie flies. We read. One day merges into the next. Gradually, we relax.

Every morning after breakfast, three boats, each containing a guide and two anglers, disperse. Some head for the short portages to Big or Little Hairy. Some head down to the rapids at Shearpin or Big Red. Some decide to cruise Minonopi itself, or Green Pond. At different times of the season one or the other place heats up. The week before we arrived, the brown drakes were swarming on Green. Now the hatch seems to have moved up to Big Hairy.

We rarely spot rising fish in the mornings. Usually a breeze riffles the water, and it’s too early in the day for mayflies to hatch anyway. We throw deerhair mice and streamers in the moving water at the lake outlets and in the mouths of feeder streams. Sometimes we add six inches of wire to our 8-weight outfits, tie on a big foam gurgler or yellow bass popper, and catch a bunch of pike. The pike are vicious, the perfect antidote for a slow morning of trout fishing. Average big ones range up to 7 or 8 pounds, and there are plenty of double-digit northerns in these lakes. We have no qualms about keeping a mess of pike. Andy knows how to filet the bones out of them, and Elliot and Steven, our gourmet cooks, usurp Sylvia’s kitchen to prepare them for our table.

In the afternoon, some drakes usually hatch in the sheltered coves, and if it’s not too windy—often it is too windy—we hunt down sipping trout and drop dry flies in front of them.

In the backs of our minds, we are anticipating the evening, hoping the wind dies and the spinners fall. It usually happens. It gets intense, hunting and chasing swirling trout, as the sun drops behind the spruce forest in the west and the moon rises in the east.

On our last evening in Labrador we linger after dark, reluctant to quit for good, all three boats parked in the Big Hairy outlet where a couple of trout are cruising in big circles, sipping fallen spinners. The moonlight catches the widening rings of each tiny dimple, and we aim blindly for them. We cannot see our flies on the water. We cannot even see the other boats. All nine of us—six anglers and three guides—talk among ourselves in the dark, alerting each other to a trout’s riseform within casting distance.

Then—I don’t know how I know, because I can’t see anything, but I do know, for certain—I say, “Got ‘im.” I lift my rod, and the trout is on.

It’s a male, 5½ pounds on Peter’s scale, which we read by flashlight.

Murmurs of “way to go” and “nice fish” and “good way to end it” drift from the other boats. Then comes the soft chatter of reels taking in line, and the outboards start up, and all three boats chug back to camp. Tomorrow morning the Twin Otter will glide up to the dock and take us back to civilization.