Native coastal cutthroat used to grow large and beautiful in this lake, feeding on threespine sticklebacks. The sticklebacks are still there, wandering in great numbers around the shallow areas of the lake, darting in and out an underwater forest of aquatic plants and stems of yellow pond lilies. With the creek that joined the lake to the river now destroyed, the native coastal cutthroat are all but gone, replaced by a piscivorous strain of rainbow trout from the local hatchery.
Stickleback Lake is easily accessible and fairly attractive, but by virtue of its difficulties, has done quite nicely in keeping the fishing crowds away. The loud stories of those fortunate enough to be rewarded bring more fishers to the lake, but without persistence, failure here is a lot more common than success, and most of the newcomers leave empty-handed and disheartened, never to return. It’s easy to be fooled by Stickleback Lake. On calm and sunny days, the lake is irresistibly inviting, but its small size does not make it particularly suggestive of good fishing or large fish, and when these days of promise turn out to be cruelly blank and hopeless, without the slightest sign of fish, one's faith is badly shaken and one may be misled to dismiss the lake altogether.
It took me two years of obstinacy and doubt before I decided to try this lake again after my first visit there. My introduction was nothing short of dismal. I worked my flies all day long, down deep and in mid water and through the shallows and along the bottom and close to the surface. I searched for fish in every corner of the lake and found nothing. At dusk, a fingerling finally jumped close by the weeds and thoughtlessly I whipped my line towards it. It struck the fly and got hooked. Fortunately it shook itself free on the way to the float tube. Desperation had made me act like a barbarian, but I wasn't about to take my frustrations out on tiny little fish.
I paused for a moment to pull myself together, when suddenly, a splash resounded from behind me. I turned around and saw the ripples of the rise spreading out of an enormous crater. This was more than a fair possibility; it was a flash of light and sudden hope that all those trying hours could be salvaged. My spirit lifted and wonderful strength infused my arms and torso. I needed only two or three false casts to reach the centre of the rings and my line was already whistling through the air. I was about to shoot it forward when a beaver surfaced a few yards away from the "rise," and dove again at once, slapping his tail on the water. I was instantly paralysed. The fly line came crashing down on me and coiled itself around my head and float tube. This little lake was mocking me. I reeled the line in, nipped the fly off, and went home.
In the two years that followed, I listened patiently to many embellished stories about Stickleback Lake. Every so often, apparently the lake was giving away large fish—to worms and stinky baits mind you, but all the same, it seemed this lake had something genuine to offer. I sorted through the trustworthy and the suspect news and tried to keep my head cool and my judgement level. Finally, however, the temptation grew strong enough to disperse the dark memories of failure. One early May morning, I paid the lake another visit. Even then, I returned to the lake expecting nothing—and the lake gave me exactly what I expected. But this time around, just when it seemed that the day had little else to offer, an auspicious event kept my hopes alive.
A pileated woodpecker made an unusually bold appearance from the wooded area at the far side of the lake. Distinctly male, with a full red cap and red moustache, strikingly colourful against the green backdrop of the willows, the bird swooped down close by me, low over the rushes, and perched on a standing snag along an overgrown trail. I watched him circle the trunk several times and could hear him pecking at the wood long after I had floated by.
On my way out, I decided to inspect the scene. The trail, clearly defined at first, quickly disappeared under a tangle of willow branches, painfully difficult to push through. The snag stood at the corner of a small clearing. At the base of the dead tree, abandoned spider webs, foiled and dangling in the breeze, were peppered with fine white particles. It was sawdust, pouring out from every crack around the fissured, decaying trunk. Within this tree there was a nest of carpenter ants. Unlike termites, carpenter ants do not eat wood, but build their nests in it, excavating smooth-walled galleries and dumping the chewed-up wood through the windows of their entry.
On the outside, the scene appeared calm, with only a small number of worker ants shuffling in and out of the cracks as though measuring the damage. The turmoil was probably a lot more serious inside the nest, where panic-stricken workers would be hustling frantically to move the queen, the eggs, the larvae and the pupae in the protection of the deepest and safest galleries. At any other time of year, this would have been their sole preoccupation, but in late spring and early summer a mature ant colony is also burdened with safeguarding the future of a transitory yet important caste: the reproductives, winged male and female ants, developing for months within the nest, ready to take to the air for their nuptial flight.
A carpenter ant nest by a lake certainly holds the promise of a hatch, but a localized hatch of ants offers a narrow opportunity for action. As soon as the reproductives of one colony become airborne, the sweet scent they spray in the air unleashes a mass exodus of males and females from all the other colonies in the surrounding area. The whole affair can be over in two to three days. Each female—a potential queen—will be inseminated by several males from different neighbouring colonies. The queen will use this sperm to fertilize her eggs over her life span of ten years or even longer. The males will simply die after mating. The queens that survive predators and other dangers will drop their wings and search for suitable location for a nest. The colony is borne by a lonely queen, and dies with her.
The reproductives are usually restrained from taking off by worker ants until the weather is just right. A sudden spring or early summer heat wave will give the signal to the wardens to let their adventurous wards go and the air will fill with clumsily flying ants. Soon after, still and running waters, and roads and windshields, will be littered with hundreds of haplessly drowning and violently crushed ants.
I’ve heard and read the stories about trout going into a feeding frenzy over ants and then giving up eating altogether for days on end, presumably recovering from indigestion. These tales are based on observation, I am sure, but I suspect they are also spiced with a liberal dose of speculation. I have caught nice trout in the past whose stomachs were full of ants or hard-shelled click beetles, and these trout had no difficulty taking my flies convincingly, a good day or two after a serious hatch.
All the same, I decided to accept commonly held theories as truth, and was particularly vigilant about the upcoming weather. It was on an early evening in late May, the second day of a four-day heat wave, when I ventured to the lake again. As soon as I stepped out of the car, I spotted a carpenter ant fluttering above me. A darner dragonfly came out of nowhere, pounced on it, carved it, and let two yellow, translucent wings spin sadly to the ground. Out on the lake, several ants were floating lifeless on the surface of the water. There was absolutely no sign of trout. Was I already late? Was folklore about to teach me another lesson in humility?
I picked a spot at the centre of a little bay at the far end of the lake, where the breeze blew gently from the direction of the ant nest. Over the dark, deep water, I cast a Black Caterpillar at the end of a floating line. Haig-Brown raved about this pattern as "the deadliest fly" during an ant hatch, "best tied by an amateur’s clumsiest hand." I certainly had the qualifications and I believed him.
The fly struggled to stay on the surface, gradually sinking, hackle fibre by hackle fibre, until it finally disappeared under a tiny dimple. The leader was pulled under, slowly sinking towards the fly line, like the fuse of a dynamite stick. When it reached the fly line, the fly line itself followed the leader underwater—and kept going. It took me a few seconds before I suspected that something unusual might be taking place. But even then, I lifted the rod only absentmindedly.
The fly came to a sudden halt. This was one of those rare instances of momentary stillness, fractions of a second long, when neither fish nor fly fisher knows exactly what has happened. The fish broke the stalemate first. The moment he felt my pressure, he came unhinged, shaking his head and twisting his body, diving to the depths and rolling on the surface, rushing forth and coming to a standstill. Three times he let me gather up my fly line, and three times he stripped it out again. He must have tried every evasive move and every bodily contortion, but the fly held firmly in his lip. He flaunted his temper and then sulked. There were a couple of close calls when he seemed utterly resigned to my pull, but then all of a sudden bolted. Finally he showed up defeated about five feet below my float tube like a glowing oval mirror reflecting the light of the setting sun bright yellow. He was an enormous rainbow. I raised him a couple more feet and then he slowly twisted his body around so all I could see was his bulging, impeccably white belly. It's disconcerting to see a beautiful fish this way, belly up, floating motionless and all but lifeless. I lifted the rod sideways to try and straighten him, and then the hook came loose. The fish twisted his body around and slowly faded away into the dark green water with smooth, deliberate tail strokes.
During the following two hours, about a dozen rainbow trout came to the fly and every one of them was brought into the net. None was as big as the one that slipped away, but they ranged between fifteen and eighteen inches and offered some thrilling sport. None of the trout came to the surface for the fly either. They waited for it to sink a few feet underwater and then appeared from the depths to take it in a restrained, almost polite manner. I have yet to come across a shyer kind of trout.
A few days ago, almost two years since that memorable evening, I went back to Stickleback Lake—this time not with an interest in its trout, but in its carpenter ant colony. The old snag was still standing, horribly brutalized by woodpeckers, but the ant colony was gone. The queen had died, but I am certain another queen will be establishing a younger colony nearby, and one day I will return to fish the lake again, during another hatch. Until then, Stickleback Lake has revealed enough of its secrets to keep me happy.
