An excerpt from “Spring Trout and Strawberry Pancakes”
“GOOD HEAVENS, your Troutship,” exclaimed a blinking Earl Fuller, a medical doctor from Utica, as the Rev. Byron-Curtiss drew in on the cotton line and netted a beautiful two-pound brook trout wagging a well-crisped fin. “You caught a beauty on that old peeled alder sapling pole this time.” Earl managed to get up to Nat Foster Lodge at least once every fly-fishing season. He considered fly-fishing for brook trout to be “first-rate sport.”
He was thankful there were so many good trout streams between the southwestern Adirondacks and the Mohawk Valley. The Reverend and Earl shared a love for warm sun and tiny wild strawberries added to their pancakes, and a tolerance for the ferocious little black flies that caused them to swat and scratch their itching skin, bitten right through their shirts. Fishing near Nat Foster Lodge, the duo used to cut over the hill and take an old woods road up over the mountain, striking Grindstone Creek where it began coursing down a long wooded, rocky slope—all rips, falls, and deep pools, one after the other. The water was so turbulent that you could just as well fish downstream as up, as far as the trout were concerned, and it was a heap easier. Besides, when they quit fishing they had only a short walk to a trail that led back to the camp. One day, as the men were going down the trail from the brook, after several hours of fishing, they met Raymond F. Dunham and Harvey (“Rascal”), his brother, both of Utica, who had also been fishing up in North …
