By Dennis Smith
Apart from pushing the snow blower around, I don’t spend too much time outdoors in January. I still have a late season elk tag to fill, so there’s that. I might sneak in a waterfowl hunt with the boys or do some ice fishing with the grandkids. But for the most part, I see January as a good month for reading by the fire, tying flies, reflecting on the past season’s adventures or trying out some new venison recipes.
For my birthday last fall, my son Derek bought me a copy of Hank Shaw’s highly regarded venison cookbook Buck, Buck, Moose, and I fully intend to put it to good use. We dined on braised lamb shanks in a hotel restaurant in Killarney, Ireland, a few years back, and I vowed then to see if I could replicate the recipe with venison when I got back home. Shaw’s book has five recipes for braised venison shanks, and I have some deer and antelope shanks in the freezer. That’s something I can do this month.
The fly shop here in town puts on fly-tying demonstrations every Saturday morning through the winter, and a bunch of local anglers gather there to drink coffee, eat donuts and watch a celebrity flytier do his thing. As you might expect, fish stories abound. Now, it’s not often I get to tell a big fish story because, well, I just don’t catch that many big fish. When I do it’s more often a product of dumb luck than angling skill. Besides, where fish are concerned, big is a relative term, dictated by habitat and food supply: A big fish in the ocean might be several feet long and weigh a hundred pounds or more whereas a 20-inch trout in a Colorado headwater creek could be legitimately considered a genuine monster. As it turns out, I caught one late last summer.
My buddy and I were happily catching little brook trout on bamboo rods and dry flies in a small mountain creek when I spotted a gargantuan brown trout finning slowly near the bottom of a deep hole. He looked to be almost 2 feet long. He was stationed against a steep, grassy bank beneath a clump of alders that hung directly over the stream, making it darn near impossible to get a fly to him without spooking him. We took turns casting to him for the better part of an hour, changing flies and changing positions to no avail. We finally gave up and fished on downstream.
On our way back to the truck, I made a desperate Hail Mary-type cast to the spot where we last saw him and, just like that, he rose to the surface, nonchalantly took my fly and swam back to the bottom of the pool with it. Minutes later, he measured 23 inches in the net.
A memory like that can warm your heart while you’re pushing the snow blower around on a cold winter morning.