Char, as a family, are somber and have an almost funereal coloring upon which there is a breathtaking and chaotic display of spots that are much brighter in color. It is a color scheme exactly the opposite of the rainbows and browns where darker spots or stripes are seen against lighter-colored bodies.

When rising, its back in the light, a brook trout seems to flash a gallery of shallow scars across the length of its back. In full light these marks are wide, often honey-colored, sometimes pale yellow, a color which makes them look like tunnels of light isolated in a black world. Wrinkles of trapped sunlight. A friend of mine who never gets enough of specs likes to believe these twisted markings are the remnants of some lost evolutionary map, turnings of the seasons and years, the inexorable movement of water. Time endlessly passing. Another angler I know, a man with a more practical turn of mind, scoffs at such nonsense.

"It's nothing but fish camouflage," he says. His voice is firm and doubtless."Nothing but."It's hard to take sides, especially when watching a brook trout rise in cold water, the light settling in those wormlike tracks across its black back, making them look like tiny islands of light rising on some dark sea, islands of light rising up out of the cold, fast water. Rising.Brook trout are the southern highlands' only native trout, although the rainbows and browns have been in these waters so long it is hard to think of them as anything but family, lives that fit the mountains. But the introduction of the rainbow and brown trout, the drastic loss of habitat caused by logging, and the press of civilization have all tended to press and push the specs, where they survive, higher and higher, up above the fall lines, deep in chilly shadows and cold water.

The brook trout is, like so much that now holds on in the Smokies and Appalachia, a survivor of the last great Ice Age. As glaciers inched down across Canada, what was not trapped or what could not adapt to the cooling climate fled the grinding ice and cold. Even though it is believed that the brook trout was at one time an ocean species that thrived in arctic waters, it too moved south and eventually migrated inland, into the temperate waters of coastal rivers. Later, as the earth once again warmed and as the ice sheets melted, shriveled, and pulled back, many species such as the brook trout were cut off, left to adapt or vanish. The brook trout survived by moving up the rivers into the colder waters of mountain streams where it flourished on crawfish and minnows and an abundant supply of insects.

And the brook trout thrived until the loggers came, until the streams were stocked with rainbow and brown trout. Pressed by new competition from man and other trout, the brook trout fled, moved higher and higher. Trout find it difficult to tolerate each other's presence, especially in smaller streams and rivers. Trout are bullies. Rainbows will press and drive off specs, just as sooner or later the big browns will press and drive off the rainbows. Not too many years ago a rumor spread through the high country like the windblown fog that fills every valley, cove, and hollow. The rumor was that the Park Service, in a sudden fit of creative management, was actually considering poisoning the streams of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in an effort to rid the park's trout waters of renegade rainbow and brown trout, thus ridding the specs of their enemies and their competition. It caused considerable discussion and comment and not a little excitement until someone chanced to ask just what kind of magic poison, what grand elixir was so marvelous, so selective and discriminating in its killing that you could taint a river with it and yet it would do away with rainbows and brown trout and not harm anything else. It sounded as though the Park Service had come up with the piscatorial equivalent of the neutron bomb—a concoction that would kill certain species of fish without upsetting the stream's ecosystem at all.

"What next?" said Tewksbury when he heard the news. He shook his head tiredly from side to side and his eyes got brighter, as they always do when he swells with good-natured cynicism. "Perhaps some device that rids the seas of everything unprofitable, leaving us great pools of lovely tuna, cod and halibut? The grasslands of everything save cows, surely the very symbols of wildness? The earth of everything save hordes of boring human beings?! Ah, technology! Better living through mindless tinkering!"

The rumor mutated into fact. A few streams were poisoned; most are now poison free, and the brook trout, or what's left of them, are still high up. Much of the park's brook trout water is closed to fishing and has been since 1975, when a moratorium was placed on taking brook trout in the park. And where angling for brookies is allowed, most of it is strictly catch and release, barbless hooks required.

Most fly fishermen I know with an unshakable devotion to brook trout dream of Labrador or some other equally exotic destination. I wish them well each time I hike up along Big Snowbird Creek, up along its headwaters, where brook trout of some size still run, native southern highland trout in pools of cold water where sunlight comes through the woods clothing the landscape in a dazzling wardrobe of shadows.