father and stepmother were driving back to attend. I had time on my hands and my girlfriend was also waiting to meet my family One morning she called to say that her dorm proctor and his wife had asked her and several other girls to a picnic at his family's cabin on Cape Cod. She was a bring her "friend", me, and it was on a lake. There was "fishing". That's all she knew. Sure, I thought, "fishing". Little did I know that that afternoon, just one hour, would re-shape my view of the world in a way rivaled only by my first experience finding and unhooking a bra snap. "The Cape", is just two hours from downtown Boston, traffic notwithstanding. I had been there before, but never off the tourist paths. John's family's cabin was situated on a bluff overlooking what I had to admit was a beautiful, round, pine-rimmed lake, one of the many glacial potholes left by the last receding ice age. This was Lower Brewster Pond, just downstream from Upper Brewster Pond. The outlet stream narrowed into an old grist-mill flume with an intact water wheel, then dropped directly onto a tidal estuary. From the bluff I could see the entire lakeshore. Three other cabins intruded the view, otherwise it was untouched, quiet, inviting exploration. The shallows were rimmed with reeds, and splatterings of lily pads denoted areas of shallows. As quickly as I could extract myself socially, I took my rod down to the water to look around. There was a narrow strip of sand beach directly in front of the cabin itself, and as I stepped up to the water's edge, an unfamiliar fish scooted off into deeper water. I had never seen one before, but I knew I had just seen my first smallmouth bass. Hmmmmmmm. I flipped out a small nymph and the little bass attacked it at once and came to hand for inspection, a pretty little thing, brown to bronze, barred with vertical spots and stripes. Hmmmmmmm. Then I looked around and spotted moving shapes lying just off the reed edge. They too attacked the fly and I brought to hand my first Pumpkinseed sunfish, palm sized, riotously colored with neon vermiculations of blue and green on a background of bright gold at the head shading to green at the tail. Delightful! I could see the shallows of the shoreline now, pocked with clearings in the sand. The big pumpkinseeds were nesting, each clearing guarded by one or two large shadows. The water looked knee deep out past the reeds so I took off my shoes and began wading laterally along the shore. Immediately I spooked out another fish new to me, shaped like an arrow. The foot long lance scooted away for six feet, then turned and glared at me. It ignored the nymph so I changed to a small streamer which it attacked at once. I inspected this fish carefully. It was obviously of the pike
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