So, undeveloped, unplanted, and unfished, Lower Brewster Pond represented as closely as one could hope to find, a biologically natural and native New England pond as the pilgrims must have found it. The pickerel population was in fact the best indicator of the fishing pressure. This suicidally and terminally aggressive fish simply cannot consistently grow to any size in any lake that gets plugged or spinnered or wormed or live minnowed. Though not especially good to eat, few New England fishermen would ever release even a medium sized fish, saving it as stiff and dried conversation piece about ferocity and denta\l structure. Lower Brewster Pond throbbed and pulsed with life and was, fishing wise, as God intended. In it I caught my first pumpkinseed, and was forever after spoiled since each one was hand sized or better. The smallmouths, red-eyed and black barred on bronze ran to four pounds and competed effectively with the pickerel in the charge to a poppe. The largemouth ran bigger, to five pounds, but one literally had to soremouth the pickerel first before one could effectively work a slow popper to seduce them. The bluegill and even perch swarmed like flies in the shallows in the spring around a small popper, kissing it with passionate smacking sounds. So much for the usual. I found, fishing the pond weekly through the season, what amazing things transpired up though the outlet. I found, one spring day, the submerged rockery of the splash pool literally festooned with the heads of 3 foot long eels. These reverse anadramous "fish" were returning to the freshwater lake systems FROM their spawning run in the ocean. I immediately plunged in and for the next two hours proved without question that two unaided human hands cannot grasp a live eel under water. Once back in the lake, the eels made wading the shoreline barefoot rather dicey, but it was really the leeches that made me decide to buy a boat. The first run of the spring was the white perch. These one pound salt water relatives of striped bass and white bass apparently negotiated the creek with its one and two foot jumps between pools totally without notice. One day exploring deeper water with a sinking line I suddenly caught a brand new fish, never that surprising on the pond, white and gleaming, then a second, a third, a fourth....I gave up and moved on somewhere around the 30th. A week later they were gone again. But the dominant run was the alewives, halfway between a shad and a herring, that would work their way up the creek and splash pool from the ocean by the thousands, stirring, literally, the whole pond into a soup of milt and eggs and endless circling daisey-chains of these mini-tarpon, displacing all the other forage and predator fish in their single-minded pursuits. Many would die, exhausted and battered like
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