As we motored across Aylmer Lake in the far north of the Northwest Territories, guide Kevin McNeil touched me on my shoulder.

“Do you have bigger flies?”

Aylmer’s storied tundra lake trout were giving us a bit of a struggle, given our limited supply of streamers. As is usual, I meant to devote a couple of evenings prior to my departure to Yellowknife to tying up big lake-trout streamers – massive hunks of imitation protein that big predators just can’t ignore.

It’s no secret that our piscatorial triumphs sound so much better in the telling if the heroic angler outsmarts a wily foe. So we embellish our trout with fishy superpowers like intelligence and emotional guile. Even when we lose them, we’re never beaten by a run-of-the-mill fish: It was big and arrogant and knew exactly what it was doing!’