Being in the mountains of the American West, I expected to see the occasional furry critter scampering around. The first two weeks in Aspen have definitely proved me right.
We have a fox that lives in the hills behind my condo, so I’ve seen it cutting through the parking lot, and relaxing under a pine tree.When I’m up early enough I can sometimes catch deer cutting through the backyard. We have to be careful about how we dispose of garbage to keep the bears from coming into the complex, so we’ve got a garbage shed on the other side of the parking lot. And the drive to and from work each day takes us through a beautiful meadow, and last week we saw a herd of about forty or fifty elk grazing up the mountains.
But rather than wax poetic about the graceful deer or the regal elk, I’d like to tell you about the Frankentrout in one of the Aspen Music Festival and School ponds.
The campus has four small ponds between the main building and the building I work in. The largest is probably fifty to sixty feet wide, the smallest about fifteen by twenty-five feet. Three of the ponds have little trout, about four to six inches. But the smallest pool has a few of the biggest and ugliest trout I’ve ever seen. They’re probably about fifteen inches long, but they’re extremely wide lumpy, rather than being sleek, like normal trout.
The intern last year was not afraid to dispose of the dead mice that one in inclined to occasionally find in an old house miles up a canyon. But instead of just throwing them away, she would drop them in the pond. And let the trout eat them. These trout don’t just eat the regular insects that land on the water. These are mice-eating Frankentrout.
This summer I’m giving the pond a wide berth but next year, I would not be surprised to read about an intern falling into the pond and being eaten alive by these Frankentrout.