Roderick L. Haig-Brown - A River Never Sleeps

Copyright 2010, 2014 by Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Skyhorse Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

Skyhorse Publishing books may be purchased in bulk at special discounts for sales promotion, corporate gifts, fund-raising, or educational purposes. Special editions can also be created to specifications. For details, contact the Special Sales Department, Skyhorse Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018 or .

Skyhorse and Skyhorse Publishing are registered trademarks of Skyhorse Publishing, Inc., a Delaware corporation.

Visit our website at www.skyhorsepublishing.com.

www.skyhorsepublishing.com

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

The Library of Congress cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:

Haig-Brown, Roderick Langmere, 1908-1976.

A river never sleeps / Roderick L. Haig Brown.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-1-60239-939-6

1. Fishing. 2. Fishing--British Columbia. 3. Steelhead fishing.
I. Title.

SH441.H15 2009

799.12--dc22

2009039612

Cover design by Owen Corrigan

Print ISBN: 978-1-62914-525-9
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-63220-109-6

Printed in the United States of America

INTRODUCTION TO THE 2010 EDITION

by Nick Lyons

What a sweet pleasure it is to return to A River Never Sleeps after too many decadesmore than sixty years after it was writtento be refreshed by Roderick Haig-Browns measured prose and infallible eye, his good cheer, great enthusiasm, and a humanity that never flags. This remarkable book is surely the one on fly fishing that most repays careful rereadingand I envy those who are fishing in Haig-Browns waters for the first time.

We travel with him from one winter to the next in the course of the booka fishermans year in which his own early days in England and his mature years in British Columbia are played in tandem with the seasons. Those first early winter days in Dorset, England, and a boys discovery of the dimensions of his passion for the natural world, his discovery of fishing, are played against his introduction to the great steelhead rivers of the Pacific Northwest, where he made his adult life. And his chronicle, built month by month, leads ineluctably to a December full of ruminations on books and seasons past, and one of the most satisfying explorations of why those of us who love to fish do so. Everywhere we are grateful for what he sees and feels and tells us about rivers and fishing, and their natural world which both need, in which both exist. Little is lost on him. He knows the Campbell River, on whose banks he made his home, as finely as any author has known his home water. Of the river in winter, for instance, he writes:

On the bank the maples and alders are stark and bare, drawn into themselves against the cold. The swamp robin moves among them, tame and almost bold for once, and perhaps an arctic owl hunts through them in heavy flight whose softness presses the air until the ear almost feels it. On the open water of the river are mergansers and mallards, bluebills, butterballs, perhaps even geese and teal. Under it and under the gravel, the eggs of the salmon are eyed now; the earliest of the cutthroat trout are beginning their spawning, and the lives of a thousand other creaturesmayflies, stone flies, deer flies, dragonflies, sedges, gnats, water snails, and all the myriad forms of planktonare slowly stirring and growing and multiplying.

But the steelhead, with the brightness of the sea still on him, is livest of all the rivers life.

Month after month he tracks his fishing year, as the pike and trout of England give way to sea-run cutthroats, huge Pacific salmon, those bright steelhead that are at the heart of the book, and forays out into the vast fecund and various life of the sea into which all rivers wend. He hooks great fish. He catches some, some are lostand he vividly records a thousand of any fishermans occasions, many of which any fisherman will have shared.

It is a full life, lived close to the natural world, full of new events, learning, and the pleasure of repeating what is old and well known and comfortable. Read Tom McGuanes wonderful account of a visit, not long before Haig-Brown died in the mid-seventies, to Campbell River, and his account of the quiet humanity of this man who was judge, college chancellor, and devout fisherman. This infrequently reprinted portrait of this great man is a valuable addition to this new printing of A River Never Sleeps.

But first, read the book. It is a memoir that never agesa paean to a life thoughtfully lived, sensibly, wisely, with an intimacy with rivers that still instructs and thrills us. But mostly it alerts us, without ever pontificating as so many more modern books do, to our own best knowledge of the mystery surrounding why some of us are so passionate about fishing. Here are some of his closing words: I still dont know why I fish or why other men fish, except that we like it and it makes us think and feel. But I do know that if it were not for the strong, quick life of rivers, for their sparkle in the sunshine, for the cold grayness of them under a rain, and the feel of them about my legs as I set my feet hard down on rocks or sand or gravel, I should fish less often.... Perhaps fishing is, for me, only an excuse to be near rivers. If so, Im glad I thought of it.

And how glad we should all be that this Englishman transplanted to North American shores should speak so memorably for so many of us. A River Never Sleeps is a miracle... and a treat not to be missed.

Nick Lyons
Woodstock, New York, 2009

CONTENTS

AFTERWORD
A Visit to Roderick Haig-Brown

You are about to read one of the greatest books about fishing ever written. If you are among the many who have read it before and are about to return to it again, as many do, often, then there is no need for me to tell you that; but if you are about to read it for the first timewell, then I can say only that I envy you the pleasure you have in store.

A River Never Sleeps was one of the first books I read about fishing. I was young then and it was a good time in my life to come upon such a book because it did much to shape my views on the philosophy and ethics and wonderment of angling; but there is never really a bad time to read a book such as this, and over the years I have returned to it again and again, finding each time in its pages a quiet serenity of thought and profound observation that is as much a balm for anxious days as is the act of going fishing itself.

I grew up among a generation of anglers for whom Roderick Haig-Brown was a giant, and his angling and literary exploits were well known to us all. But now we are witnessing the rise of a new generation of eager young anglers, more numerous than ever, who are just beginning to explore for themselves the mysteries and delights of angling literature, and perhaps for their benefit it is appropriate to try to place Haig-Brown in proper perspective, both as an angler and a writer.

Roderick Langmere Haig-Brown was born in Sussex, England, in 1908. His formal education was at Charterhouse School, of which his grandfather had for many years been headmaster, but he enjoyed a scarcely less formal education in the arts of fly fishing and wing shooting on the chalkstreams and downs of southern England. At the age of seventeen he traveled to the Pacific Northwest to work as a scaler and survey crew member in logging camps, first in Washington State and later on Vancouver Island, and quickly applied his fishing knowledge to the new species and new waters he found there. In 1929 he returned to England briefly to begin his writing career, but the lure of the Pacific Northwest summoned him back to Vancouver Island where he eventually settled. By the time he reached full manhood he had thus been exposed to the varied angling cultures and opportunities of two continents, from the well-ordered deliberate fishing tempo of the English chalkstreams to the wild, disordered salmon and steelhead rivers of the Northwest. It was an enviable background for an angler or a writer, and much of that diversity of rich experience is on display in these pages.