The river in winter

"A River Never Sleeps" is a simple but profound pronouncement; Roderick Haig-Brown wrote that phrase as the title of what many consider his best book.

No other angling author captures the essence of fly fishing in words as Haig-Brown did. Some might grab it for a sequence of phrases, a paragraph or an entire passage; none did it as well as Haig-Brown for the length of an entire book.

He wrote from a sense of intimacy with his home river, the Campbell on Victoria Island in British Columbia. The Campbell at the time Haig-Brown fished it was pretty much unspoiled. It has always hosted magnificent...