Description:
Logger, trapper, guide, magistrate, army officer, radio broadcaster, conservationist, and university chancellor, Roderick L. Haig-Brown, the multitalented Renaissance man of North American angling, considered himself first and foremost a writer. Given the overall quality, range, depth, and grace of The Seasons of a Fisherman, it would be awfully hard to argue. This marvelous volume, which collects four of his best-loved classics between one set of covers for the first time, should elegantly introduce Haig-Brown, who died in 1976, to a new generation of outdoors enthusiasts as it reintroduces him to his old angling friends. Originally written in the early '50s, the four books wade into an angler's summer, winter, spring, and fall, and while each muses over what a particular season requires of the fisherman, none is just about fishing; Haig-Brown never limited himself. These books are about his beloved British Columbia, the environment as a whole, its repetitive rhythms, and the angler's place in it. They are about fishing stories; the traditions of fly-fishing; and how to catch fish, tie flies, and observe the natural world. Fishing, in Haig-Brown's cosmos, was more than just the pursuit of fish: it was the full, wide-ranging engagement of the mind and the senses. Listen to the litheness of his prose from "Fisherman's Spring," the first of the four sections, as he ponders the worthiness of the endeavor: It is ... something more than a sport. It is an intimate exploration of a part of the world hidden from the eyes and minds of ordinary people. It is a way of thinking and doing, a way of reviving the mind and body, that men have been following with growing intensity for hundreds of years. This is just a taste of what "Seasons" overflows with, as is this admission--is there an angler who can't share it?--from "Summer": "I am beginning to find it very salutary to remember just how much 'happening right,' if not downright luck, there has been in nearly all my little triumphs." As a book, Seasons is a big enough triumph to become a dog-eared cornerstone of your fly-fishing library. --Jeff Silverman
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