Author: Mark Hume & Harvey Thommasen
Publisher: UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON PRESS, Apr 1999
Binding: Hardcover
ISBN: 0-295-97744-2
Synopsis
The Bella Coola River is now closed to steelhead fishing because the stocks are endangered. A story of loss, imperitive, greed, & shortsightedness, as well as a story about the changing seasons an angler experiences. Powerful writing. 6x9 inches, 182 pgs.
More Information
The Bella Coola is one of the world's celebrated fishing streams. A magnificent rushing river surrounded by raw mountains, it flows through the stunning richness of British Columbia's temperate rain forest. In this poetic and powerful book, Mark Hume describes a year in the life of the river as he fly-fishes for the legendary bull trout, the spirited cutthroat, or the elusive steelhead. Along the way he describes the incredible beauty and fecundity of the valley ecosystem and examines what has happened to that increasingly endangered ecosystem and its inhabitants in recent times. He encounters other anglers, old timers who have fished the river for decades, and an abundance of wildlife, including a suspicious bear and a white-legginged wolf that appears at the water's edge like and apparition and just as suddenly disappears into the forest.
In January, Hume describes the chill of deep winter, when wood frogs, beetles, and butterfly larvae may become frozen alive, when the snow on the mountains is stacked in steeples, and when it is often too cold to fish. In February, he talks with an old-timer who remembers catching a monster bull trout with half a muskrat impaled on a large halibut hook, and as he casts for whitefish he muses on the variety of aquatic insects and on the importance of gravel, which provides shelter for fish eggs and a protected nursery for emergent salmon. In June, when the river is discolored by glacial silt and the rapids between pools deepen, he observes men fishing, their spinning rods propped on the river bank while they drink coffee, and wages a dramatic battle with a chinook salmon. And in October, he witnesses the miracle of salmon spawning, draws and intriguing parallel between commercial hunting and commercial fishing, meets a buck with tattered velvet hanging from one horn, and catches and releases a spectacular steelhead.
The Bella Coola River is now closed to steelhead fishing because the stocks are endangered. This book is thus a story of loss, human imperative, greed, and shortsightedness as well as a story about the changing seasons an angler experiences on the river. Most of all, it is an eloquent and stirring tribute to a wild and beautiful river.
