There’s a wolf wandering around camp. I’m shocked, but not that surprised. Having stepped off the float plane that just touched down in Kimsquit Bay, BC, it’s obvious we’re way out here. I knew this place was remote and wild and chock full of critters, but I guess I thought grizzlies were the apex predator […]

An hour and a half’s drive northwest of Dublin is a lake—or “lough” as they say in Ireland. By Irish standards it isn’t particularly big—at five miles long and only half as wide, there are 12 other loughs on the island that are bigger. No mountains tower overhead. No eagles soar. Yet its curiously green […]

“Look I caught another one!” The squeaky voice of a 5-year-old Eastern Shoshone girl named Kamiry was almost unbearably cute. She beamed at me as she held up another leafy stick dangling from her deerhair caddis. I never claimed to be good at teaching people to catch fish. Kamiry didn’t seem to mind. Kamiry led […]

“To PUT your hands in a river is to feel the chords that bind the earth together” — Barry Lopez ONE Into the river is where I’m bound. TWO Every river has a language. Every river has a history. Every river is a teacher. THREE Four-hundred forty-four miles of water from New York to the […]

Years ago, my friend Jon Olien and I took our first trip to Oregon’s lower Grand Ronde after our mutual Spey-casting and steelhead guru bestowed his long-standing admiration—nay, adoration—for the storied Snake River tributary and its skyward-looking steelhead. After the usual stumbling that comes with the arrival to a new landscape, we came across the […]

“Oh no.” Rupert and I look at each other. It takes a moment, but then we realize the same thing Ben has.  “Oh shit,” Rupert says.  It’s 5 a.m. in Youghal, County Cork. The Irish dawn is breaking overhead. We’re tired; this is the third and last day of our trip, and we’re up early. […]

As a child, I was convinced the dock at our family’s lake house was the epicenter of all fish activity. My evidence was an arching mulberry tree that overhung the bank and dropped its dark-purple fruit into the water, coaxing fish to swarm in response—tiny sunfish darting busily around the rocks, bass lurking in the shade […]

Keaton McEvoy clenches a line between her teeth as she sets up her rod for some early spring fishing in the Presumpscot River north of Portland, ME. She pays no heed to the 25 mph wind gusts and the puppy whining in the crate of her SUV, nor to the gray slush on which she […]

They’re called a Norfolk Tumbler, a man named James is saying. He demonstrates with his hand. They can swivel from their hocks, see. That’s unusual for a dog. It’s why they’re so fast, even over rough ground. Had a good one a few years back. Then one night we’re out, she’s on a rabbit, and […]

I awaken to the perpetual roar of waves churning just outside the window. It’s dark, early, and the slightest twinge of a hangover pulses behind my right eye. Late in the night, I flung open the window to let the cold, misty late-October wind blow in off the lake from Canada. The bedroom is freezing, […]