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    A Poaching Client Q: What's your least favorite kind of client? LaFontaine: Definitely the hard-driving types who consider the fish as an object is my least favorite client. Let me tell you a quick story. It's fairly well known around West Yellowstone. I was guiding on the Madison. I guided there for four years. In all my years of guiding I've only had two bad clients. I love to be with people. One of these two bad clients came in, told me his name (let's say his first name was Stephan), and said, "I'm hiring you to be...

 Early Years in an Angling Paradise       Sportfishing came to the region we will call "Trout Country" during the nineteenth century as privileged persons sought untainted waters from which to enjoy salmonid populations. Many of the sport fishers, and therefore fly fishers, were from the old world. Little record on sport-fishing in western America was kept through the nineteenth century, but anglers such as William Drummond Stewart and Sir Rose Lambart Price, sport-seeking British noblemen, related to European civilization the wonders of western trout populations. One of the first accounts of an American fly fishing western waters comes...

  The world is replete with examples of fisheries that once were. Whether it be bluefin tuna, coral reef fishes of southeast Asia, the northern cod of eastern Canada, Atlantic salmon throughout most of their range or the chinook and steelhead runs of California's Central Valley and northern coast and the Columbia, to name but a few, the story has been the same. The human animal has consistently placed a lower value on fish than the economies that have grown to compete for them and, eventually, against them. The end result—each generation of us lowers the bar and redefines a...

  Rivers are sacred and none more so than those that have the holy trinity of salmon, grizzly bears and steelhead. This book, a collection of tales on fishing, companionship and the power of dreams, is about one of those special rivers. The Babine spills out of a long lake with the same name in central British Columbia, north of the small town of Smithers. It cuts a ragged arc through the remnants of a once great forest, gathering flow from water pouring off the Sicintine and Atna mountain ranges, before turning south to join the great Skeena River system, which ties it to the...

  I've been asked to write many Forewords to fly-fishing books. So when Gary Soucie e-mailed me to write one for his new book on Woolly Worms and Woolly Buggers, I agreed. I expected a small book. Instead, what arrived was a two-inch-thick manuscript. I wondered, "How could anyone write more than 400 pages on two somewhat similar flies?" Gary did and I am grateful he did. I started fly fishing in 1947. The first few fish I caught were smallmouths on a popping bug. Joe Brooks, my mentor, said, "You should try fishing under water," and handed me some...