Roderick Haig-Brown, an Englishman and avid angler, spent most of his life on the banks of Vancouver Island"s renowned Campbell River, watching the annual migration of birds, game, fish, and the people who hunted them for sport and subsistence. Few will ever know moving water like Haig-Brown. In spare, graceful prose, he captures the inherent mystery of his foggy riparian landscape. To Know a River is a collection of some of his finest pieces, essays not just for devotees of fly-fishing but for anyone who appreciates first-rate writing on the outdoors. It is true, though, that Haig-Brown occupies a near-mythical space on the fly fisher"s bookshelf as a prose stylist and as a sort of dignitary; in the foreword to this edition, Thomas McGuane writes of Haig-Brown, "In person, he was considerably more presidential than our last five presidents, and if he had possessed just a sliver of vigorous fraudulence, he might well have risen to a great political prominence."