This is a book written out of love and pleasure, and it glows with both- the love of friends and family, the love of rivers and brooks; pleasure in the art of the flyrod, and the pleasure of enjoying each spring the wild trail, the falls with the salmon leaping, the mosses underfoot, the deer and the white-throat.

Ted Weeks never began fishing until he was forty and then did so reluctantly to rest his eyes from the absorption in manuscripts. His call to Fresh Waters involved his wife and son, brought him new friends ranging from David McCord the poet to President Dickey of Dartmouth and to Roderick Haig-Brown of British Columbia. Wherever he traveled, to the West Coast, to England, the Soviet Union, or Yugoslavia, he took with him his flyrod. The early passion of all anglers for how big and how many was replaced by a vigilant desire to keep alive the rivers he had come to love; too often in his chronicle we read of streams ruined forever by pesticides, power dams, and pollution.

This book has all the charm and eloquence of Edward Weeks's famous essays. It is the freshly written narrative of half a lifetime's explorarion, of the editor's decret life out of the limelight, away from the desk and the lecture platform, at ease with himself and his intimates, a stream, a rod, and the primitive forces below the surface of the water.