To the North – the full width of our great country – runs the boundary-line to another nation, one just as wide. Its people lead lives parallel to ours, similar on the surface, yet in substance very different from ours. They speak a language exactly like ours, except in far-off Quebec, where they have Atlantic salmon and a tongue (French) that links them directly to Europe, not to us. So internally they have differences, too. Otherwise Canadians are very much like ourselves. They breath the same polluted air and fish in streams unfit to drink. They even look like us. Visited up close, however, they often act and behave very differently. Bombarded by our popular culture over the TV and radio airwaves, inundated by our ads for merchandise from our factories (cars and beer, for instance), it is easy for them to despise or hate us. But they don't, well, not quite.

They fish for rainbow trout (landlocked Kamloops and sea-going steelhead), plus five varieties of Pacific salmon, with flies like ours, but these are different, too, even though if you look far enough back we both have the same common heritage. The more we are a like, the larger the differences loom. Their flies are brothers to ours so to speak, or brothers and sisters, just as their people are. Or perhaps we are cousins. Often we are fooled by minor surface variants, rather than make closer by our common traits. This is too bad, but it is a modern fact of life. Which brings me to my topic, Art Lingren, fly tyer and B. C. Historian, and his writing.

He has published two books that point out what we share, what we don't. They are worthy of our reading and our respect. Roderick Haig-Brown is the subject of his first one, namely the great fishing writer's flies. H-B-an Englishman who migrated to British Columbia and became a citizen, marrying an American in the process-embodies what the three countries have in common and demonstrates their best characteristics, along with their differences. It is he who we often lay claim to share most strenuously. He belongs to all of us, all who care enough.

Since fly patterns are sprinkled throughout R H-B's many books, Lingren thought it might be a good idea in his self-anointed role of historian to bring them all together and list them according to the type of fishing they were designed for. This makes the patterns available to fishers and tyers who do not read extensively-the great majority of us. And for the others, it makes the patterns easier to find and puts them all in one place. So it was a worthwhile project.

Lingren and I first met (sort of) when 1 wrote an article on R H-B for Flyfishing magazine, perhaps wrongly using as my primary text the recently printed, scurrilous text of E. Bennett Metcalfe's biography, which was privately published and not in wide circulation. It brought to light some very questionable material about R H-B that 1 thought should receive the spotlight of wider scrutiny and discussion. Many of my friends thought the book ought to receive early burial. And a few refused even to turn its pages in order to see what it said. I thought this was wrong and unfair in a literary sense.

My editor, Marty Sherman, thought it was prudent to include some fly patterns at the end of the article and used (unknown to me) a pirated edition of a chapbook that had drifted into his hands, one listing H-B's flies. The cover was missing, so Marty did not know where it had come from, but found it interesting and useful, for he too was a H-B buff. So he appropriated the material, believing it to be already in the public domain. I mean, they were fishing flies, for Pete's sake.

When Lingren saw the flies he had lovingly collected and organized from so many texts reprinted and himself not acknowledged, he exploded. He wrote a scathing letter to the editor. The editor apologized (a bit more profusely than I thought necessary, according to the magnitude of the crime), and fired off a copy of Lingren's letter to me. Meanwhile, Valerie H-B-the dead writer's daughter--read my article and set off a bomb herself. She wrote the editor and me to the effect that Metcalfe was a rascal who had exploited the family and made up a bunch of lies, and that I was a rascal, too, for having quoted from such a shameful book. She sent me a different biography, a sanitized one, Above Tide, by Anthony Robertson, which met with the family's approval, and a kind of temporary peace between us was achieved. We became friendly, but did not use each other's toothbrushes.

Matters with Lingren were made better, too, a few years later, when the man Marty Sherman and I (as a free-lance writer) worked for, the publisher Frank Amato, offered to publish Lingren's book, which he did, in a slender (71 pages) handsome fullcolor edition in 1993. Lingren and I had several mutual friends, and now a book publisher in common, for my Steelhead Water came out the same year. We read each other's books, exchanged friendly letters, talked about the merits of various Spey rods, and when we finally met, at Ralph Wahl's ninetieth birthday party, he thoughtfully brought down my book for me to sign. Old friend Bob Taylor and Lee Strait were also there. Touched, I wrote in it: "A friend of a friend is a friend."

Lingren then wrote an excellent Steelhead River Journal on the Thompson for Amato. I was so impressed by how he named real pools and revealed the best fishing heights that I wrote him a fan letter. I was also impressed with his photographs. I learned that some Canadian fishers were angry with him for giving away this valuable information. It was a situation I was familiar with firsthand, for I've named rivers and pools, too. We may be the only ones who do this.

Now Lingren has just recently published Fly Patterns of British Columbia, a much more extensive undertaking but much in keeping with his book on HB. I have chosen to write about it in this issue The Salmon Flyer because I enjoyed it. It is written in the mother tongue and seems to describe a recognizable world, the one inhabited by all us who flyfisher for large salmonids. Yet the image the book reflects back of his world is a unlike the one Americans are used to learning about. In the difference can be found a useful perspective. It is one we can learn from and appreciate.

The book is rich with history, anecdote, and lore. The flies appear to be tied by a doppelganger and have an eerie resemblance to ones we might have tied but didn't quite.. Reading the book then is a bit of a spooky experience. Flies are almost familiar but are lacking in cognitive value. They vary in many particulars, some important, some not. They are not worse flies than ours; to the contrary, many may be better. A large number obviously share a common Atlantic salmon heritage and incorporate the rare and semi-precious materials we salmon fly-tyers use daily. The flies are attractively photographed and carefully described, so that we may want to sit down at the tying bench and crank out a few to test on our favorite waters. Not all are well tied, however, and many have a certain raw or amateurish look, especially to their heads and bodies, which are lumpy and uneven. Spiral ribs vary widely in their distance from each other, like strangers at a cocktail party, as well as the direction in which they are headed. Yet some of the nearly original Spey patterns tied by Lingren and Bob Taylor conform to the uniform high standards of today; they are sleek and sexy. There are a few old favorites, too, flies already in our flyboxes and that have been tried and produced for us, many times over. This reinforces our common heritage and the "ties that bind."

For instance, anybody who hasn't tied and tried H-B's Steelhead Bee for Atlantics and steelhead is missing a good bet. It is a low-riding dry that will, if left briefly unattended, riffle beautifully and draw a strike from a goodly distance. And the Colonel Carey Special flies, in all their variety, are indispensable for trout, most anywhere in the world today. A fly box without a few sprinkled in is sadly lacking in what is necessary for daily success in a wide variety of waters.

The book is divided into four logical parts: interior trout, steelhead, coastal trout, saltwater salmon patterns. It is probably the steelhead section we would be most interested in, for it contains takeoffs on traditional Atlantic salmon patterns. In some ways, their heritage is more direct and less diluted than ours, for when the Brits settled Canada, they had a long and strong tradition of fly tying to draw on, whereas we steelheaders to the South had mainly Eastern American brook trout and landlocked Atlantic salmon patterns to work off of. So it is not surprising to see that many B.C. patterns make use of peacock wing, golden pheasant tail feathers, tippet, and crest, chatterer, jungle cock, etc. This seems only natural. And their trout flies often make use of these materials, even though some have grown rare and exotic today.

Lingren has brought together many good stories about the origin of various patterns, both anecdotal and from scattered articles and books that are hard to locate today. It is a valuable service. Here again are General Noel Money, Tommy Brayshaw, Roderick Haig-Brown (of course), from years past, along with Kamloops trout specialist, Brian Chan, of today. Stories of fishing trips ended long ago are brought back to life and currency once more, and Lingren's flair for collecting tales--often recent ones from members of his fly club, the Totems-meshes the past nicely with the present. What is a pattern without a story attached? The number of surprising variant dressings simply confirms that patterns never stay the same for long; everybody longs to improve them, or else the correct materials are not at hand and substitutions must be quickly made, or else there will be no fly for tomorrow's fishing. Thus Doctor Spratley not only gets listed with Guinea for tail and hackle, but it is big-spotted Guinea in the picture. I've always seen it tied with grizzly and the speckled Guinea would be a more logical substitute. Yet I'm sure tied this way (or most any other) the fly catches fish in droves. It is a great standard dark fly, for both resident trout and all the migratory ones. And it is yet one more example of the international nature of fish, flies, and tying, for Dentist Spratley was from Washington State, but fished the interior lakes of B.C. extensively. Similarly, several of the Totems fished Washington waters when their own close-in rivers had lost their runs of wild summer fish, and brought back flies originated here and discovered that the flies produced well in Canada. This is how it should be and only reinforces the two countries' interdependence, for now our anglers go North for their wild steelhead and fish our flies, though in neither country are the fish numerous enough to be killed.

As for steelhead patterns, aside from R H-B's adoption of certain Dee and Spey River ties, the strongest influence in adapting other, brighter styles seem to have come from an American, Syd Glasso. Bob Taylor and to a lesser extent Martin Tolley (both friends of mine) met Syd and were properly impressed with his neo-Speys; like many of us Americans, they went home and tied their own versions. Funny how these ties seem to have settled like coffee grounds in a cup to the same bottom and to a similar density: purple plus golden pheasant breast feathers, the latter either natural or dyed to an even greater brilliance; orange and black; yellow and red, etc. This features draw us and the Canadians closer together, even when some people may wish to see the lines of demarcation widened. Well, steelhead and Atlantics everywhere like bright, streamy patterns-flies with lots of flash and not too much bulk.

Lingren's book is rich with anecdote and streamside chatter. I like this aspect. It is important for a historian to listen closely and record with accuracy. Yet we are all fishers: Few of us are to be believed completely when we talk about fish--either numbers or sizes. And it is true about the origin of flies. So while I greatly enjoyed many of the stories Lingren records, I am suspicious of many, at least in their minutae. This makes them apocryphal. A couple in which I am involved are ninety percent inaccurate; this makes me suspicious of others. A man tells his fishing buddy a story and he tells another friend (say, Wintle to Taylor to Lingren, as though it were a muffed double-play grounder ), and a fourth friend is the trusting historian who writes it down dutifully, as would Paul or Matthew. And when it reaches print, who is to doubt it then? Things in print are the absolute truth, aren't they? They must be, or the publisher wouldn't print them.

Well, I am a doubter, and the recording historian must also be. He must check and recheck his sources, for his responsibility to the elusive truth is enormous. And memory proves unreliable. As we age-in some of these instance, more than thirty years have gone by-we fishers either come to believe our lies or else are seduced by the passage of time (and the absence of corroborative witnesses) into accepting them as the Truth. Much as that big buck steelhead never measured or weighed becomes, first, nearly a twenty pounder, then about twenty-one pounds, and finally a fish nudging the twenty-six pound mark, stories about our originating flies may become accepted as word-of-mouth Gospel. What a shame. We no longer recall (it is called "strategic forgetting") that somebody once showed us a pattern and we hurried home to tie one just like it, motivated by the sight of that fine fish lying on the beach, with the grubby number lodged in its jaw. After all, we did "first" tie it, that self-same day, didn't we? And then we went out and caught fish on it ourselves, and so did our friends. The friends first heard of it from us, didn't they? So from a very practical standpoint, at least as far as the friends are concerned, we could be said to have originated the pattern. But wouldn't it be a lot better to own up to what really happened? Isn't it better than to make a pathetic bid for vague immortality by taking credit for things not ours? Who needs it? Well, some do, evidently.

So let me take a stab at setting the record straight in one or two small instances. I did (all by myself) originate Spade, for what it is worth. (Not much, except historically, but then what is the book about?) I showed it to Jerry Wintle on the Manure Spreader Hole of the Stillaguamish on one of those July days when you could see every fish and rock on the bottom. He looked at it dully and said, "That's nothing more that [Clyde] Hoyt's fly." Well, I said, yes, but mine had a different tail, no wing, but it was black and gray, and so was Hoyt's fly. I had been influenced by others, as Hoyt had been by Black Gnat Bucktail, and Brindle Bug and the California Comets had inspired me. Never did I dream Jerry was impressed enough with the pattern to tie it for himself to use. And some wag named it Wintle's Western Wizard as a joke, he later told me. But I am happy that he like it and made it produce for him. I guess the patterns was so simple and easy to tie that it appealed to his minimal tying skills.

Wintle is also the common denominator for the wide-spread use of the Woolly Worm-the one with the hot orange tail and the palmered grizzly hackle-in Canada. When I asked him about the pattern, he told me he got it from Don Ives. Ives said it was a variant on McLeod's Ugly, but also a wellknown trout fly, tied huge. Ken McLeod told me that the Ugly worked better on the Kispiox, but the Woolly Worm caught more fish Stateside. I believed him. This was in the mid-Fifties, nearly ten years before Taylor said he invented it for Wintle to fish. But there is no doubt in any of our minds, Wintle and Taylor made the fly famous throughout B.C, along with Spade-even if you choose to call it by another name, which makes it no different as a pattern. As they did to the North, Bill Stinson, Alec Jackson, and John Farrar made Spade well-known throughout the American West.

All this is small potatoes. It is quibbling, of course. Or is it? Historians are the gatekeeper to the truth. On a microscale they are to our flyfishing heritage what Gibbon is to Rome. The historian's job is not to choose among versions of the past the one they "like" best, but to assemble every known fact from the scrambled past and present them all in an orderly manner and in a way that we are led gently and intelligently to the truth, believing it to be our discovery. I think there is a simple touchstone to the truth and it is to ask what a contributing party to the matter can gain in terms of self-advancement or vanity. Of course there is always the problem of faulty memories. We do forget, over long periods of time. It is the human condition. The past is not fixed in amber. (A good thing, too.)

Perhaps it is wiser to believe in the truth of fiction-that there can be several versions of the same truth and no single one of them can lay claim to total historical accuracy, but they together will comprise something that comes closer than any single version will, especially if the one who advances the single version has something to gain from pushing it forward. In courts of law hearsay is not to be trusted and is stricken from the record. If we were to do this in the history of angling literature, we should not be left with much to go by. (See Kelson, Francis, Blacker, et al.) So it is even more important to check and recheck one's sources, in the field and in the literature. It is not the historian's choice to perform but his duty to do so. And it is this, rather than his scholarship, that he will ultimately be known by.

It's a nice book, with many good, colorful pictures and rich stories. I urge you to go find a copy in the store, and if you like what you see (and I am sure you will), to purchase it.