"Late at night and wakeful, I don't count sheep as some do. I have another approach. I fish a reach of my river, a Vancouver Island stream born in mountain country that drops by way of riffles and pools and freshet-carved bars to a Strait of Georgia forty miles away."

So begins this gentle, humorous, engaging memoir: a heartfelt appreciation of British Columbia's wild places, a tribute to the art and science of fishing - and, most of all, a funny, poignant story of how love and respect between father and son grow through many decades.

In the 1930s, Arthur's father, the Reverend Amos William Mayse, moved the family from Winnipeg to Nanaimo. There they first fished their beloved Oyster River. Arthur's story unfolds from there, like the sweet, meandering river itself: the afternoon Arthur went from worm and spinner to real fly-fishing (with a Royal Coachman); the day he borrowed a tuft of two-toned badger bristles from Amos's shaving brush in order to tie the perfect fly; the moment on a fishing trip when Arthur and Amos, mid-estuary in hip-waders, realized suddenly they were surrounded by sharks. "He was a simple man and a good one," Arthur writes, "the best I've known." Their love of fishing, conservation, the outdoors, and each other are the stuff of a deftly understated, very moving memoir.

Susan Mayse is a fourth generation Vancouver Islander who grew up on stories of the mining towns of Cumberland, Bevan, Nanaimo, and Wellington. She has written for many national and international publications including The Daily Mail, The Toronto Star, and The Malahat Review. She is also the author of a prizewinning novel, Merlin's Web and Ginger: The Life and Death of Albert Goodwin, a BC Bestseller and winner of the Arthur Ellis Award for True Crime and the Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non-Fiction. She is the daughter of the late journalist and author Arthur Mayse.

Susan Mayse's profile page

Arthur William ("Bill") Mayse (1912-1992) "spent his teens in gritty Nanaimo and grittier east side Vancouver. He knew Cowichan shamans, Sointula pukka fighters, tame apes from the A-frame camps, Chinese labourers, unrepentant Wobblies. More than anything, he knew and loved the country. He lived it, breathed it, fished it and sometimes despaired at what was being done to it in the ignorant clamour called progress. He was an ace reporter for The Province from the day he was hired out of UBC, a prize-winning poet one course short of graduation. He left to cover labour and politics for the rowdy Sun, then with his bride Win went to Toronto where he became fiction editor for Maclean's. He later joined the Victoria Times to write a warm column. It ran for thirty years." (Stephen Hume, Vancouver Sun)

Mayse wrote many published stories and articles, several scripts for television's The Beachcombers, and four novels: Perilous Passage, The Desperate Search, Morgan's Mountain and Handliner's Island.

"No one has written more about this coast more often, and more knowingly (I want to say wisely, too) than has Arthur Mayse."
-Charles Lillard

Arthur Mayse's profile page