Hoagy Carmichael Jr. was up to his waist  in the Grand Cascapedia, the Pebble Beach of salmon rivers, on Quebec’s Gaspé coast. With the effortless grace and  unerring precision of a Zen archer,   he cast  a loop of line  a hundred feet out over the amber green water. The loop uncurled in slow motion and softly, unobtrusively dropped his gawdy Lady Amherst fly right  into a riffle  where a big Atlantic salmon had just rolled. Then he watched intently, his left hand  on his hip,  elbow crooked, and neck craned slightly forward, to see if the fish was going to take it. 

         “It doesn’t get any better than this,” he called to me, trying my luck further down  Little Camp Pool, one of the 87-mile-long river’s  150 named pools.  The laid-back, clubbable Hoagy’s father composed some of the  immortal jazz standards, and he gets royalties  every time  a new version  of “Stardust” or “Georgia on My Mind” is recorded. This  has enabled him to indulge his passion for this highly ritualized aristocratic blood sport.  Every summer he comes to this majestic river, as do some three thousand  salmon. They come back to spawn in the river where they were born, after years of  epic, uncharted peregrinations in  the North Atlantic. 

       There are  23 salmon rivers on Gaspé Peninsula, and 150  in Quebec, but the fish that return to the Grand Cascapedia are a particularly robust strain of Salmo salar, the biggest in Canada, or anywhere except Norway’s Alta River. They average twenty pounds. Three forty-pounders had been already caught this summer. The record is still the 54-pound fish caught in l886 by R.G. Dun, of Dun and Bradstreet, the New York credit-checking firm. 

          Hoagy is writing a history of the river, so he is on top of these facts. “Sometimes I think of all the interesting people who have fished this pool,” he told me : “Chester Arthur, Jimmie Carter, Mike Mansfield,   Bing Crosbie, Benny Goodman, the hockey great Bobby Orr, the sculptor Joel Schapiro, various Vanderbilts, three generations of Fricks. Just recently I found  the diary of Dr. Weir Fisher, an eminent Philadelphia surgeon. Sitting in his canoe in l896, he wrote,  ‘Ah ! the sweet green peace of it all.’ To me that is a perfect summation of what this river is  about.”

       The shimmering reflections of the towering, closed-packed trees crowding its banks brought to mind the thumping dactylic hexameter of Longfellow’s  Evangeline, 
 

This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks
Bearded with moss  and in garments green indistinct in the twilight
Stand like druids of old, with voices said and prophetic.

This was the wilderness he was describing. But to me there was nothing gloomy about it. It was radiant, glorious, this maritime boreal forest—nature in its purest, cleanest, almost untrammeled splendor. 
 

     “People have enormous respect for this river because of its rich heritage, its big fish, and its beauty,” Hoagy went on. “You feel privileged when you take a fish from it.” For me it was privilege enough just to be here. Whether or not I a caught a fish was secondary. In fact, I was secretly hoping I didn’t. There are so few of them left, and they come such a long way, down from the outer banks of Greenland and Labrador, guided by their noses, which imprinted on the river’s unmistakeable geochemical olfactory signature before they took to sea, as six to eight-inch par. In the best of worlds, these fish should be left in peace while they go about the critical business of  reproduction. But a whole subculture and economy has evolved around them. Their hopes for survival have now come to depend totally on the forbearance and  wise management of the people who catch them, who want their to be enough fish to catch next year.  This is one of the ironies of  conservation, and has  been  since the movement  began, in the late nineteeth century, as an alliance between the birdwatchers and the hunters. The trout and ducks’ most  powerful advocates are sportsmen’s organizations called Ducks Unlimited and Trout Unlimited, and the much more imperiled Atlantic salmon look to the St. Andrews, New Brunswick-based Atlantic Salmon Federation and locally to the Cascapedia Society, whose memberships overlap heavily. 
 
 
 

      After the French lost their colony on the Plains of Abraham in l760, and New France became Canada, the British administrators arrived with their rods and reels and guns and racquets and golf clubs. It didn’t take long for word to reach their ears   about the humongous salmon in the Grand Cascapedia. Sport fishing on the river is documented back to the l840s, but it didn’t really take off until the Marquis of Lorne,  the Governor General of Canada from 1878 to l883, and his wife, Queen Victoria’s daughter Princess Louise, steamed down the St. Lawrence River from Montreal  and around the Gaspé Peninsula to the Baie des Chaleurs,  which the Grand Cascapedia pours into. There they were met by the Micmac Indians who had been living at the river’s mouth since time immemorial and trapping and spearing the fish at night with torches. Their settlement was called Gesgapegiag, “Where the River Widens.” It is still there, home to 550 Micmacs.
Cascapedia is a corruption of it. 

        The Micmacs  poled the party  from Montreal up the treacherously strong and swift river in long birchbark canoes. The Marquis of Lorne was, in the words of his biographer Sandra Gwyn,  “a member of the homosexual set” who “lacked the capacity for sustained concentration,” and  Princess Louise was the lady Di of her time, a great outdoorswoman who had “a favorite guide” who posed in the nude for her (and that is not all, according to gossip); she rewarded him with a ranch in Alberta when she went back to England. 

       Princess Louise secured for a few pounds an exclusive ninety-five-year lease of the river for the governors general, and  a fancy fishing camp called Lorne Cottage was built for the  couple fourteen miles up the river. The Micmacs were forbidden to hunt the salmon—poaching what were now the governor general’s fish was punishable with jail time--  and many departed for factory towns in New England. The bottom fell out of their culture, and they remain deeply demoralized and marginalized to this day. While I was there, the chief’s teenage daughter killed herself. 

        A jaunt in the Canadian wilds became the in thing for English nobles. “Camps” was a facetious term for the   seven splendid compounds that were eventually built on the Grand Caspedia. It was hardly camping out. Each camps had its staff of guides, cooks, servers, shoreboys, cleaners, smokers (who filleted your catch into orange-pink slabs and hung them to cure in the beech-fired  smokehouse) to attend to your every need. An elaborate camp and pool etiquette evolved. Special flies were designed : besides the Lady Amherst,  the brainchild of  a Rochester investment banker named George Bonbright, there were blue charms and green highlanders. Thick,  sixteen foot long bamboo rods were made to play the huge fish (although Hoagy and I were using single-handled eleven-footers, as most anglers do now). The reels went from wood to brass to hard rubber and nickel silver and are now mostly aluminum. A good one can easily set you back a thousand dollars. 

       The next governor-general, the Marquis of Lansdowne, built an equally fancy camp that he called New Derreen after his estate in Ireland. In four seasons he and his guests caught 1245 salmon. Then Lord Stanley, who created the Stanley Cup, built Stanley House, an 18-bedroom Queen Anne mansion, on the bluff overlooking the bay because his wife couldn’t stand the black flies up the river. Then came Lord Aberdeen, followed by Lord Minto, who relinquished the rights to the river in l898 to a syndicate of  American millionaires, “high-living, cigar-puffing products of the age of unfettered capitalism,” according to one writer (Robert Stewart), who  “pursued salmon with the same relentless zeal as they pursued the almighty dollar” (according to another writer, quoted but not named by Stewart). These plutocrats founded the Cascapedia Club, which controlled the river exclusively until the early seventies.