Lorne Cottage was acquired after some decades by the obese, carrot-haired South African gold and diamond merchant Charles Englehart, who was the inspiration for James Bond’s hideous archfoe, Goldfinger. Ian Fleming was a regular guest at the camp. After Englehart ate himself to death in his early forties (he was well over three hundred pounds), Lorne Cottage passed to his five daughters. The one who was married to Oscar de la Renta had  just left, and her snitsy sister Susan, who lives in Missoula, Montana, was there, “in camp” now. We ran into her husband, Roy O’Connor, at Mrs. Guest’s pool. It was named for Mrs. Winston Guest, the daughter of Henry Phipps, Jr., Andrew Carnegie’s business partner. Her brothers built the 400-foot-long Camp Chaleur in l922, which was burnt to ground by two disgruntled locals on a snowmobile in the dead of winter fifty-five years later. The incident precipitated a Steven King-like tragedy that no one in the local community wants to talk about, “and I wouldn’t either, if you ever want to set foot here again,” a woman advised me. 

      New Derreen’s present owners are Royal Victor IIIrd and Walter Shipley, the ex-c.e.o. of Chase. Tracadie has passed from Frank Goelet, who owned “half of Manhattan,” to his nephews. Hoagy and his seven guests were staying at Middle Camp, the most accessible of the seven private camps. “But you still have to know someone to get in,” he told me. 

     Leonard Schlem, a refreshingly unsnitsy Montrealer,  had just acquired Horse Island from the ex-wife of the previous owner (she had gotten the camp in the divorce but didn’t fish and had put it on the market). Schlem has a chain of 305 health clubs in the U.S. and a minority interest in 200 more in Europe, and 18 in Europe. “My twelve-year-old boy just caught a fifteen-pounder,” he told me when I visited him and his American wife Sandy one afternoon, “and his sister caught a seventeen-pounder last week, but if we don’t take care, by the time they get to be my age, there will be no fish.” 

      In the seventies access to the fish in the  Grand Cascapedia was somewhat democratized. The Parti Québécois, which was trying to secede the province from the rest of Canada, succeeded in gaining public access to some pools, and the MicMac sued for the restoration of their aboriginal fishing rights and won the right to trap the equivalent of 350 large fish at the mouth. The MicMacs also acquired one of the seven camps and started an outfitting company whose native guides take fishermen on the river. But also in this decade the number of large Atlantic salmon started to go into steep decline, from an estimated 800,000 to 200,000 today.
 

      I journeyed to the headwaters of the river, in the Chic Choc Mountains, which are in the interior of the Gaspé Peninsula and are almost 4000 feet high, a series of tabular peaks of volcanic origin that were sheered off by the glaciers. The two branches of the Grand Cascapedia come down from them in ever-deepening crevices, plunging over a series of tilted terraces, sliding sideways in glossy metallic sheets of water with such tremendous force that a few years ago  a couple fishing one of them was swept away and drowned. It’s as wild as Alaska back up in there, more moose and caribou and bears and mountain lions than people. The fish spawn up to 17 Mile Falls, 125 kilometers from the mouth, where I found a game warden named Joshua Philbrick sitting in a little cabin overlooking the river gorge and carving a thunderbird mask. A 26-year-old Micmac, Philbrick had lost both this parents to alcohol and drugs when he was little and had become a traditionalist; he was in training as a healer. “I had reached the point where I didn’t know who I was,” he explained. “A lot of people are walking around who don’t know who they are,  because they don’t understand their connections, their relations. We believe that all the animals  are our relations. Every animal has a medicine.”

     “What’s the medicine of the salmon ?” I asked.

     “Salmon have the stimulation not to give up,” Joshua said. “They travel all the way across the Atlantic just to spawn here. If people have that connection with Salmon, they get his medicine, and don’t give up. But people are losing touch with the Earth. They don’t have that feeling any more.  We’re all part of the vicious cycle now and are doing vicious things. These rich, self-centered people who are forking up for conservation—it’s blood money. Six companies are clearcutting the trees up here. They think they can take it away and it will come back, but once it’s gone, it’s over. That’s it.”

      The erosion from the clearcuts is the most serious immediate environmental threat to the survival of the Grand Cascapedia’s salmon. It is washing down into the river and silting over the gravel bottom that the salmon need to spawn. With the trees gone, the spongy, mossy floor of the forest is drying up and less rain is falling, and what does is running off more quickly, so the river is much lower than it has ever been, and its temperature and biology are changing. Most of the sediment is carried, suspended in the rushing water,  all the way down the river,  being precipitated  into the bay, which is filling up with mud; there are only a few channels left that the salmon can swim up. 

      In l981 the Cascapedia Society took over the management of the river. It is a tri-cultural organization  of the camp owners, the Micmacs, and the residents of St. Jules and Cascapedia,  villages on either side of the river  six miles up  composed of English-speaking descendants of “empire loyalists”-- American colonists who refused to join the revolution and fled north-- mixed with Francophones whose fugitive Acadian ancestors had managed thirty years earlier to avoid being deported to Louisiana. The Society is trying to get the logging companies to clearcut only 35% and not 50% of the sub-basins in the headwaters, and to observe the law about not cutting within 500 meters of anywatercourse, which they have been flagrantly violating, and to put in better culverts where there roads cross streams and most of the erosion is taking place. It also tried to get the Grand Cascapedia declared a catch-and-release-only river, but the local Gaspesians vetoed this because they want to keep their fish. So at this point releasing is strongly encouraged but voluntary, and you can keep up one fish per day, and a total of two. Last year 2800 large fish were counted in a diving census. This was twice as many as they year before. About 1000 were caught, and 300 were kept. Some of them were given to the society’s hatchery, where 350,000 fry were raised from their eggs and milt and released into the river. But very few of these will make it to adulthood. Predation begins the moment the alevin, as the first-year fry is known,  hatches from its egg, laid in the gravel at the well-oxygenated tails of the pools. Kingfishers, otters, brook trout (which are also sea-running), bald and golden eagles, ospreys, black-backed gulls,  and above all mergansers take a huge toll. The par, or second-year fry,  leave for the sea,   to return as two-to-six-pound grilce and later as full-grown adults (three or four times if they make it to the end of their 12-to-14-year lifespan). But once in the open ocean, they are subject to 61 factors  that are  contributing to the species’ dramatic depletion. So under the circumstances,  it seems ecologically irresponsible not only to keep the fish, but to even be fishing for them at all, except that  much of the money that the society makes from the anglers goes to the conservation effort. Hoagy told me about a new threat to the salmon : the Micmacs are trying to get the right to catch the “black salmon,” the fish that spend the winter in the river, after spawning, living off their body fat and gradually turning from gleaming silver to a dull slate, as they head back out into the Atlantic the following May. “Nobody every bothered with these spent fish before,” he told me. “It would be really horrible if this is allowed to happen.”
 

      But here I was, guiltily enjoying myself casting streamers into  Little Camp Pool.  “This can be a fabulous pool,” Hoagy told me, and the following week he caught two big fish in it. But this afternoon they weren’t hitting anything. Why they ever do at all is a mystery, because they don’t eat  while they are spawning. Hoagy’s theory is that flies remind them of when they were par and grilce (which I did catch two of)  and snapped at anything that moved. It’s just like that song of your Dad’s, “Some Days There Just Ain’t No Fish,” I suggested.  

       “But they’re there, Alex,” Hoagy said. “That’s the silly part of it. Quite often the fly will be six or eight feet on either side of the fish, and he won’t move.”

       “You’re covering the fish,” one of our guides, Barry Coull, whose father had also been a guide, told me. “If he don’t take it, there’s nothing you can do about it.” And Homer Labrett, our other guide, said of my casting, “I seen worse,” so it wasn’t a question of my technique. 

        But I wasn’t complaining. The experience didn’t need to be crowned with the ultimate, vulnerable prize to be complete. I didn’t mind being skunked one bit.  
 
 

INFO

To get on the river, you need a license from the Cascapedia Society, in Cascapedia, across the river from St. Jules,  which also has a nice little museum. Call Phyllis Caldwell at 418 392 5079 to book a guide cum 26-foot-long Chestnut or Sharpe canoe (specially designed for this river and the nearby Restigouche and Matapedia), who will take you to some of the most legendary and exclusive pools, which are fished in rotation with the private camps and which you can’t get on on your own. This runs $650-900 a day (all prices in Canadian $), depending on which sector of the river you fish.  You can also get time on some of the upper pools for $60 dollars a day without a guide by submitting your name to a drawing held on the first of November the year before. Time on these pools may still be available on 72-hour notice if you call Phyllis. There are also other rivers with not as large salmon and trophy-sized searunning brook trout, like the Nouvelle, the Petit Cascapedia, and the Bonaventure,  and further south, in New Brunswick, is the Miramishi, which has a run of 70,000 salmon and  vast stretches of good public water.
 

Gear :

Sexton & Sexton, in St. Jules, has everything and then some. It’s heaven for the serious salmon fisherman and the Orvis/Abercrombie & Finch/Patagonia aficionado in general.

Lodging:

Auberge La Maison Stanley, Lord Stanley’s spectacular camp on the bluff of the bay, Wainscoted throughout and little changed in 120 years, run by a lovely old couple, M. and Mme. Edgar le Blanc, 418 759 3969, $60 a night with continental breakfast but no other meals. Kid-friendly and path down to private beach, as with the even more spectacularly sited

Cascapedia Lodge, also on the bluff, closer to the mouth, run by a nice French-Canadian couple who don’t speak much English. $125 a day with full breakfast. Other meals extra. View across the bay from the bluff here is worldclass. In July and August the Baie des Chaleurs has the sultry lushness of the Great Lakes of Central Africa.
 

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