Trout Tracks

A new collection of outdoor writing from one of fly fishing’s most popular essayists.


Drawn from 55 years of excessive obsession with trout, water, streams, and flies, this collection of essays from Canada’s most widely read fly-fishing author since Roderick Haig-Brown reveals the depth of engagement that this sport engenders. Poised and polished words reveal the flaws and virtues of humanity, the strength of Mother Nature, the beautiful mystery that is a wild trout, and the obsessed’s inexplicable need to outsmart a creature with a brain the size of a pea.

Fly fishing is considered perhaps the most reflective and graceful of outdoor pursuits, and author Jim McLennan agrees – for the most part. Trout Tracks includes pieces on fly-fishing people and fly-fishing places, plus stories of quiet successes and loud failures, in sum revealing the soul of “the quiet sport.”

You won’t learn from this book how to cast farther or tie a knot faster, but if you’ve ever fly fished – or if you want to – you’ll smile and understand more clearly the seduction of wild trout in wild places.