Return to the River ─ The Classic Story of the Chinook Run and of the Men Who Fish It

Return to the River remains one of the finest books ever written about the salmon and has won its place as an angler's and naturalist's classic.
Drawn back again to spawn in the stream that hatched them, the deep-sea salmon, the great silver chinooks, return as inevitably as the September rains.Return to the River captures the whole sweep of the chinook migration in every significant detail: the departure seaward of the millions of small fry in the spring of the second year, the saltwater life of the free-swimming schools in the deeps beyond Puget Sound, the later return of the survivorssixty- and eighty-pounders that leap against every obstacle, striving to complete their lives at last among upland shadows barely deep enough to contain them.
Roderick Haig-Brown, observing with the trained eye of the naturalist what he records with a novelist's skill, here sets forth the dramatic life history of one salmon from her hatching through her matingthe fulfillment of her life cycle.
The supple, rapid style, vigorous as the great fish itself,” wrote Joseph Henry Jackson in theSan Francisco Chronicle, makes this account as easy reading as fiction.”

Roderick L. Haig-Brown was born in England but lived most of his adult life on Vancouver Island, along the banks of the Campbell Rivera river that provided an ever-plentiful source of material for his many articles and books. Among his classics of nature and angling writing are A River Never Sleeps, Fisherman’s Winter,Fisherman’s Spring, Fisherman’s Summer, and Fisherman’s Fall. He is deceased.

Nick Lyons is the author of many books on fishing, including his famous Spring Creek, and a former English professor and book publisher.