There is something in angling which provokes a host of its partisans and practitioners to write about it. Most of them write very badly indeed, with enthusiasm running lengths ahead of talent. Only rarely does marked literary skill combine with sound knowledge and rich experience to produce a really good angling book, but Roderick Haig-Brown's "A River Never Sleeps" is just that.

The author writes for his fellow-fishermen, and assumes the reader's sympathy for his piscatory approach to rivers, but there is much in this book to captivate those whose interest in nature is more sedentary. The spectacle of salmon migration, for example, loses none of its eternal and elemental excitement when seen through the eyes of a fisherman—especially when the fisherman is as competent a naturalist as Haig-Brown proved himself in his earlier book, "Return to the River."

Haig-Brown came to the Pacific Northwest after a...