True Love and the Woolly Bugger »

Dave Ames spends much of his time in pursuit of trout and grayling. He has written for the Chicago Tribune, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Sports Afield, Fin and Feather, and Montana magazine. He lives in Helena, Montana.

Tales--some a little tall, but all with a witty, humane perspective--from one of Montana's premier fishing guides.

Publishers Weekly

Smatterings of The Compleat Angler, The Bartender's Guide and Dear Abby dot this homespun first collection of offbeat fishing tales by an inveterate Montana fly fisherman who casts his obsessive pastime out into the intellectual waters somewhere between high religion and tackle-shop tall tale. The opening story, "The Woolly Bugger," recounts high points in the fishing life of a narrator who first wet a hook at age 10 in 1964 and projects his future into the year 2020. "True Love," the concluding story, is a poignant little fable about the bonding of a married couple still fishing together after 35 years. From cutthroat trout in Montana to steelhead salmon in the Pacific Northwest and the bonefish and tarpon in the Caribbean, these seven stories involve ghosts, hippies, truck wrecks, hoe-downs, kinky libidos, marriage, parenthood, divorce and boozy friendship. The plots, which wander, and the prose, plainer than dirt, are almost incidental. The bait here is folksy philosophizingjust the thing to lure a tired, beer-numbed angler on a day when his rod is broke and the skeeters are biting. (July)