Throw It Forward

Fly-fishing with my daughters became a lesson in the wonders of nature

- Mark Hume

WHEN MY DAUGHTERS were growing up, my partner, Maggie, and I took them camping every summer. It was the late 1990s, and we'd pitch our tent on British Columbia's lakeshores and beside rivers, where I introduced them to one of the great passions in my life, fly-fishing.

Before I taught Emma and Claire how to cast, I showed them how to lie on a dock and peer through the cracks to see trout swimming below. I helped them turn over rocks on the lakeshore to find larvae of caddisflies, wandering aquatic insects that carry on their backs intricate homes made of tiny sticks or stones. I taught the girls that adult caddisflies look like small moths and that when they skitter over the surface to lay their eggs, trout chase them, striking with abandon. This changed the way they looked at lakes.

One time, when Emma was about eight and Claire just four, I showed them dragonfly nymphs clambering up the stems of bulrushes to shed their shells. "When you see dragonflies zooming about over the you know there will be nymphs underwater nearby," I said, referring to the aquatic, larval stage of the insects. "Trout love to feed on them." I took a newly emerged adult dragonfly off a bulrush and brought it into the canoe.

"They look fierce, but they won't bite if you don't hold them roughly," I said as Claire watched the insect resting on the gunwale, testing its new wings. Tentatively she laid her hand down and waited while it clambered onto her fingers. With its wings gingerly unfolding, its ferocious mandible gasping harmlessly, it gently clasped her skin with tiny, clinging feet. She held it in front of her face, turning it in the light. Emma found one, too, and it sparkled blue.