Steve Pettit, warrior-biologist extraordinaire, without whom I doubt a single salmon or steelhead would return to wild Idaho; Rebecca Miles and the Nez Perce people, who deserve a tribal Nobel for what they’ve endured without surrender for two centuries; Bill McMillan and Bill Bakke, for lifelong contributions to every wild fish that still swims; Kurt Beardslee and the Wild Fish Conservancy for the same; Linwood Laughy and Borg Hendrickson for truly, brilliantly fighting Goliath; Frank Boyden, Jane Boyden, Melissa Madenski, Tom Crawford, tenders of my home and heart fires; Yvon Chouinard, gruff sage of Patagonia and archenemy of deadbeat dams; Sam Mace and Bryan Jones, Loaves & Fishes diplomats extraordinaire of the Palouse; my Trappist brother Casey, for recognizing that BPA money is blood money—the tribes’, the Mother’s, the Son’s; Ben Knight and Travis Rummel, for all their films, but the sorrow-and-joy-inducing DamNation most of all; Steve Hawley, for his grasp of the Columbia/Snake clusterfuck and of bogus dam science worldwide, but for his big open heart and humor even so; Jim Norton, salmon point man for Ecotrust and co-maker of PBS Nature’s salmon horror show, “Salmon: Running the Gauntlet”; Alexandra Morton, arch salmon druid of British Columbia and archenemy of net-penned corporate-salmon clones and the contagions they’ve unleashed; Laura Rose Day, co-restorer of the Penobscot as her name somehow foretold; Mark Titus, maker of the fine Pacific salmon portrait The Breach; Lee Spencer, longtime guardian of the wild steelhead of Steamboat Creek, whose love has led him to fish flies with no hooks; Sherman Alexie, for his nonpareil salmon and grief songs; Brian Doyle, Chris Dombrowski, John Bussanich, for faith brotherhood; Pope Francis! Where… how… what the?! Go, Pope Francis!; and Ian Boyden, for his fiery insight into the need to relinquish self, just like a wild salmon, in order to traverse the great prayer wheel that is the watershed entire.
Adrian, Cecilia, Ellora: my three queens of Orient are.
About the Author
DAVID JAMES DUNCAN is the author of the novels The River Why and The Brothers K; the story and memoir collection River Teeth; the National Book Award–nominated My Story as Told by Water; a book of non-Christian reflections on Christianity, God Laughs & Plays; and two fast-response activist books, The Heart of the Monster (coauthored by Rick Bass) and Citizen’s Dissent (coauthored by Wendell Berry). Duncan has won three Pacific Northwest Booksellers Awards, a Lannan Fellowship, the Western States Book Award for nonfiction, an honorary doctorate from the University of Portland, the American Library Association’s award for the preservation of intellectual freedom (with Wendell Berry), and other honors. His work has appeared in scores of magazines and more than forty anthologies, including The Best American Essays, The Best American Sports Writing, The Best American Catholic Writing, and The Best American Spiritual Writing (five times). He lives with the sculptor Adrian Arleo on a Montana trout stream.
Also by David James Duncan
The Brothers K
River Teeth
My Story as Told by Water
God Laughs & Plays
The Heart of the Monster (with Rick Bass)
Praise for David James Duncan’s
THE RIVER WHY
Selected by the San Francisco Chronicle as one of the twentieth century’s Top 100 books of the American West
Selected as one of the 100 Best Oregon Books (1800–2000) by the Oregon Cultural Heritage Commission
“A whirlwind, madcap, humorous, and sensitive novel.”
—New York Times
“A hymn to the waters of the earth and the wholeness of life. It is also funny.”
—Miami Herald
“This is a modern—repeat, modern—tale of maturity and redemption.”
—Christian Science Monitor
“A small national treasure.”
—People
“Wonderfully funny.”
—Esquire
“A veritable epic of fly-fishing… done in a high-velocity, exuberant style, sprawling in scale, heedless of form.… The feeling for and evocation of the imperiled natural world is rhapsodic in its intensity; the writing energetic, literary in a distinctly American way.… So amiable is the prevailing tone that the flowing narrative is able to absorb Koranic and Eastern mysticisms, Tao, Sufism, Zen—the religions of oneness and gospel of love—without turning into the kind of maudlin choral chanting that so often disfigures treatments of fusion of self and the world.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Anyone who reads this amazing story will find it filled with more and deeper truths than almost any nonfiction book.… If Huckleberry Finn didn’t exist, I’d consider this the greatest American outdoors novel ever written.”
—Houston Chronicle
“The best thing to come out of Oregon since Nike running shoes.”
—West Coast Review of Books
* filterless Camel cigarette
* from The Complete Sherlock Holmes
* from The Complete Sherlock Holmes
Thank you for buying this ebook, published by Hachette Digital.
To receive special offers, bonus content, and news about our latest ebooks and apps, sign up for our newsletters.
Sign Up
Or visit us at hachettebookgroup.com/newsletters
Copyright
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Copyright © 1983 by David James Duncan
Afterword copyright © 2016 by David James Duncan
Cover design by Mario J. Pulice
Cover photo-illustration by Debra Lill
Author photograph by Yogesh Simpson
Cover copyright © 2016 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.
All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitute unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.
Little, Brown and Company
Hachette Book Group
1290 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10104
littlebrown.com
twitter.com/littlebrown
facebook.com/littlebrownandcompany
First ebook edition: September 2015
Originally published by Sierra Club Books, 1983
Little, Brown and Company is a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc. The Little, Brown name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
The Hachette Speakers Bureau provides a wide range of authors for speaking events. To find out more, go to hachettespeakersbureau.com or call (866) 376-6591.
The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.
The two excerpts from “Drinking Song” by Jim Harrison are reprinted by permission of Jim Harrison. The excerpt from “Three for the Predators” from The Rough-Hewn Table by Henry Carlile copyright 1971. Reprinted by permission of Henry Carlile.
ISBN 978-0-316-26121-0
E3-20180704-JV-PC
The River Why Page 39
