Ebb and Flow

Nobody taught the journalist Mark Hume how to read the water. As he explains in his lean but elegant memoir, the tradition, the talent, the gift — whatever you want to call it — came to him by chance when he was seven, “the way poetry or dance or dreams come to others.”

Tagging along behind an older brother, Hume wandered through the overgrown orchards surrounding his isolated family home near Penticton, British Columbia. His brother was seeking the source of a stream flowing from Campbell Mountain, the forested hulk looming over the Okanagan Valley that marked the edge of their boyhood world. Ignoring a No Trespassing sign, the two found a pool of trout, “moving in a tight interlaced school, collecting like gold in a seam, waiting to be discovered.” These fish were the first trout Hume had ever seen, and he was hooked. “They seemed hand-painted, daubed with surprising colors. . . . It was astonishing to see such perfect form, such vividness, emerging so...