Story by Mark Hume with Photography by Nick Didlick

Bruce Hill said there would be fish in the river and when he makes a promise like that, anglers listen.

``There will be Dolly Varden lying all along that run, and there may be some sockeye in there too,'' he said. ``They are right on the bottom."

It is sometimes hard for a guide to communicate the most simple instructions. When he said ``right on the bottom'' he didn't mean a meter off the river bed. He meant your fly had to tick along, bumping from rock to rock. But it took awhile to figure that out. Hours. Normally when you don't get a bite all morning you figure there are no fish. But Bruce Hill, who stalks gravel bars with the informed grace of a bear hunting salmon, knows his rivers -- so you believe, and keep casting.

Mr. Hill, a former steelhead guide, former logger, former president of the Steelhead Society of British Columbia, co-owner of Kitlope Ecotours and an all-round fish lobbyist, had dropped a group of us on a small, clear river that came rushing down out of some of the most spectacular mountains that ever erupted from the earth. It was early summer and the sockeye were just arriving. We'd seen them, rolling like small porpoises in the milky green waters of glacial Kitlope Lake, where the faces of ancient petroglyphs stare out over a haunting landscape and high on the mountain native Indians see the face of a goat hunter, who was turned to stone.

Mr. Hill played a key role in the early 1990's lobbying the government to save the Kitlope watershed from logging. He said that the first instant he laid his eyes on the estuary, where chest deep grass waves like wheat in the wind, he knew the place was special.

Mr. Hill, who at the time was a logger and steelhead guide, had been traveling British Columbia's rough, wild coastline the hard way, by small boat, searching inlet by inlet for wilderness fishing rivers.

Like a lot of others, he thought there might be another Dean River out there somewhere, hidden in the untramped mountains.

When he saw the Kitlope he thought: "Holy s---. This is awesome."

A dark mountain wall looms over the mouth on one shore; on the other is a huge granite dome topped by an ice field. Looking up at this you feel like somehow you've stepped through time and are looking at the world the way it was just after the glaciers retreated.

The milky green Kitlope pours into this scene, mingling with the sea, through a wide meadow marked by ancient bear trails. The air is pungent with the smell of the tides.

Anchored in the estuary on the day of Mr. Hill's enlightenment was a research boat. When he went aboard, paying the kind of cursory visit required when strangers pass in the wilderness, he met a team of forestry planners. They told him they were going to blast a road along the north shore. Put a log dump on the flats. And float rafts of timber down the Kitlope.

"I thought: 'Log drives in a salmon river? Didn't they stop doing that in the 30s?'," recalled Mr. Hill in an interview.

As he studied the logging plans, he felt a chill run through him. He'd been cutting trees long enough to know exactly what he was looking at - the end of the wilderness.

When he pulled out of the Kitlope a few days later, heading back to his home in Terrace, he knew his old life was behind him. He'd been transformed into something he never thought possible. He'd become an environmental activist.

He founded a group (at first it was just him and a friend) that began working to raise the profile of the Kitlope in an effort to save it. Soon he'd been joined by anglers, local politicians, mainstream environmental groups such as Ecotrust and the Western Canada Wilderness Committee.

One of the first things Hill did was track down Yvon Chouinard, the president of a chic U.S. clothing company, Patagonia Inc., who was steelhead fishing on the Skeena River.

Recalling the meeting, Mr. Hill said he hit Mr. Chouinard as he was emerging from the river in his chest waders, water running off him as if from a baptism.

"See there's this wild place it's just awesome it might have steelhead and it's threatened so we gotta save it," said Mr. Hill, reliving his frantic appeal.

"Yeah?" said Mr. Chouinard.

"We need to rent a chopper go in there and get some pictures so we can start telling people about it and save the damn place. I figure it'll cost about $4,000 for the flight," said Mr. Hill.

"Do they take credit cards?" asked Mr. Chouinard, without blinking.

"So I'm going: 'Yeah! Yeah, they take credit cards!' and that's pretty much how it started," said Mr. Hill as he recalled the conversation.

When the rolls of film came back, Mr. Hill sent off slides to everybody he could think of. Magazine editors, journalists, environmental leaders, politicians. . .

"I didn't know what I was doing - but I knew I had to do something," he said.

The Kitlope, at 400,000 hectares, is the largest intact temperate rain forest on Earth. It has grizzly bears, wolves, five species of salmon, trout, char, bats, falcons, eagles, mountain goats, oolachon - and the remnants of ancient Indian villages.

Near where the lake spills into the river, the current has dragged and dropped a small forest of tree trunks. They stand like guardians to the lake's entrance - and the world's largest population of freshwater seals can often be found there, lying on the snags, waiting for the salmon. Above are towering cliffs. Up one black wall are a series of indentations -- natural footsteps, say the Haisla natives - left by the first hunters as they climbed to the peaks. Men who were so heavy they pressed their feet into the granite as if it were clay. It's easy enough to believe when you're there.

The Kitlope has been used by the Haisla since the glaciers retreated. The Haisla, People of The Rocks, have an oral history that appears to go back to a time before the forests grew - which would be in the immediate post-glacial period, about 10,000 years ago.

While he was fighting to save the Kitlope, Mr. Hill became close friends with Gerald Amos, a Haisla leader who was equally passionate about saving the region from logging - even though forest companies had promised his people high paying jobs and rich rewards to help clearcut the forests.

"If your whole family history, if the knowledge of your family was in one book that was bound and rested in your possession - I think you'd protect that with your very being wouldn't you?" says Mr. Amos in explaining his position.

"I think that's what the Kitlope is. It's the Haisla book of knowledge. I don't think you'd allow your book to be burned or the pages torn out."

Together the two made a formidable pair, and eventually, along with many others who'd joined the fight, they were able to convince both the government and the logging company that the best thing to do was set the area aside as a wilderness preserve.

When Mr. Hill came back to move us to another location in the Kitlope system, he just laughed when he heard nobody was catching anything. Then he went away, vanishing down the river in his jet boat, as if to say: ``If you can't figure it out, you don't deserve it.''

Some guide, you think, and then later you realize that he has given you the greatest gift of all - time alone on the river to be part of nature - and to learn.

To get a light lure down to the bottom of a quick river you either have to add a lot of weight, or you cast directly upstream, so the line has time to sink. The trouble with the weight is that it takes the fun out of it. The trouble with the upstream cast is that it puts so much slack in your line that when a fish strikes, you can't set the hook.

On cast after cast the line came back untouched. After too much of this, some of the anglers wandered off to nap in the shade.

I bore down, casting and mending the line and swinging the rod to keep pace with the current. The line danced and jigged and then, after a long while, it started to tick. Off the bottom.

Synchronicity.

The Dolly Varden hit with a jolt. It was exactly where Mr. Hill had said it would be, lying among the stones, waiting for the sockeye to arrive with their bellies full of spawn. It took a false egg - and just about yanked the rod out of my hands.

When the fish came in it was long as a forearm, with silver sides and a heavily spotted green back. After catching a fish like that, you just can't wait to catch another.

Hours later the jet boat came back with a hiss, slop-sliding up the rapids and clunking to a stop on the rocks. Mr. Hill just stood there with a big smile on his face, looking at the river and the mountains and the forest.

``What do you think?'' he asked about the valley. It was a question, of course, to which he already knew the answer.

Then he asked about the fishing. When he heard about the 12 big Dolly Varden that had come out of the run, he laughed in delight. The river had delivered again.

"You know," he said as we drifted downstream, "the world has changed a lot. There was a time as a guide when the only way your clients measured success was by how many fish they caught. Now we are dealing with a generation that cares as much about how they catch a fish, and where they catch a fish. It's the whole experience that counts."

Mr. Hill is now too busy advising the Sierra Club on fisheries matters, and promoting his eco-tourism company to work as a steelhead guide anymore. But if you get in a boat with him, you can be sure he'll be watching the water the whole time, for the sign of a dorsal fin, the brush of a spotted tail. If he sees it, he could point you right to it. . .then again, he might just leave you to discover it for yourself.

Through Kitlope Ecotours, Mr. Hill and Mr. Amos have opened up one of British Columbia's greatest wilderness tracts, where you can read from the Haisla book of knowledge, and catch some of the most beautiful fish in the world.

(For more information call Bruce Hill at 250-638-8250, or write: Kitlope Ecotours, 4916 Haugland Avenue, Terrace, B.C., Canada, V8G 1H4. )