Behind drawn curtains in the main room at Corbett Lake Country Inn the guests are oblivious to the weather. Outside a spring squall has passed, hail has hissed down on the water and now the clouds have parted to pour sunlight on the still lake. A trout swirls in the shallows, signalling a new season, rich with promise.

Nobody notices. Inside, 60 avid anglers are leaning forward to listen to a speaker and look at slides of bamboo, growing wild on a hillside in China. It's not just any bamboo mind you, and these are no ordinary anglers.

They have come from California, Idaho, Delaware, Montana, Oregon, Washington, throughout British Columbia, Alberta and one all the way from Germany, not to fish, but to learn about an ancient art that is undergoing a remarkable revival.

They are cane rod builders - some of the best anywhere - and they have gathered for what has become perhaps the most important conference of its kind in the world.

The first conference of cane rod builders in North America was held here, just outside Merritt, a two hour drive East of Vancouver, in 1988. That year there were just 26 of them, some of the last practitioners of an old and, some thought, dying art form. But since then the number of participants has grown rapidly. By 1997 the conference was booked to over-flowing, and spin-off conferences are now being held in California, Oregon, Arkansas, Michigan, New York, Toronto, Germany, France and Sweden.

Over the past 20 years, cane nearly vanished from fishing waters because trade embargoes cut off the supply from China and technology offered new materials - glass, then graphite - that had more casting power.

At a conference a few years ago, Harold Demarest, a second generation bamboo importer from Bloomingdale, New Jersey, explained that because of trade restriction, for decades rod builders had to live off the Tonkin cane that was held outside China in stockpiles.

But the access to China cane is open again, he said, and the supply is there again. For how long?

``Politics - that's another subject,'' he laughs. ``But commerce will govern. International trade is something on which China is very dependent.''

For a long time it seemed like the real threat was that the world would run out of cane rod builders before it ran out of cane. The Corbett Lake conference has marked a dramatic turnaround.

``It's a renaissance,'' says Peter McVey, the resort owner and himself a renowned rod builder and skilled fly fisherman.

Why is cane making a comeback?

``There's your answer right there,'' replies Mr. McVey, laying an expensive graphite rod that looks like an oil dipstick alongside a glowing, bamboo rod he's just finished building in his workshop. The bamboo rod seems to be alive, and it's all I can do not to pick it up and run down to the lake, where, I'm betting, the trout are rising within casting distance of the boat dock.

``If you have any appreciation of beauty, you can see what I mean," says Mr. McVey, turning the rod in his hands so it catches the light pouring through a dusty window. " And that'll catch a fish for you,'' he says. The $785 cane rod he's lovingly holding has silver finishings and a tigerwood reel seat.

``It's more than a rod. . . It's an art form," he says.

Mr. McVey builds rods in a small shed behind the resort during the long winter months. Ten a year. He just sold three of them. And it hurt.

``When I put it in a case and give it to a guy, I have a moment of sadness,'' he admits. ``You kind of get attached to it.''

Bob Milward, a Vancouver architect (featured in our profile section), had one of the star pieces at the show I attended. A four-piece pack rod housed in a bamboo case adorned with line drawings of trout flies and a jumping rainbow. He's a professional rod builder, but the idea of a sale still makes him wince.

``Oh, about $1,900 at least,'' he says, reluctantly putting a price on his exquisite creation. ``I didn't really build it to sell. But I suppose I'll have to, eventually.'' Later he'd up the price to $2,300.

Fred Miller, of Bellingham, showed off a rod with a reel seat made from a 100-year-old fence post he collected while fishing in New Zealand. It looked like a limb of discarded lumber to most people, but when he saw it and hefted it in his hands, he just knew he had to take it home and use it in a rod. With the grayness of the ages sanded off, the wood emerged dark, red in color, with a fine, tight grain.

The reel seat is not only beautiful, but everytime he looks at it, it reminds him of the fishing trip to New Zealand when he came back with an old fence post stub. The rod, he says, is not for sale. He couldn't imagine anyone walking away with it.

Gerry Arbeider, of Vancouver, knows how he feels.

``You can't afford to sell them,'' he says, thinking of the long hours it takes to craft one. Fifty hours is routine for a single rod.

When we talked he was in the process of building four for his grandchildren. Something to remember him by, even if they don't grow up to be fishers.

The Corbett Lake convention, held every second year on the last weekend in April - the most recent just concluded, the next is in 2002 - began with a late night conversation beside the resort's fireplace.

John Bokstrom, of Maple Ridge, British Columbia, had been up for some spring fishing when he noticed another angler fishing with a beautiful cane rod. They struck up a conversation. Both were builders and wondered if there were many more out there. They set out to raise a dozen participants for the first conference, got 26 - and the rest is angling history.

``We figure there are 350 guys in North America building them now,'' he said of the cane rods. ``It's an epidemic.''

Mr. Bokstrom said a cane rod book that came out in 1976 started the revival, giving true believers a bible to work from. But it was really the Internet that allowed the cane rod building fanatics to find one another.

"The Internet has made it so easy for guys to communicate, so it's sprouting up all over now," he said.

Mr. Bokstrom said the Corbett Lake retreat is usually booked long in advance, making it hard for new builders to get in. He and a few colleagues have taken to holding informal workshops, at their homes in Vancouver, "just to help them get going."

Outside the Corbett Lake Country Inn, in a grassy field, more than a dozen rod builders are putting their work to the test. The rods flash in the sunlight and the lines arc gracefully through the air. Down at the lake the trout are still waiting, but nobody's much interested. For the moment, they'd rather be here, conducting a fly fishing symphony on dry land.

(Corbett Lake Country Inn can be reached in British Columbia at: 250-378-4334. It's a fine place to fish, even if you can't get in to the cane rod conference.)