The Last Guide: A Story of Fish and Love

Ask any good journalist what the best part of the job is and he's likely to say the serendipitous moment when one story turns into another. A few years ago, the Ottawa Citizen's Ron Corbett set out to write a tale on wolves in Ontario's Algonquin Provincial Park. A chance encounter at a gas station led him to the front door of Frank Kuiack, who, Corbett was told, knew a good deal about the park's wolves. When Corbett went to meet him, he learned something remarkable about Kuiack. He was the last of the old-time fishing guides still working full-time in the park. "Kuiack's life," he writes, "seemed to be a counterpoint to the many changes that had taken place over the years, not only around Algonquin Park, but elsewhere in Canada."

Corbett explores those rush-toward-the-21st-century changes in this lyrical narrative of a fishing trip via canoe through the park with Kuiack. It would turn out to be the old man's last journey as a guide. By using the guide as his centrepiece, he weaves together a marvellous anecdotal history of the park, its fishing, and legendary guides like Basil Sawyer, Sam Beaver (friend and guide to The New Yorker's E.B. White), and Tom Thompson, who once lived in Algonquin's wilderness and seems such a part of its geography. Corbett writes: "While [the changes] led to the slow disappearance of the fishing guides in the Algonquin Highlands, Kuiack never abandoned the calling. Today, he is the last practitioner of a business, a trade, an art, that will die with him." Which makes the serendipity that brought Corbett and Kuiack together just that much more fortunate. Because of their meeting, something that would have otherwise been lost has now been preserved with great care and real affection. --Jeff Silverman