Excerpt from The Run Of The River, by Mark Hume. Photography by Nick Didlick [Published by New Star Books, in 1992, the edition went out of stock and out of print in 2008. The last royalty cheque was for about $20. Those buyers of the last books didn’t know how lucky they were.] The Salmon River rises in dry grasslands on the Douglas Plateau in south, central British Columbia, where cattle wander across the dusty roads and old ranch buildings are weathered the color of copper. It drops through a rocky gully with scree slopes and brown clearcuts marring  surrounding hills, before winding through a rich agricultural valley system to enter Shuswap Lake at Salmon Arm. From its headwaters on the Douglas Lake Cattle Ranch, to its estuary, on Indian land just beyond what passes for urban sprawl in the small, logging, farming and retirement centre of Salmon Arm, the river is full with the promise of fish. In the upper reaches the small pools are said to hold olive green brook trout and small rainbows will sometimes dart out from under log jams lower down to take a tiny dry fly. But wading this stream in the fall, looking for salmon, the promise is unfulfilled in pool after empty pool. The runs between the pools lie vacant. The perfect spawning gravel, where you can find it swept clean of silt, is unused. The Salmon River, Salmon Arm on Shuswap Lake, and the town of Salmon Arm are all named after the runs of red sockeye that once filled the lake and choked the stream. It is said that the salmon were so plentiful up until the early 1900’s, that farmers pitchforked them on to their fields for fertilizer. Stories like that are told...