GREEN HIGHLANDERS AND PINK LADIES.

By Dana S. Lamb '21. Bar re(Mass.): Barre Publishers, 1971. 92 pp.Limited edition, 1500 signed copies. $15.

It's a dark world. Canada cannot fulfill its usual quota of 150,000 salmon eggs for the New Hampshire Fish and Game Department for salmon restoration in the Connecticut. But a bright world. Another book by that stylist and wit: Dana Lamb, former president of the New York Anglers' Club, author of Not Far From The River, Bright Salmonand Brown Trout, and Woodsmoke andWatercress.

The title? It concerns an Adirondack oatmeal eater with knobby knees, whiskey and black bean soup with undertones, a statewide temperance convention, a pious virgin who may have prayed too well, and the conflagration of an earthly paradise. The book consists of essays with delicate color and sound, esoteric talk spiced with joviality in fishing camps, situations picturesque and picaresque, and subtle delineations of human foibles and frailties. Fish, yes, especially those increasing in size and fighting qualities as whiskey encourages truth, but also birds (quail, grouse, woodcock), dogs with flexible noses and stiff legs, sea gulls and fidler crabs, scampering pink pigs and cricket-hunting hens, cooked codfish tongues, and foghorns off the Gaspe.

Most of all, human beings with their quidnuncs and their quiddities. A salmon lover outwits Asa Parsons, "tough as rawhide, mean as sin." Owner of a stretch of river, Asa hated fishing and fishermen almost as much as did his two savage, wolf-size dogs. The salmon lover also checkmates his betting friend and collects a fat wad.

Heart interest? Ah, yes. A piscatorial honeymoon on the Kennebago, Juliet of the fishing rod, Romeo of the fishing boots attempting to dance delicate attendance on the timid little bride. Her innocence bordering on ludicrous ignorance, she couldn't tell the difference between a salmon and a horned pout. Well now, guess who hooked the ten-pounder and who, arms like windmills in a hurricane, sank in two feet six inches of water cold enough to freeze a seal. In the middle of the Kennebago, Sweet Innocence had let drop that, unmarried, she had fished the Brodhead.

How good a fisherman is Dana Lamb? His hand on the Bible, he tells us that in one week long ago on a lake with no unobstructed outlet to the sea he caught two nine-pound and one twelve-pound salmon but missed the flirtatious female of 18 pounds who delivered her charms to a rival. It's a dark world. Today a Lamb four-pounder makes headlines in Portland newspapers. But a bright world. Fisherman or mere reader, you respond to the winter log fire while Dana Lamb touches nostalgically his Mickey Finns and Edson Tigers and dreams of trout as gorgeous as the flaming foliage of hardwood hills and of salmon, shapely, silver, and strong. Asa Parsons is condemned in the afterlife to fish the Styx, The Hateful, with, as guide, Charon, mean as sin and tough as rawhide. Asa's fishing rod is a hefty iron crowbar, its hook to be baited by him every hour with a tough and mean scorpian.