Having served in Moscow as a staff correspondent during the last days of the Soviet Union, Montaigne longed to return to Russia to explore the nothern areas unknown to him. With rivers and lakes in abundance, he decided to fly-fish his way across Russia, from the Solovetsky Islands, 100 miles south of the Arctic Circle, to the wilderness of the Kamchatka peninsula in the Russian Far East. As well as being an account of an American in his mid-forties discovering himself in alien territory, this book is also a history of Stalin's Gulags.