Last winter at Fly Rod & Reel magazine's Boston show there was a hatch of lies, black lies seething out of the Umiakovik Fishing and Hunting Camp booth like winged ants from an August-heated lake shore. This according to the char-fishingest gentleman, who had chased Salvelinus alpinus all over its circumpolar range. He knew what everyone else who fishes for Arctic char knows--that you can't catch these piscivorous, bottom-hugging salmonids with dry flies, especially at the top of Labrador on number 16s tethered to 6X. "You're lying," he ungraciously proclaimed.

I'd had enough experience with char to know that the guy was half right--i.e., that you can't raise them to surface lures. But I also knew that my friend Harvey Calden--a dry-witted, 47- year-old swamp Yankee from Jay, Maine, who has made his considerable fortune as a body shop owner, bush pilot, sporting camp proprietor, and master aircraft mechanic--doesn't lie, even about fish. It was obvious that he merely was mistaken. Doubtless he genuinely believed that the Arctic char he had discovered 75 miles north of the Eskimo village of Nain, Labrador--the northernmost settlement on the Atlantic coast--really fed on flying insects in the North River and its source, Lake Umiakovik.

My theory was that he was confusing char with sea-run brookies. God knows it's easy to do. I remember having to get down on my hands and knees to do "spot checks" on the few small fish I landed 10 miles seaward from the union of the Tunulik River and Ungava Bay in subarctic Quebec. Half were char, half squaretails.

That was the trip Spence Conley of Watertown, Massachusetts, and I used fast-sinking shooting heads to dredge the rivers that appear twice daily on the disappearing islands of the Tunulik Archipelago. It was also the trip Spence hooked and landed a black guillemot on a yellow Picabugger, fighting it on his back (because guillemots are birds) until it dropped like a nice punt into the sea and nearly spooled him. When he released it to fight another day the Eskimos clapped their hands to their foreheads because black guillemots are good eating. If you have never been deposited by freighter canoe to fish islands that sink beneath you into the black, wintry tide, I urge you to keep it that way.

THANKFULLY, Harvey Calden had found a brighter, friendlier char/trout location where the islands stay put and the only thing you sink into is six inches of caribou moss. On August 17, 1989 he and Peter Paquet of George River Lodge had been flying to Nain to pick up some smoked char. "The weather was really bad," he recalls. "We headed north to get out of it, and we came down a big, wooded valley and onto this lake. At the end of the lake was a huge fog bank, and Peter said, 'You're never going to make it to Nain tonight.' So I banked the aircraft around, and he hollers 'Jesus Keeyriste' so loud I thought something was wrong with the airplane. 'Look down there,' he said; and at the mouth of this brook there was a column of Arctic char a hundred yards wide and a mile long."

They landed on the lake, had coffee with Elmer Wilson, caught some char, and beat the storm back to George River. Wilson, a flying fisherman from Old Town, Maine, had found the place in 1963 and fallen in love with it. Nine years later he built a cookhouse and a cabin, quickly turning them over (save for personal-use rights which permitted him to spend the next 20 summers there) to a Canadian outfitter who expanded the camp. Last year Calden bought the place from the Canadian who was free to sell after Wilson gave up his rights in 1991.

Calden fixed up the buildings and constructed a spike camp for caribou hunters 40 miles away on Black Duck Bay where woodland caribou--bigger than animals of the George River herd because they don't spend energy migrating--browse in eastern North America's northernmost coastal forest.

How was it, I wondered, that Calden could identify vaguely distinct populations of caribou yet couldn't differentiate between Salvelinus fontinalis and Salvelinus alpinus? Certainly, he'd been exposed to enough brook trout. Tim Pond--just north of Stratton, Maine--has been gated off from easy public access and therefore is one of the state's few wild trout ponds that hasn't been hurt by overfishing. He and his wife Betty bought Tim Pond Camps back in 1980, and this was after they'd been handling brook trout for 20 years.

"You'd think they'd be able to tell even sea trout from char," I remarked to Spence Conley as we boarded the prop jet at Montreal, braced for yet another installment in our ongoing series of fishing fiascoes.

If overnighting in the dingy, moribund, ex-mining town of Schefferville, Quebec, was not the high point of the trip, at least it provided a foil that enhanced our appreciation of other northern destinations--George River Lodge, for instance, to which we journeyed by Otter early on the morning of August 22 and where Harvey met us in his Cessna 185. The hop to camp took 45 minutes over bare, ancient granite strewn with puddles, ponds, lakes, and rivers that run through lakes. As we topped the high, jagged hills and floated down over Umiakovik Pass the topography transformed from rock desert to oasis. In a valley green with spruce lay a long, sunlit lake fed by silver rills that plunged over ledges and down through lichen, moss, and taiga.

Twenty miles to the northeast, but seemingly close enough to scrape with our rod tips, a perfect Rock of Gibraltar--maybe bigger than the genuine item--rose into a hazeless sky. It all looked like one of those islands Hollywood has been discovering dinosaurs on for the past 60 years.

Then we were on the beach, unloading our gear, shouting to Betty, whistling back at the whiskey jacks, and filling our lungs with polar air. One thousand miles north of Montreal in the wildest place Spence and I had ever been. Just the previous evening photographer Dave Walker of Dixfield, Maine, had left his camera in the canoe during a rain squall and therefore had come cheek to jowl with a brace of wolves. "Magnificent, mature animals with lots of black trim." They were turning to leave but had been so appalled by Walker's hideous attempt at howling that they'd come back and goggled at him for 15 minutes.

NOT WISHING TO APPEAR unenthusiastic about the fishing, I politely leapt into my waders, ran a Class IV shooting head through a six-weight rod, tied on a yellow Picabugger, and cantered to the stream in back of camp. Spence and George Martinez of Benson, Vermont, already were soaking to their withers. Knowing, as I did, that char will not rise to dry flies, they, too, were using streamers and shooting heads.

There were plenty of fish in the run, though the light had been wrong to see them from the air. They drifted brazenly around our feet, flashing like pond shiners. Two casts out an occasional caudal or dorsal fin waggled through the riffles just before they merged with the smooth lake surface. You see Atlantic salmon, which never feed in freshwater, doing that a lot. A common loon plowed through the shoal of fish, surfing and diving, frantic with greed. The sky had gone gray, and we were very cold.

But, just as we had foreseen, Arctic char were hugging the bottom; and, as we had also predicted, the shooting heads worked splendidly. These were average, sea-run fish which, once you delete the big and the small and discount all the photographs you've seen of Tree River giants held at arm's length, means grilse-sized. They fought like grilse, too--especially when you stuck them in the back or tail, which was more often than not.

All were bright silver. All tore out into the current and sliced off into the quiet water with their shoulders just below the surface, beating their tails furiously when you tried to hoist up their heads. Turning falconlike on widening gyres, they made us shuffle around in circles to keep our rods pointed at them. As I fought my third fish I noticed gnats blowing by me, and out in the run the fin waggling seemed slightly more purposeful.

I clamored out of the icy flow, switched to a floating double-taper and tied on a salmon Bomber the size and shape of a cigar butt--"an insult to the fish," snorts my friend Dick Buck. Indeed, they seemed insulted. So, on a lark, I tied on a number 14 Quill Gordon. On the first drift there was a boil under it, a boil on the second drift, a boil on the third. I yelled to Spence. "Yeah, yeah, yeah," he said, slinging his leaden line at the Rock of Gibraltar.

I switched to a number 16 and instantly hung a good fish. When I had it in my hands Spence and George came splashing over to see if the fly really was in the mouth. "Son of a beeech," declared Spence but stayed with the sinking line, preferring to believe what he had seen was all an aberration.

It wasn't. Clearly, these anadromous fish a few hours out of the Labrador Sea were feeding on a hatch. And they were selective, turning away from the fly unless you or the current moved it. On the light tether they fought even harder, and because they were close to the surface and unburdened by the shooting head, they leapt high and often.

None of this surprised Elmer Wilson two weeks later when I tracked him down in Old Town, although he maintains that once sea-run char enter freshwater they have dainty appetites. "The only thing that I've ever seen in a char's stomach is a few black gnat flies which when they're wet are about the size of a head of a pin," he told me. "And most of 'em don't even have that. You never see any fish in them╔The biggest char I ever got on a dry fly was probably six or seven pounds. When they was in the mood I'd catch and release them. Course I╒ve had ahold of char that were bigger than that with a small fly--you've got to use a pretty small one or they don't want to hit it--and a course you lose a lot of fish with that small a hook. I've seen char at Umiakovik that would weigh sixteen to twenty pounds. Some people don't believe that, but they haven't stayed theah as long as I have either."

Finally, Spence and George couldn't stand my cackling, and they, too, switched to floating lines and dries.

As the week progressed we unlearned most of what we had read about these mystery fish of the far north that never have been studied hard by anyone, especially fly fishermen. Once when the dry-fly action had fallen off, an experiment by George proved that stunning success could be had on the floating line by dead-drifting tiny, orange-trimmed Muddlers and that you could feel the takes through the slack line.

One still morning Dave Walker and I paddled a canoe far up the lake, encountering thousands of riper, fly-spurning char--some blaze orange--reposing like water-logged pulp sticks on the spring-pocked bottom. Later we hiked five miles up the stream, Dave toting a slug-loaded riot gun because the bears in this country haven't seen humans and therefore are unpredictable. It was obvious to anyone who knew fish that nothing could negotiate the white water blasting through granite nozzles and hanging in thin sheets over house-sized boulders.

I slept away a cloudburst under an overhanging rock across the river from last year's ice. When I awoke I stared in wonderment at the pool in front of me. There in the tailout lay half a dozen big char. Or maybe they were brook trout; Dave had caught a four-pounder downstream. Whatever they were, they were spooky as missed grouse, refusing all offerings save a red Clouser Minnow which they took only grudgingly. I dropped the first fish before making a positive ID, but finally hooked and landed a fat, six-pound char, much fresher than the colored fish we'd seen from the canoe. None of this was making sense.

I found Dave a quarter mile upstream, standing where the gradient is about 45 degrees and the flow so shallow and wide that we knew--even with our freshly acquired knowledge--that char couldn't possibly get through it. As we turned to go back to where the fish were, a char zipped upstream past our feet, its dorsal fin quickly at shoulder level and waving in the mountain wind like a cavalry flag.

There was the day we awoke to the season's first snow on all the hilltops, the night of the gaudy northern lights, the afternoon of the 10-mile hike down the outlet of another lake where the only footprints on a mile-long beach had been made by wolves, and where mostly pan-sized brook trout would chew your rod tip if you held it underwater. And there was the day of the big wind.

"You got to learn to live with the wind," says Elmer Wilson. Not too philosophically, I squatted by the wood stove and wrote until 5:00 p.m. when I fantasized that the whitecaps had shrunk. With that, I suited up and struck out for the stream, clawing back at the clawing wind. Even with the Class IV, I couldn't shoot more than 30 feet; but the wind taught me three important lessons: 1) that I'd been casting beyond and above the biggest fish; 2) that if you let little, orange steelhead flies sit on the gravel, barely twitching them, you get more pickups and never foul-hook fish; and 3) that shooting heads can be lots of fun, even for double-tapered brook-trout snobs from Yankeeland.

Lake Umiakovic, write the biologists, is far north of Atlantic salmon range. This is a piece of common knowledge that gives rise to yet another fisheries mystery--the presence in the Umiakovic system of countless Atlantic salmon parr and smolts. Because I assumed that these were not the products of spontaneous generation, I wasn't astonished when I connected with a fish of about seven pounds that somersaulted as well as jumped, obviously a salmon. "A lot stronger than these char," I commented to Spence who had appeared by my side with his camera. The leaps came far apart; the green running line melted under the waves; spray flew from the Dacron backing. Finally, I had the fish on the beach--a beautiful, ocean-bright╔Arctic char.

ON OUR WAY BACK to Schefferville the Otter was forced out of the sky by the blizzard of August 28, and we had to spend 24 hours at the Eskimo-run Tuktu Club de Chasse et Peche on Lac Mistinibi. But even that was fun.

Repatriated in my native urban sprawl, the first thing I did after embracing Brittany and wife was reread the Arctic char section in McClane's New Standard Fishing Encyclopedia. As printed sources go, it is top shelf in that it only leaves things out. "Occasional good dry-fly-fishing [for Arctic char] can be had on the rivers of Iceland," it instructs. And: "In barren polar regions they are smoked over sheep dung." I dare say both data are correct. As for the latter, a more appetizing and certainly a more academically profitable method might be to smoke Arctic char over all the literature ever written about them, excepting this piece of course. As my editor reminds me, FR&R's glossy paper contains lead.

Sidebar: If You Decide to Go, Can You?

Six days at Umiakovic, including getting there from Montreal, will cost you $3,200. (Call: 207-897-2100.) Charging that, can an outfitter make it in this unforgiving land where the fish are widely known by the literati who educate fly fishermen to be inferior to Atlantic salmon in that they never take dry flies and where overhead looms like the Rock of Gibraltar over every little venture? He probably can, if his name is Harvey Calden.

What Calden has going for him is his own ingenuity and the region's diversity. There is: hiking in spectacular country; caribou hunting; brook trout fishing; airborne whale, seal, and iceberg watches; a dozen unexplored rivers easily reachable in Harvey's Cessna which carries two canoes on each pontoon; and, of course, an endless supply of Arctic char that haven't read any of the articles about how they are supposed to behave.

Without doubt, the biggest challenge Calden faces is the cost of gasoline--$17 a gallon. "What are you going to do about that?" I demanded of Harvey as I hacked off another two-inch- thick slice of Joyce Michelin's magnificent homemade bread. ("I hope you don't mind if it's still hot," she seriously told me one morning as I appeared bearlike in the cookhouse on my way to the stream.)

"I've got a plan for dealing with the gas," Harvey said.

I asked what it was, knowing that his answer would be just a swamp-Yankee smile. "Do you mind char for supper?" asked Joyce, unsmilingly.