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Today the guests arrive by float plane at the long, deep, North Woods lake with its cluster of cabins on the northeast shore in the shadow of Munsungan Ridge. They come to fish for trout - brookies and togue - and, most particularly, they come to fish for landlocked salmon. In the fall they come for hunting: whitetail deer, bear, moose - if they are lucky enough to have won a lottery permit - and ruffed grouse.

Sportsmen have been coming to fish and hunt in this remote part of the Maine woods for more than a century (Teddy Roosevelt unsuccessfully chased caribou here as a Harvard student in 1879). And they have come in ever increasing numbers since the legendary Will Atkins founded the string of rough wood camps that opened the virgin wilderness of the Aroostook River basin in the late 1880s and early 1890s.

In some respects The Bradford Camps are little changed from when Will Atkins first put them up. True, the half dozen or so guest cabins, made of peeled spruce logs, chinked with oakum, have been re-roofed and jacked up occasionally over the years, and they now sport bathrooms with hot showers and flush toilets, as well as propane-fueled mantle lamps. And the central lodge offers electric light for reading and yarning until nine most nights. Beyond that, Will wouldn't have known what to make of the Cessna 185 that Dave Youland, the current owner, uses to ferry fishing parties to outlying waters. But the place still smells of history. After all, there have been only four owners over the last century, and tradition dies hard in the Maine woods.

Meals at The Bradford Camps are served family style punctually at 7:00 A.M., noon, and 5:30 P.M. by the "table girl" no longer called that, of course; the current server is Diane Corson, wife of Gary Corson, the senior guide, and herself a registered Maine Guide). The "chore boy," who splits firewood, totes it around to the cabins for burning in the woodstoves, and helps with the luggage, gardening, and a hundred other tasks, is Gerry Bard, a cheerful retiree from the St. John River Valley who has worked in North Woods camps all his life. Guides eat in the kitchen where Dave Youland's wife, Nancy, presides over the huge cast-iron cook range.

Out behind the lodge is the vegetable garden, the guides' cabins, and an icehouse where the Youlands put up six tons of Munsungan Lake ice every January. The camp's diesel generators provide juice for an industrial-sized dishwasher and refrigerators, but as Dave Youland says, "You can't have a sporting camp without an icehouse" - and a woodyard as well, it seems. The Youlands fit up fifteen cords of hardwood every year.

On the walls of the library-lounge, next to the dining room, are trophies: an antler chandelier, a buck's head, mounted lake trout and salmon, photographs of blanket beaver pelts and hanging deer. In a place of honor on the polished log walls hangs a photograph of the founding father, Will Atkins, standing in a canoe filled with half a dozen bull moose trophy heads, Munsungan Ridge in the background. It is a famous picture, one that first appeared in Atkins' 1905 advertising calendar, printed for distribution at The New York Sportsmen's Show, and aimed at "men and women who enjoy the backwoods life and who find occasional pleasure in a little fishing or hunting."

By all accounts Will Atkins was a most unusual man. Born in 1857 in Quebec, he was an experienced trapper by age fifteen, and by his twenties was guiding in Maine, first in the Rangeley area and then at Moosehead Lake where he worked out of the Kineo House. By the late 18880s one of his clients encouraged him to think about opening his own sporting camps in the big, largely untouched forest country to the north. Legend has it that Atkins went into the woods at Moosehead and came out two years later at Oxbow on the Aroostook River, some miles from Masardis and a good thirty miles from the nearest railhead at Oakfield.

Whether or not he gave the project his undivided attention for a full two years, the upshot was that Atkins soon began building hunting camps, first on an island in Millinocket Lake and then on the shore of Munsungan Lake. He also threw up dozens of cabins on outlying waters, connected to his main camps by streams and forest trails. By early in the century Will Atkins was famous in sporting circles and had even built a hotel with eight sleeping rooms and a taxidermy shop in Oxbow, where clients broke their journey into the back country.

And quite a journey it was. In the early years, sports detrained at the Bangor and Aroostook railroad station in Oakfield and then endured a thirty-mile buckboard ride over rough roads to Oxbow. After recovering at the hotel, they moved on three miles farther by buckboard and team to Arbo Flats where guides and canoes awaited. The trip up the Aroostook River to Munsungan Lake covered twenty-three miles, all of it upstream, with guides poling the sports and their duffel in twenty-foot canoes. As the journey generally required two days, with stops along the way for fishing, Atkins erected camps along the route at which to break the trip. In view of the difficulties of getting in, it is not surprising that most clients came for a month or more. Anything less would not have been worth the effort.

By 1910, game and fish were becoming less plentiful - understandable in view of the game laws of the day. At the turn of the century legal bag limits were one bull moose, one caribou, and two deer, and hunters were allowed to kill or have in possession up to thirty duck, woodcock or grouse at any one time. There was no limit on bear whatsoever. Whether because of dwindling game or sheer fatigue, Will Atkins decided to sell out his network of camps to an Oxbow neighbor, one Will Libby, in 1910. At the time Atkins was only fifty-three, and he spent the next twenty years trapping in Canada and Maine before dying in 1930, something of a recluse, but remembered as the finest woodsman and trapper of his generation.

The Libby years saw a slow decline of the camps through the first World War and the Great Depression. The enterprise was sold to Milt Hall, a Rhode Island sportsman in 1942. It was the late 1940s before Hall got the Libby camps (which he renamed The Bradford Camps, in honor of an ancestor, the first governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts) back into good operating shape. By the time Dave and Nancy Youland came along, a new clientele had been established, and a new means of travel - the float plane - had replaced the arduous canoe voyage up the Aroostook.

If you ask Dave Youland to describe his chosen career, his Scotch-Irish features crinkle into a slow grin. "It's a year-round business with a seasonal income," he tells me one night at the end of a fourteen-hour day. Youland should know. For the last twenty-odd years he and Nancy have spent seven months a year caring for 300 to 4oo guests during a season that begins with ice-out on the lake in early May and ends after Thanksgiving with the closing of deer season. Nancy runs the kitchen - no small task, as it involves serving three squares a day to as many as twenty-eight guests, plus assorted guides and employees. All day she also monitors traffic on the radio telephone that is their link with the outside world. Dave spends his days at one or more of the dozen skills a sporting-camp owner must master, from airplane piloting to guiding fishermen, down through bookkeeping, gardening, and carpentry to plumbing and repairing and maintaining engines.

Once the camp is closed for the season, the Youlands go home to Turner to catch their breaths and celebrate Christmas with their four grown children and grandchildren. Then, in January, the routine begins again: sportsmen's shows, printing of brochures and rate cards, correspondence, ordering supplies, arranging a myriad of other details - and then the long trip in, over frozen logging roads, in April, to open camp and get ready for ice-out and another fishing season.

"I don't complain," says Youland, who gave up a promising career as a rising young executive with United Parcel Service to buy The Bradford Camps for $75,000 - on time - in 1972. "It was a long time before Nancy and I were able to take as much profit out of the operation as I was making at UPS twenty-two years ago," he says with a wry smile. "I crossed paths with some of my old colleagues at UPS a year or so ago. They've all done pretty well. But I've done all right, too. My kids grew up at this place, summers. We've build the operation up to where it's worth many times what we paid for it. We have no debt and we have lots of friends - our regular clients. If you love the outdoors, it's a great life."

"UPS is a great outfit," he continues. "I loved it, but I loved my family more. I was on the road all the time, out of state a lot, missing my kids' growing up. I had an ulcer."

"So I dropped out of the rat race," Youland says with a laugh, "but I didn't drop out of life. This place keeps you too busy for that."

The Youland's Bradford Camps are among a handful of surviving full-service American Plan camps still left in the state. What makes their operation unique are the extensive outlying fishing waters -- some locations even sport rustic cabins for overnight stays -- that are accessible by float plane. Dave Youland estimates that over the years he has made some 30,000 takeoffs and landings in amassing 3,000 flying hours ferrying clients to fifty or so fishing spots on lakes and ponds within a twenty-five-mile radius of Munsungan Lake.

The float plane is central to operation of The Bradford Camps. For the last decade or so it has been possible to drive in to the camp over logging roads, and today most of the supplies are actually trucked in. But in the early years of the Youlands' ownership, everything came in by air, and the first thing Dave had to do was learn to fly. After buying a Piper Super Cub float plane, he ferried in heavy stuff, like 1,400 gallons of gas per season in five-gallon cans and light stuff such as bedsprings ("the worst freight to fly -- they create a turbulence you wouldn't believe").

Today, fully 80 percent of the Youlands' guests arrive by float plane from flying-service docks in Greenville, Millinocket, Patten, Old Town, and Bangor. Some regulars (about 75 percent of their clientele is repeat business) fly their own planes in. Most people come for the fishing. They range from regulars like legendary fly-fisherman Frith Pickslay, a Wall Street banker who has been coming with his wife Chip, for more than thirty-five years, to honeymooners.

Of late, the Youlands have played host to increasing numbers of foreign guests. Sportsmen from the U.K., Canada, Germany, France, Poland, South Africa, Yugoslavia, and Korea have signed the guest register. "Another trend is to shorter stays," observes Youland. "And a different sort of guest -- people who don't care a bit about hunting or fishing but come for the solitude and nature experience. In fact, "he continues, "that's probably where our growth will come from."

Other changes over the last two decades? "Catch and release has taken hold in a big way," Youland observes, "and the fishing is better now than it was twenty years ago. People used to take fish home in ice and we still get a few requests. But we discourage shipping fish to friends. If a neighbor wants fish for supper, let him catch his own."

During the long weekend in mid-September that my son and I spent on Munsungan Lake, we encountered a mix of Dave Youland's new breed of sports: some bow-and-arrow bear hunters, including two Brits from the Midlands, a group of jolly ex-college chums up for their annual reunion, a dedicated fly fisherman from New York who was back for salmon after a ten-year hiatus, a party of two couples that flew in with a De Havilland Beaver, and a Connecticut lawyer who trolled slowly up and down the lake in an outboard day after day. He didn't get as much as a strike (the wind was up), but told me it was the best week's vacation that he'd ever had.

My son and I spent most of our time eating, sleeping, and investigating the surrounding woods and streams. But on the last day guide Toby Montgomery took us over to the Allagash River to show us how to catch brook trout. We left just after dawn in Toby's four-wheel-drive truck and after an hour or so of jolting over logging roads, we parked the truck, launched the canoe, and were soon on a broad, gravelly stretch of river where Toby expertly whipped cast after cast across the pool in the morning light. The trout were rising and he hooked and played half a dozen, including a beautiful fourteen-incher that put up a spirited battle. All were released.

Driving back through the partially cut-over forest land, we spotted a six-point buck and several does. Overhead hawks wheeled. "That's what it's all about", said Toby, a recent wildlife-management graduate of the University of Maine, "getting close to the scenery, breathing in the experience, whether you catch any fish or not." Back at camp, nailed to the base of the flagpole near the shore was confirmation: a bronze plaque with a memorial inscription. It reads: DEDICATED TO BILL WEST, 1894-1979. FISHED HERE FOR YEARS - AND LOVED IT.  Amen.

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