Opening the Middlebury Fishing Tales is a bartender, playing the part of the Canterbury Tales Host; he challenges a bar-full of fly fishermen to tell amusing stories, but in contemporary settings, in Modern English, and fashioned as modern reflections of Chaucer's more ribald Tales. Also in the collection of mostly unpublished works are several pieces of fiction and a metrical romance, The Great Bear of Labrador, in which a fly fisherman travels north for a vacation, but slips into a different time and a different world altogether, where he is made to play a deadly game.