Читать книгу Ring of Bright Water - Gavin Maxwell - Страница 12

Four

SPRING COMES LATE to Camusfeàrna. More than one year I have motored up from the south early in April to become immobilized in snowdrifts on the passes twenty miles from it, and by then the stags are still at the roadside down the long glen that leads to the sea. By mid-April there is still no tinge of green bud on the bare birches and rowans nor green underfoot, though there is often, as when I first came to Camusfeàrna, a spell of soft still weather and clear skies. The colours then are predominantly pale blues, russet browns, and purples, each with the clarity of fine enamel; pale blue of sea and sky, the russet of dead bracken and fern, deep purple-brown of unbudded birch, and the paler violets of the Skye hills and the peaks of Rhum. The landscape is lit by three whites – the pearl white of the birch trunks, the dazzle of the shell-sand beaches, and the soft filtered white of the high snows. The primroses are beginning to flower about the burn and among the island banks, though all the high hills are snow-covered and the lambs are as yet unborn. It is a time that has brought me, in all too few years, the deep contentment of knowing that the true spring and summer are still before me at Camusfeàrna, that I shall see the leaf break and the ground become green, and all the snow melt from the hills but for a few drifts that will lie summer through.

It has its own orchestration, this little prelude to the northern spring; every year there is the sound of the wild geese calling far overhead as they travel north to their thawing breeding grounds, and sometimes the wild unearthly beauty of whooper swans’ voices, silver trumpets high in the clear blue air. The eider ducks have arrived to breed about the shore and the islands; they bring with them that most evocative and haunting of all sounds of the Hebridean spring and summer, the deep, echoing, wood-wind crooning of the courting drakes.

One by one the breeding bird species return to the beaches and the islands where they were hatched; the sand martins to the sand cliff at the burn foot, the wheatears to the rabbit burrows in the close-bitten turf; the black guillemots and the gulls to the Camusfeàrna islands. The herring gulls come first, to the biggest island, where the lighthouse stands, some two hundred and fifty pairs of them, and the air above the white-splashed rocks and sea pinks scattered with broken shellfish is vibrant with the clang of their calling and their wheeling white wings. Among them are two or three pairs of great black-backed gulls, massive, hoarse-voiced and vulturine. Then come the common gulls, delicate, graceful, segregated shrilly on to a neighbouring promontory, beadily mistrustful of the coarse language and predatory predilections of their neighbours; and, lastly, not until well into May, come the terns, the sea-swallows, to their own outlying skerry. They arrive in the same week as the swallows come up from Africa to nest in the old ruined croft across the field, and with the thin steel oar-beat of their wings spring has almost given place to summer.

By then the colour everywhere is green. The purple birch twigs are hidden in a soft cloud of new leaf; the curled, almond-bitter rods of young bracken have in those short weeks pushed up three feet from the earth and unfurled a canopy of green frond over the rust of last year’s growth; the leaves of the yellow flag iris that margin the burn and the shore form a forest of broad bayonets, and the islands, that but for rank rooty patches of heather growing knee-deep seemed so bare in April, are smothered with a jungle-growth of goose grass and briar. To me there is always something a little stifling in this enveloping green stain, this redundant, almost Victorian, drapery over bones that need no blanketing, and were it not for the astringent presence of the sea I should find all that verdure as enervating as an Oxford water-meadow in the depths of summer.

Early in May comes the recurrent miracle of the elvers’ migration from the sea. There is something deeply awe-inspiring about the sight of any living creatures in incomputable numbers; it stirs, perhaps, some atavistic chord whose note belongs more properly to the distant days when we were a true part of the animal ecology; when the sight of another species in unthinkable hosts brought fears or hopes no longer applicable. When the young eels reach the Camusfeàrna burn – no more than a uniform three inches long nor thicker than a meat-skewer, steel-blue when seen from above, but against the light transparent except for a red blob at the gills – they have been journeying in larval form for two whole years from their breeding grounds south-west of Bermuda, through two thousand miles of ocean and enemies. During that long, blind voyage of instinct their numbers must have been reduced not to a millionth but a billionth of those who set forth, yet it is difficult to imagine that there can have been vaster hordes than reach the Camusfeàrna burn; still more difficult to realize that these are but a tiny fraction of the hosts that are simultaneously ascending a myriad other burns.

Where the burn flows calm through the level ground their armies undulate slowly and purposefully forward towards the seemingly insurmountable barrier of the falls; on, above the bridge, into the stretch where the water rushes and stumbles over uneven stones; round the rock-twist to the foot of the falls. Here, temporarily daunted or resting before their assault upon the vertical, spray-wet rock-face, they congregate almost motionless in the rock pools, forming a steel-blue carpet inches deep; dip a bucket here, and it comes up with a greater volume of elvers than of water. Some mistake the true course of the burn, and follow steep trickles leading to cul-de-sac pools of spray water; to and from these (for the miraculous powers of their multitudes do not appear to include communication or deduction), there are simultaneous streams of ascending and descending elvers, while the spray-pool itself is filled to the brim with an aimlessly writhing swarm.

It is here, during the wait at the foot of the falls, that the last heavy toll is taken of their numbers; for a week or two the rocks below the waterfall are splashed white with the droppings of herons who stand there scooping them up by the bill-full, decimating yet again, on the verge of their destination, the remnants of the great concourse that has been travelling thus perilously for two years.

But one has not been witness to the long core, as it were, of that mighty migration, and so it is in the elvers’ final ascent of the falls that the colossal driving power of their instinct becomes most apparent to the onlooker. At first, where at the edges of the falls the water splashes into shallow stone troughs among the horizontal ledges, the way is easy – a few inches of horizontal climb and the elver has reached the next trough. But after a foot or two of this ladder-like progression they are faced either with the battering fall of white water at their left or with a smooth black stretch of rock wall in front, hit every few seconds by heavy splashes of spray. For a few feet at the bottom of this wall grows a close slimy fir of waterweed, and among its infinitesimal tendrils the elvers twine themselves and begin, very slowly, to squirm their way upwards, forming a vertical, close-packed queue perhaps two feet wide. Sometimes a big gob of spray lands right amid their ranks and knocks a hundred of them back into the trough below, but slowly, patiently, they climb back again. I have never marked an elver so that it is recognizable, and for all I know this may happen to the same elver many, many times in a day or even in an hour. Perhaps it is something to do with the transparency of the creatures, besides their diminutive size and bewildering numbers, that makes the mind rebel both at the blind strength of their instinct and their inherent power to implement it, as though the secret power-house should be visible.

Once above the water-draggled weed there is no further incidental support for the climbing elvers; there is just sheer wet rock, with whatever microscopic roughness their transparent bellies may apprehend. They hang there, apparently without gravity, with an occasional convulsive movement that seems born of despair. They climb perhaps six inches in an hour, sometimes slithering backward the same distance in a second, and there are another twelve feet of rock above them.

It is not possible for more than a moment or two to identify oneself with any single one of this mass, but there is a sense of relief, of emotional satisfaction, in looking upward to the lip of the falls where they spill over from the hidden pool above, and seeing the broad band of glistening elvers that have accomplished the apparently impossible and are within an inch of safety.

Perhaps a few million out of billions top the Camusfeàrna falls; some, certainly, surmount the second and third falls too, and I have seen elvers of that size more than two thousand feet up the peak where the burn has its source. In perspective, the survival rate must be high when compared with that of spermatozoa.

Only once at Camusfeàrna have I seen any other living creatures in numbers to compare with those elvers, but I remember the occasion vividly. In the warm evenings of later summer, when the sun still flared a finger’s breadth above the saw-tooth peaks of the Cuillin and glowed on the dense red berries of the rowans, the MacKinnon children would come down the hill from Druimfiaclach to bathe at the white sand beaches of the islands. Long before I could hear them my dog Jonnie, growing a little corpulent and stiff now, would prick his ears and whine, and the feathery white stub of his tail would scuff softly on the stone floor. I would go to the open door and listen and Jonnie would sit very upright on the stone flags outside, staring up at the high skyline with his nose twitching and questing, and I would hear nothing but the sounds of ever-moving water and the faint, familiar bird-cries of the wilderness, the piping of shore birds and perhaps the mew of a buzzard wheeling overhead. There was the murmur of the dwindled waterfall and the trill of the burn among the boulders, and at the other side the muted sound of wavelets breaking in a small tumble of foam along the shore; there was the twitter of sand martins hawking flies in the still golden air, the croak of a raven, and gull voices from the sea that stretched away as smooth as white silk to the distant island of Eigg lying across the sea horizon. Sometimes there was the warning thump of a rabbit from the warren among the dunes behind the house.

But Jonnie always knew when the children were coming, and when at last I could hear them too, treble voices faint and far off and high above us, he would assume a sudden unconcern, walking with stiff indifference to lift his leg in a flourish over a nearby tuft of rushes or a post that guarded the small flower-bed. From the time that the boys’ heads were bobbing small on the hill horizon it would be some five minutes before they had descended the last and steepest part of the track, crossed the bridge, and come up over the green grass to the door, and all the time I would be wondering what they had brought – longed-for or unwelcome letters, some supplies that I urgently needed, a bottle of goat’s milk from their mother, or just nothing at all. When it was nothing I was at once relieved and bitterly disappointed, for at Camusfeàrna I both resent the intrusion of the outside world and crave reassurance of its continued existence.

One evening when the twins had brought me a bulky packet of letters I had been sitting reading them in the twilight kitchen for some time when I was roused by the urgent excitement of their cries from the beach. I went out to a scene that is as fresh in my mind now as though it were hours rather than years that lay between.

The sun was very low; the shadow of the house lay long and dark across the grass and the rushes, while the hillside above glowed golden as though seen through orange lenses. The bracken no longer looked green nor the heather purple; all that gave back their own colour to the sun were the scarlet rowanberries, as vivid as venous blood. When I turned to the sea it was so pale and polished that the figures of the twins thigh-deep in the shallows showed in almost pure silhouette against it, bronze-coloured limbs and torsos edged with yellow light. They were shouting and laughing and dancing and scooping up the water with their hands, and all the time as they moved there shot up from the surface where they broke it a glittering spray of small gold and silver fish, so dense and brilliant as to blur the outline of the childish figures. It was as though the boys were the central décor of a strangely lit baroque fountain, and when they bent to the surface with cupped hands a new jet of sparks flew upward where their arms submerged, and fell back in brittle, dazzling cascade.

When I reached the water myself it was like wading in silver treacle; our bare legs pushed against the packed mass of little fish as against a solid and reluctantly yielding obstacle. To scoop and to scatter them, to shout and to laugh, were as irresistible as though we were treasure hunters of old who had stumbled upon a fabled emperor’s jewel vaults and threw diamonds about us like chaff. We were fish-drunk, fish-crazy, fish-happy in that shining orange bubble of air and water; the twins were about thirteen years old and I was about thirty-eight, but the miracle of the fishes drew from each of us the same response.

We were so absorbed in making the thronged millions of tiny fish into leaping fireworks for our delight that it was not for some minutes that I began to wonder what had driven this titanic shoal of herring fry – or soil, as they are called in this part of the world – into the bay, and why, instead of dispersing outwards to sea, they became moment by moment ever thicker in the shallows. Then I saw that a hundred yards out the surface was ruffled by flurries of mackerel whose darting shoals made a sputter of spray on the smooth swell of the incoming tide. The mackerel had driven the fry headlong before them into the narrow bay and held them there, but now the pursuers too were unable to go back. They were in turn harried from seaward by a school of porpoises who cruised the outermost limit of their shoals, driving them farther and farther towards the shore. Hunter and hunted pushed the herring soil ever inward to the sand, and at length every wavelet broke on the beach with a tumble of silver sprats. I wondered that the porpoises had not long since glutted and gone; then I saw that, like the fry and the mackerel that had pursued them into the bay, the porpoises’ return to the open waters of the sound was cut off. Beyond them, black against the blanched sunset water, rose the towering sabre fin of a bull killer whale, the ultimate enemy of sea creatures great and small, the unattackable; his single terrible form controlling by its mere presence the billions of lives between himself and the shore.

The sun went down behind the Cuillin and the water grew cold and the tide crawled grey up the beach, clogged with its helpless burden of fish, and long after the distance had become too dim to see the killer’s fin we could hear the putter of the rushing mackerel as they moved in with the tide. When it was nearly dark we fetched buckets and dipped them in the sea’s edge; they came up heavy in our hands, full not of water but of thumb-length fish.

In the morning it was dead low tide, and the sea, as still as a mountain tarn as far as the eye could reach, had gone back some two hundred yards. The tide-wrack of high-water mark lay right along the slope of white sand under the dunes, but that morning it was not dark like a tarry rope ringing the bay; it gleamed blue-grey and white with the bodies of millions upon millions of motionless minnow-sized fish. The gulls had gorged themselves when the sun rose; they sat silent, hunched and distended, in long rows on the wet sand a little to seaward, their shadows still long and formal under the low sun that glared over the hill.

I gathered a few more buckets of the fry, and kept them as cool as I could in the heat of that sunny September. But manna, like everything else, should be of at least fifty-seven varieties; when heaven sends bounty it too often sends monotony. The first meal of fried whitebait had the delight of novelty and of windfall, akin to the pleasure that for the first few days I take in some humble but new treasure harvested from the shore after gales; the second had lost little, but the sixth and seventh were cloying, while there were still three buckets full. Jonnie, who entertained an unnatural passion for fish of all kinds, ate more than I did, but the level in the buckets seemed never to diminish; a guest came to stay and we made them into fish-cakes and fish-pies, into kedgerees and fish-soups, into curries and savouries, until at last one merciful morning they began to smell. Then we used them to bait the lobster-pots, but after a while even the lobsters seemed to grow weary of them.

It so happened that about that time I made one of my rare shopping journeys to Inverness. The second item on the hotel luncheon menu was fried whitebait, and the dining-room was rich with the once-appetizing aroma. I left that hotel as might one who had perceived a corpse beneath his table, and it was some two years before I could eat whitebait again.