Читать книгу The Key Above the Door - Maurice Walsh - Страница 3

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I, THOMAS KING of Loch Ruighi, will begin this narrative with a relation of the events that befell me—and my friends—on a July day in the Province of Moray. I could begin a long way further back than that and tell of the circumstances, the chances, the predilections, the little side-winds that made me forsake the wandering paths of the world and anchored me loosely to a hermit’s life in a stone bothy on the limestone breast of Cairn Rua, above the lonely, shining waters of Loch Ruighi. That telling might be nice exercise in self-diagnosis, but it would be no more than a long-winded introduction to the gist of my narrative; moreover, as I go on, there will be more than enough opportunity for self-diagnosis, which is one of my vices and the worst form of egotism.

Therefore I will begin with the day on which I first met Agnes de Burc. On that day Neil Quinn out of Ireland, and Alistair Munro out of Sutherland, came across the hills from Inverness in a side-car outfit, and the three of us spent the forenoon trying to catch a mess of trout in Loch Ruighi. We caught none. The loch was as still as a splash in a rut, and the silver of it was dulled with a tenuous, shimmering heat-haze, whilst overhead arched a brazen July sky, flecked here and there with the whitest of cloud. I often wonder whether it was the hopelessness of the fishing or the prompting of my own destiny that made me suggest an expedition across the moor to the Leonach River. Whichever it was, the afternoon found us plodding up the long slope of Aitnoch Hill, and sagging down among the scattered birches of the Leonach Glen. In that glen destiny had me safely in its trap.

Through untold antediluvian centuries the curbed Leonach fretted a channel deeper and deeper into the red-brown sandstone of its bed, until it reached the stubborn mother-basalt, and deeper than that it has not yet gone. It is not as limestone clear as the White Avon of Upper Banff, nor as sternly impetuous as the mighty Spey, nor as swift as the rock-torn Findhorn, but the pale amber of it running serenely over its basalt ledges between its high, birch-grown, ruddy sandstone bluffs makes it one of the bonniest rivers in all the north. Let me make it clear here and now that it was that beauty and its quietness that drew us across the four miles of moor from Loch Ruighi. The thought of poaching never entered our heads. In the first place I had no need to poach the Leonach. My friend and landlady, Mary, Lady Clunas, owned all that countryside, and I got all the fishing I cared for under the good-natured surveillance of Davy Thomson, her head keeper. And yet, that day fate drove us to try in mere curiosity one of the poacher’s favourite methods. This was the way of it.

We came down on the Leonach at the head of Dalbuie Pool, and the moment Munro saw the amber clearness of it he exclaimed, ‘My heavens! What a river to poach!’

He was a rascally Hielan’man from the borders of Caithness, and the pools of the Dunbeath River knew him but too well. His remark set us talking of the many ways, besides the legal ones, of taking salmon.

‘In low water and under a sky like yon,’ said Munro, ‘there is only one way of catching a fish honestly.’

‘He has all a good man’s parts and honesty besides,’ quoted the Irishman. ‘Is it a stick of gelignite or a long-handled gaff you would be suggesting?’

‘One is murder and the other too obvious. I would use a staff with a loop of brass wire at the end of it.’

‘G’wan,’ scoffed the Irishman. ‘ ’Tis rabbits you have in your mind.’

‘I could show you. There’s Tom King’s hazel staff, and you have an old salmon-trace round your hat. Show me a fish under a ledge in three or four feet of water, and I’ll show you how to snare him out by the tail.’

Quinn looked at me with a sardonic speculation in his dark eye.

‘I would like to see the lad try it,’ he said softly.

‘It can be done,’ I told him, ‘but, besides being sinful, it is daylight poaching.’

‘Even the just man falls seven times a day.’

‘Moreover,’ I went on, faintly protesting, ‘these fishings and shootings have recently been let by Lady Clunas, and the new tenant and his party are just arrived at Reroppe Lodge at the other side of Tomlachlan Knoll yonder. If they come on us——’

‘If they are fishermen,’ interrupted Munro, ‘they will be giving the river a rest on a day like this.’

There and then I fell.

‘Very well,’ I said; ‘ ’tisn’t likely you’ll be doing much harm. Come with me, and I’ll show you where a fish lies; and, if Davy Thomson catches us, our fates be on our own heads.’

We went on down the course of the stream. Half the river-bed was dry, and the water was no more than a chain of pools strung on singing shallows that were pleasantly cool above our brogue-tops as now and again a jutting bluff forced us to splash across. On either hand the sandstone banks rose high and sheer, and above them were steep slopes grown with larch and pine—a pattern of bright and sombre green—whilst over all arched the white-flecked sky, full of lazy, warm afternoon light. We felt little and remote and safe down there in the wide gut of the hills.

In time we came to the great Poul na Bo, the biggest pool in all the upper reaches of the Leonach: forty yards in width, very deep and dark under the bluffs opposite us, but shallowing steadily to the middle, where a ridge of basalt stood well out of the water. On the near side of that ridge the pool was then in no place deeper than a foot or two, and it shallowed to a few inches bordering the gravelly spit on which we stood.

‘Now then, Hielan’man,’ I told Munro, ‘the time has come to prove your skill—and then for home, fish or no fish. Myself, I do not usually poach Davy Thomson’s territory. Wait till I fix your noose for you. There you are. See you that ledge yonder in mid-pool? That’s your stance. You’ll find at least one salmon on the other side and close under it.’

‘How am I to get there?’

‘You’ll wade—’tisn’t deep. Slip off your shoes and hose.’

‘While you and Quinn laugh at me from dry land.’

‘No, faith!’ cried Quinn, his fingers already at his shoe-laces. ‘I am coming too. Some big fish might drown the laddie.’

I filled a pipe and, as they waded towards the ledge of basalt, admired the long sinewy legs of the Irishman and the sturdy props of his companion, and so clear was the amber water through which they moved that I could see the refracted ivory blur of their feet feeling for smooth going on the rocky bottom. It was about then that I had the first telepathic twinge of approaching disaster. To my mind came very strongly the knowledge that I could no longer claim the privileges that were mine when Lady Mary kept the fishings in her own hands. The new tenant might, and indeed would, resent any infringement of his rights. Though we were only playing at poaching, still, poaching we actually were—and using, at that, one of the favourite methods of the experienced and cunning professional.

Some instinct urged me to recall the lads, but I hesitated until too late. Already they were lying across the ledge and peering cautiously over and down. Followed a little pause, and then, from the sudden stiffening of their sprawling legs, it became clear that they had marked a fish. They drew back, gave me a nod of head and a twist of thumb, edged along into position, and forthwith Munro began the stealthy manipulation of his noosed staff.