Читать книгу While Rivers Run - Maurice Walsh - Страница 4

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He was a big, straight-backed, middle-aged man in patched brown tweeds, and he carried a firm pad of muscle on his big bones, a pair of grey, wise eyes below a bush of brow, and a grizzled stub of moustache above a clean chin. He wore no waders, yet he stood mid-leg deep in a tidal pool at the very end of slack water and fished for finnock, industriously but without enthusiasm. At the back of his neck the round, polished knob of a gaff-handle peeped above his coat-collar, reminding one queerly of an Italian bravo and his dagger—though there was nothing of the bravo about this man. He plied, as if it were a slip of hazel, a fourteen-foot, single-spliced rod that any expert would say came out of Castleconnel, but instead, had been lovingly spoke-shaved out of a clean spar of greenheart by the hands that now wielded it on this pleasant Moray shore, and, furthermore, it was not inferior to any rod anywhere, having its strength in the right place and its spring in the right place—and where these two places lie no two fishermen will agree.

This big man with the oldish yet smooth face was, for some reason or other, not fishing zestfully. He was practising casts, rather than casting to lure fish. The lithe tip of the rod lifted slowly to that nicely judged point where rod and line were in exact counterpoise; followed the explosive yet restrained flick of the wrist, and the long line soared backwards in a flat loop, straightened at shoulder level, and, impelled by a second flick, returned without pause until the cast of flies hovered at the end of a dead-straight line and dropped on the water like a caress. But, as often as not, no sooner had the flies touched water than the fisherman lifted eyes and looked down the pool towards the setting sun or up the pool towards the lifting hills. It was only when an unwary finnock rose to a fly that hand and eye returned to duty, but, with such a silver-flashing half-pound of energy as the finnock, this dilatoriness merited consistent failure—and got it.

Not but that it was worth while to turn seeing eyes down the pool. It lay north by west and a point west, and looked directly into the eye of the setting sun. Below it the Leonach River ran flatly through a mile of green carse—across which white flecks of thistledown soared and dipped in little drifts of air—and joined the green of the northern sea through a wide mouth between great dunes of yellow sand. These far-stretching, tawny dunes held the sun even when the sun was behind depths of cloud, and a glimpse of them from the hills on the dullest of days gave one a sudden lift of the heart—they looked so like a patch of sunlight beyond the black woods of Doorn.

The tide was just beginning to make, and the lazy waves were breaking leisurely into white all across the bar; and beyond the bar the sea was laid down, a narrow shield of molten gold. Far beyond that shield lifted the smoky blue or dull purple of the great hills of the north—Ben Wyvis, that squat giant; far Ben More, a very ghost of a mountain; Morven, with its pap to the mouth of the sky; and behind all, a dim whale-back that might be Stroma, or Ultima Thule, or Hy-Brasil its very self. The gold ball of the sun lipped the breast of Morven and lingered in that kiss, as well he might.

A wide and clean view, indeed! And yet it was not the view that drew the eyes of the fisherman. In truth he was impatient with the sun, in a hurry to subdue that splendid panorama in the toneless light of the gloaming. For he wanted to do some real fishing. Finnock, which are probably the grilse of the sea-trout, are a game and angry fish, but at this season they were a bare half-pound in weight, and angling for them with a fourteen-foot rod no more than a subterfuge. And so he looked at the sun with some impatience, and concentrated his mind’s eye on the next pool upstream; for there was the quarry of his choice—salmon clean from the sea, and not yet altogether disdainful of a suitable lure.

Looking up the river, the fisherman saw, on one hand, cultivated slopes, yellowing with corn, merging upwards into brown moors that rolled smoothly over the horizon; and, on the other, a heavily wooded ridge lifting abruptly from the river until at last it won clear of trees and thrust a bald dome of head slant-wise into the blue. That slanting head gave the whole sweep of hill the effect of leaning over towards the river.

The sun went behind Morven, and the orange and red flare of his dying died too. The half-light of the gloaming was on all that land—subduing it, stilling it, brooding detachedly over it. The foam of the bar became dead white; the green of the sea took on purple shades; the long ridge of Morven stood black against the shine. A piebald oyster-catcher winged in from the shore, crying dolorously. A sandpiper flitted across the water, plaintively calling. The short hurrying wings of a mallard went hissing overhead. Thin flakes of dark-brown sand began to float at the stream edges; the water began to lip over the round pebbles; the fisherman felt a cold edge creeping above his knee. The tide was coming in. And all of a sudden a small, live ripple of water shaped like a ᐯ came up over the tail of the pool against the current, and glided upstream.

“You are welcome!” greeted the fisherman, and face and eye quickened. “Look at that little fellow in the by-going”; and like a thistledown he landed his tail fly a foot in front of the nose of the ripple.

But the ripple went on evenly.

“So you will not rest in a poor man’s water?” said the fisherman. “Very good, then”; and his grey eye lifted toward the next pool. For he was well aware that salmon, hasting from the sea, will never rest in tidal water when there is a fresh-water pool above it—as there was here. Down the long tail of that pool the river came in a steep run over an amber bottom, and only the steepest of spring tides, driven by a north-west wind, might succeed in wiping that run smooth. And he was well aware, too, that in that upper pool, at the proper state of wind, water, and light, a proper fly, properly cast, might lure a resting fish to take a careless nip and be sorry for it.

The fisherman slowly reeled in his long line, deftly caught the tail fly as it went by, and waded stiff-legged out of the pool. He stood on its margin, with the water adrip from the folds of his baggy knickers and oozing through convenient rents in his old brogans, and knowingly contemplated sky and river, waiting for that one short hour between day and dark, when, in dry August weather, a salmon sometimes puts aside disdain and lethargy.

Still leisurely, he squelched up by the brink of the water over the soiled round stones that were a little slimy and treacherous with the dark snoss that the brackish tide left on them twice a day, climbed a mound of gravel, and looked out over the reaches of Urdog Pool. The water here, flowing over a clean bottom, had a hint of light in its amber, while the margin of rounded boulders was washed clean by spate and rain and sun, and the runnels of sand between the stones were a golden brown. Along that margin, between the water and a line of dark-leaved alders, the fisherman proceeded to the throat of the pool, and there, where the river curved sharply to the right, he halted. At once his whole attitude became purposeful.

He unloosed, with rapid deftness, the trouting cast he had been playing with, and substituted for it a fine salmon cast. Then he flicked over the leaves of an old leather fly-book and picked out his lure without hesitation—a Number 5, Limerick-bend, double-hooked “Blue Charm,” tinsel-bodied, blue-hackled, gay-plumaged, and a murderer. He held it up against the sky to get the light, and so tied it on, smoothing it out caressingly, and giving a final little tug to test his knots. Now he was ready.