Читать книгу England have my Bones - T. H. White - Страница 9

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I can’t begin describing to-day. The rainbow last night was a good sign, and I woke up feeling that it was going to be a massacre. But the window was wet and the slate sky icy. Still, it might clear at noon. We started on the Mill Pool straight away, on the assumption that one never knew. There might be. And so we cast slowly down, and the east wind blew the rain through everything, and the river was higher still (it has not yet been in good condition) and the more we cast the more it grew upon us that hope was dead. From 8.30 till 1.15 we wandered on the banks, like lost souls staying for waftage. It didn’t clear at noon. We tried the Crooked Pot; we tried the Ardgalleys; we tried up above the snipe marsh to the bitter end. I cracked off one of my two Kessler’s Fancies. The east and watery wind blew Macdonald’s casts on to the bank, to my secret joy. My mackintosh was torn at the back. I only had a cap, and that was a cold poultice. I wore it back-to-front, in the vain effort to keep the rain from running down my neck. I paid out a sticking line with slippery, frozen fingers: the horrible and slightly rasping stickiness of cold wet deer’s fat. I snapped off one of Macdonald’s flies, using the salmon rod, by catching it in the bank. I found it again, and tied on in an ague.

At 1.15 we had lunch. We didn’t talk much. Macdonald says that witchcraft was practised about here, but it has died out. There were three curlew and a thing like a black water rat: probably a form of were-wolf.

From 1.45 to 2.30 we draggled miserably back towards the Mill Pool. By now Macdonald was fishing in front with the fly and I was coming after him, hand-lining a minnow off Cheese’s rod. It became really impossible to go on. I couldn’t feel the line. I forgot whether it was hail then or sleet. I asked Macdonald if he would mind my using his spinning rod. It was a case of wanting something to do, but being unable to go on hand-lining. I had four casts, and caught the bottom. By now I was accustomed to this, and didn’t strike. At the sixth cast I caught it again, but it was a little different. It just seemed to move: an inch, a millimetre. I struck. It couldn’t be what it seemed. The line cut the water, not quite in the usual way. I could have felt, I thought, I did feel that it was moving towards me. But I was not going to tell Macdonald, not yet. It was a salmon. Oh, God, it was a salmon, and it would obviously get off at once. I pulled and waited and it was coming and it didn’t seem to get off. It was deep. It stayed deep.

I shouted to Macdonald, who came, thinking I was snagged. I said: “I think I have a fish.”

He looked at me to see if I was mad, then at the line to see if he was. He said: “You have. Yes, certainly you have.” Then he began to become hysterical. If it had been his own fish he wouldn’t have minded. But he had been wanting one for me for three days, and he was terrified I would lose it. He was in agony because he said I was holding it too hard. He beseeched me to let it go. I assured him that it was quite all right. I talked conversationally about different ways of killing salmon. I asked him to look at the time.

Then the fish came up for a second. Macdonald said: “It’s a big trout,” and my heart went down.

I said: “Thank God it isn’t an eel.”

He said: “But no trout would hold you down like that. It would come up and flutter on the surface.”

It was only the reddish water, the aftermath of the spate, which had made him look rusty. I played him. I was hard on him, except when he had to go. He only took me 20 yards down the bank. Macdonald kept pleading for kinder treatment, but I wouldn’t. I didn’t know how long it was going to go on, or what was likely to happen, but I was going to hold him tight. I became aware of the moment when the cast would snap supernaturally, and let him off at that moment.

I brought him up, and we could get a good look. He was lovely and terrible, like a shark. I knew we couldn’t possibly have him. He sloughed in the water. Then he was weaker and came towards us. Then he was off. And then back slowly, but still too strong. Twice more, and he was swimming just below Macdonald. Macdonald slashed at him, and missed. I said, agonised, “No hurry,” and took him off for another circular tour. At last he was floating on his side, exactly below the executioner. This time there was no mistake. The gaff pulled like lightning: he was on the bank!

My first salmon. 10½ pounds. 13 minutes.

Incredible, but killed. I stuffed a pound into Macdonald’s pocket, against his will, nearly cried, and went on fishing. Occasionally I peeped at the salmon. For some reason I didn’t like to give it a close look. It would have been a kind of hubris to look at it closely. It might have vanished.

Thinking back over this incredibly wonderful experience, the only time I shall ever kill my first salmon again, several things become vivid. There was the way he took me. I understand now what fishing writers mean by a “determined pull.” There was no grab, like a trout’s. He simply took hold of me, not caught hold, and held me down. It was as if I were a small boy that he was going to spank. It was a determined outrage on my minnow, nothing wild or flashy about it at all. Then there was the extraordinary and unforced calm which descended when I knew he was on. I felt happy and interested, as if I had been condemned to death. This changed once, when my line jammed on the handle of the reel. Then I said: “Oh, it’s jammed.” It was a lamenting squeal, and I heard my own voice. I also remember Macdonald saying: “Well, if we can only get this one on the bank, we can call it a guid day.” The important thing was the weather. Just for that twenty minutes the wind veered west and the sun shone. It woke the salmon up and they began to move up once more. But before moving they felt lively and took. I am sure that I hooked this fish during the only three or four minutes when it would have been possible to take fish by any means. The sun went in again, the wind went east, the rain came down: but there was a silver cock salmon on the bank. The first from Craigenkillie this year.

When people talk about salmon here they call it “a fish.” Trouts are just trouts. A fish means a salmon. Quite right.