The Fish Ladder (17 page)

I stopped the car in a lay-by and got out. I leaned on the boot and listened to the
clatter-clatter-clatter
of a magpie. I watched it lift up and then alight behind each car that passed, picking at something red and furry that was mashed into the tarmac. Overhead, clouds were combed out like wet hair. Rain covered the western side of the plain like plastic sheeting, sealing off the direction I had come from. The weather front that encompassed me in Blair Atholl was getting nearer. I had no map and no adequate protection from the elements.

I had another reason for wanting to continue my journey, beyond these practical considerations. I wanted, just for once, to complete something I had started. My life was cluttered with abandoned projects: degree courses, film scripts, houses, journeys. My head was noisy with unanswered, or only half-formed, questions.

I had made a reservation at a hotel in Grantown-on-Spey. From Grantown it was a just few hours’ drive to Dunbeath. I got back into the car.

Spey

A buzzard perched on the
Welcome
sign in the small Highland town of Grantown-on-Spey, its head angled down and sideways. Its eye peered into my own, a bright pulse of contact as I drove by. My reservation was at the same hotel where our family used to holiday each summer, although it was decades since I had been there. We had first returned to Grantown because my brother John, aged fifteen, had won a local golf tournament, and Dad thought he should have the chance to defend his title. After that we just came back because we liked it. After meandering up and down the side roads, running parallel to the main street, I eventually found the Springfield Lodge Hotel.

Its wide gravel drive had given way to a car park, with white lines painted onto pitted asphalt. There had been a croquet lawn at the back of the hotel, with bent rusted hoops, but this, too, had disappeared, beneath a development of executive homes. Previously the grounds had felt exotic, in a
Secret Garden
kind of way, with clipped yew hedges and rhododendrons. Now the place had a hunched, suburban feel, and the word
conference
formed in my mind. But for the most part the house was familiar to me. I walked through a set of double doors to see a walnut writing desk. I recognised the Victorian glass display case that still housed a – possibly depleted – collection of hand-tied fishing flies. Watery sunshine reached the lobby through the open doors of adjoining rooms, and the half-lit fishing flies bristled, iridescent, over their hooks.

I had often wondered how fishing flies worked. The man I had met at the power station in Pitlochry had told me that returning salmon starved themselves, sustained only by the fat of their sea-years. So why then would they be attracted by a fly? Perhaps it was a reflex that made them snap at the disturbed water surface. Or maybe the flies that fell into the river didn’t count as eating, too few and far between to constitute a meal. Perhaps the fishing fly was the salmons’ last temptation, a pretty feathered demon with a curved steel tail, complete with a vicious barb. Its sole purpose to distract them, perhaps fatally, from their journey upstream. As a child I used to watch the goldfish in our garden pond use their mouths like hands, to examine anything that was of interest to them. Possibly salmon took the fly in order to discover what it was. I had placed my own hands on the glass case but lifted them, suddenly conscious of my fingerprints, when I realised that a woman was staring at me.

‘Can I help you?’ she asked.

‘Yes, thank you, I have a reservation,’ and I gave her my name. The woman peered at the computer screen in front of her. She seemed slightly puzzled.

‘Is everything all right?’

‘I’m not sure,’ she said. ‘I have you down for tonight and for two days hence but not tomorrow. Is that right?’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I will be spending tomorrow night outside.’ I told her about my plan to follow the Dunbeath Water to its source.

‘My goodness! Do you want me to hold the room for you? It’s forecast rain.’

‘No. Thank you.’ I would need to check out early though. I asked the woman if I could have breakfast at seven. She smiled, and held a key towards me.

‘You can. Good luck if I don’t see you in the morning. Callum will take your bag to your room.’

I couldn’t see anyone who might have been Callum so I picked up my holdall and made for the stairs. I thought about asking the woman if she knew who had made the fishing flies, but she was peering closely at the computer screen. Its milky reflection shone in her spectacles.

The hotel had seemed vast in my recollection, but was in fact no more than two floors of rather grand rooms beneath an attic of smaller bedrooms which our extended family of grandparents, parents, aunts, uncles and cousins, together with me and my brother, must pretty well have filled. The only other guest I remembered was Mr Kenneth Yields, an angler who always took his holiday in the same fortnight as us. Mr Yields had helped me land my first brown trout, when I was eight, which the kitchen staff had cooked for breakfast. My brother had eaten it while I watched on, preferring the hotel’s thin, brittle toast and hand-curled butter.

The staircase ascended between landings of polished wood with well-worn carpet runners. A row of heavy white-painted doors, the numbers stencilled in black gloss, opened onto the stairwell on each of the first two floors. My own room was at the top of the house. I put my bag inside the door and went back down the stairs. I still hadn’t bought an Ordnance Survey map for tomorrow’s journey. I also wanted a bivouac bag, which was a weatherproof cover for my sleeping bag. The shops would be closing in less than an hour.

There was nowhere in Grantown that had what I wanted, so I drove back to Aviemore, fifteen minutes away. In Blacks they had not heard of a bivouac bag,
a what?
And I was surprised, and also worried by this, because I hadn’t brought a tent. But in the last shop I entered, pushing past the proprietor as he turned the card in the window, I found what I was looking for. The man didn’t seem to mind about the time.

‘Now,’ I asked, ‘do you sell maps?’

‘I do,’ he said. ‘Where are you looking for?’

‘Dunbeath, in Caithness. I want to follow the river there to its source, so I need a map with all of it on.’ He found a map of Dunbeath and opened it out so we could check it had the river on it. I had been driving all day, and I needed glasses, but my first impression was that most of the page was blank. I thought perhaps some of the colours hadn’t come out.

‘Do you mind if we move it closer to the window?’ I asked. The shopkeeper carried it as though it were an origami swan’s nest and laid it in a rectangle of sunlight. This initially bleached the paper further, but my eyes were becoming accustomed to the whiteness. It was the right map.

At one corner of the sheet was a wedge of blue: the sea. Along the coast ran the A9, long and lovely, and pink as bitten candyfloss. The fishing town of Dunbeath was there, and the knotty blue squiggle of the river. To begin with there were woods on either side of the strath, a few buildings, some ruins –
Old Sheilings, Burnt Mound, Standing Stone
. But that was all. Much further north there was a forest, in green, and some terracotta web-like contours. The white areas must have been moorland, and yes, there were blue tufts, hard to see and discreet as fallen eyelashes. It was a bog. As the contours snagged together where the land began to rise I made out clusters of blue spots, half the size of sequins and as random as spattered ink, and the words
dubh lochs
.

‘What are dubh lochs?’ I asked.

‘Black water,’ said the shopkeeper. I had no idea what he was talking about. ‘Sometimes they are only a few feet across but the waterhead is like a sponge, it’s full of holes. Stay away from them, and use a stick to measure depth, even if it looks like a puddle.’

I felt a flicker of fear behind my pubic bone as though an oil-lamp, containing my essence, had been knocked.

‘It’s all right,’ I said, ‘I’m going to be following the river.’

I traced the blue line as it coiled and bent over the folds in the page, through the slowly rising landscape. As it wound higher it was joined by tributaries. When that happened its pathway grew deceptive, labyrinthine, the lines of water as evenly balanced as fingers on hands, so that it was not clear which stream led to the source. There was no loch, no thumbnail oval, just a petering out among the scattered pools in a frightening lonely emptiness. Had I seen the map two months ago, when I began my journey north, I would never have come this far. I wasn’t certain whether the new knowledge was an advantage, or if I would have been better driving to Dunbeath without a map and simply following the water. I hoped that when I found the place where the tributaries joined the river that the right path would become apparent to me. The shopkeeper had been kind, but he wanted to go home. I thanked him and left with the map and the survival bag, and headed back to Grantown-on-Spey.

Woodland pressed almost to the heart of Grantown. Beyond these woods was the river. As there were still a couple of hours before supper I decided to walk down to the Spey. A sign directed me to a footpath, curtained on either side in green-black firs, so that I had the sense of being in a corridor. After a while the trees became more spaced and in the lighter places the needle-deep ground choked into life. The summer bilberries had gone, the blackberries were not yet ripe. Gold lichen tufted quartz boulders stained to copper by the peaty soil. Toadstools pushed through moss. The forest scent was pungent; a soft sweet churchy resin over mushroom over mulch. Falling leaves drifted like confetti through the trees, the first messengers of a change in air pressure, the front that I had remained ahead of, yet had followed me all day long.

My memory of the river was of smooth black water travelling between green banks, the fish clearing the water in deep pools below the bridge. There had been occasional sandy coves, child-sized beaches, where I had constructed dams and captured elvers to use as bait. My eel-trap had been a wine bottle with a hole drilled in the bottom, a piece of Mum’s nylon stocking stretched over the neck. I would lay the bottle among the gravel of the shallows in the path taken by the elvers. A piece of bacon fat lured them through the hole in the base and, because they only swam in one direction, they became trapped against the stocking at the top. I never did have the heart to put a hook through them. Each one was returned to the river, but not before I had stared at them for the longest time. The smoky bottle of undulating eels was as fascinating and mysterious as Aladdin’s magic lamp. But as I came out of the woods on this August afternoon I was greeted by a swollen, opaque, drowning river, matted with daisy-filled weeds. It was an Ophelia river that heaved against heavy, muddied banks. I remembered the debris that had littered the submerged banks of the River Skell, and the water churning through the tanks of the fish ladder at Pitlochry. I realised, finally, that I was looking at the work of weeks of rain. It was so strange, after spending the summer in the sun, on the Llŷn Peninsula, which had been safe within its own microclimate. Tales of floods throughout the country, and newspapers showing ducks swimming under deckchairs had reached us, on our Welsh beach, but had felt unlikely, queer as fairy tales.

I tried to find the place where I had caught my first trout. I was seven years younger than my brother, and was often left behind when he and my cousins, who were all of a similar age, went on expeditions. Sometimes, Mr Yields would take me fishing. I recalled, at the end of one such afternoon, my auntie Marge making her way towards the water’s edge in a PVC cream mac, approaching warily, yet sassily, in inappropriate heels, her smile a vermilion streak, her unnecessary sunglasses glinting in the pale light. Mum and her sister Marge shared Scottish/Welsh descent. Mum was the Scot, with the light brown hair and soft blue eyes of her grandmother. Mum was gentle, her features delicate, finely boned. She was at home on the moors, in the mountains, outside. My aunt was tall, yet voluptuous, with raven hair, and took after her great-grandfather, a Welshman called Ifan Evans. I felt certain I had seen a photograph of Marge as a young girl wearing a tall Welsh hat, a wool shawl pulled tight around her shoulders. But by the 1970s she was most at ease with a cocktail in her hand, fingers curved around a highball glass, her nails signalling red for danger. For the very first time it struck me that this occurrence might have been unusual, Auntie Marge coming down to the river, and she and Mr Yields wandering off, leaving me to oversee the rods.
Now you watch the lines . . . Keep your eye on the float
. . . and then they would come back a while later. I remembered sheltering from the rain in a wooden fisherman’s hut, alone. Alone! A few days before the fishing trip with Mr Yields, my grandfather – who always carried a pearl-handled knife, ostensibly for cutting apples – had carved our initials and closed them in a heart on one of the upright posts of the hut. I had occupied myself, while I waited for Auntie Marge and Mr Yields to come back, by inking in our initials with a biro. Spots of rain had dropped through the water’s surface, making circles as big as my head. Each round band had merged with the next, forming patterns as dense as chrysanthemums. The river hadn’t felt dangerous to me then, not like now. It would never have occurred to me to go in, or to follow the adults. I had made a prop from a forked twig, to support my fishing rod, and devoted myself to my cave art, my private act of vandalism.

At a bend in the river I came upon a wooden shelter. It had been extensively patched and repaired. There was no sign of a heart and arrow. I turned the memory, questioned it, for in truth it seemed unlikely. But I was cold, the rain was coming fast behind the wind, which was rising, so I left the river, and hurried through the skittering forest.