Bog Myrtle & Peat

David caught a perch on the Black Water of Dee, and Daddy didn’t. That’s how my son remembers the night in September when all three of us rode in a canoe across the loch and up to the dark, secluded depths of the river.

The lily pads were past their best and their seed pods showed gloomily in the shadows. We pulled a few of them up to see what made them tick, and some were saved for later examination. Ospreys called from the dregs of their eyrie, and dragonflies coursed noisily overhead in a sunset on the edge of open country. As the canoe slid softly between the banks, more dragonflies were disturbed from the rustling grass until the sky was thick with clattering, papery wings. They alone would have been enough to impress any three-year-old – the trip was already a success. But I was bent on trying a cast or two in these famously pike-infested waters, ignoring the fact that I don’t know a thing about coarse fishing. Lures and deadbait are anathema to me and my wet-presented flies, so it’s odd that I should have pressed the point and brought a spinning rod that nobody had asked for.

David isn’t interested in fishing. By the time I’d decided to unpack my kit, he’d already begun to drink from a bottle of cider. But my boy watched closely as I selected a mepp from the bag at my feet; he followed the line which I carefully threaded through the eyes of the rod, then he smiled to see the rig flung far into the deep, concealing water. I tried for twenty minutes, and I felt the burn of a child’s expectation on my back. But the merciless seconds slid past, and nothing showed. Other friends have come here and turned up fish with little more than a flick of the wrist, but I was feeling my way and soon began to realise that I had over-extended my reach. So I passed the rod to David, who reckoned that in having watched me try for several minutes without success, he now knew enough to attempt a cast of his own. And inevitably, he struck directly into a perch of less than a pound in weight. My son’s adulation was immediately transferred; measured against David’s obvious prowess, I was reduced to a matter of the smallest consequence. 

With his fins flared, that perch was round as a coin in the bilges. I’d never seen one so close at hand, and we marvelled at his markings and the unfamiliar glare of his eyes. He was green as the stains on an old-time bathtub; red fins and finger-prints scorched into his flanks. We held him up to take photographs, then we released him back into the water. Instead of jinking away like a fox, he wormed vertically down into the water with all the deep-set gravity of soap sinking. Silence fell upon us all, and in the company of a boy who can talk from dawn until the rising moon, it was obvious that a profound impression had been made. But the next day he recovered his tongue, and every person we’ve met since then has been hailed with the same outrageous tale; not only that David caught a fish, but also that Daddy didn’t.