Bog Myrtle & Peat

Kids pull trout from the upland burn. It’s child’s play, and the watchers peer at the giggling flow, searching for the dum-dum slip of movement in the shingle. Then carrying rods and bags of kit to the sunlit stream, they prick the worms and cast them dreaming to bed. 

A small trout is easily gulled by the trick. Foreseeable in every sense, it plays the game and finds that life has opened up beyond the endless confinement of two opposing banks. It’s never given a moment’s thought to where the current goes beyond the peaty bend, much less perceived the sea’s relentless pull. So here is the first and only moment of truth – and it follows there’s a mind-blown, goggling void in the eyes of handled trout which can be mistaken for nothing at all. Children feel no need for a backward glance as they kill and cast again; there’s no call for pity at the end of a story which never began.

But I have witnessed salmon pulled from darker pools which lie towards the town. And I should know the flash and thunder of a well-played fish as more than something simply big. Because when a salmon’s brought at last to grass and the pool stained with the tea of his blood, he’ll turn and seek your face with the cold, resentful stare of a cat that is placed in a brick-filled sack. He knows; and in the swivel of his socket-eyes, he’ll add you to the list of all the things he’s seen – from the out-run merse to the howling refraction of a Greenland deep; from the orca’s eye to the whirl of a Northern Light. In that moment, the catcher’s only claim to fame is to come last in a fabulous catalogue, and pathetically short of the best.