DEESIDE IN APRIL.
T4IKE other Scottish rivers, the Dee begins, for the railway traveller, by the side of the train. The valley of the river suits the railway as well as the older high road, and the three run side by side from the coast until the railway makes up its mind that there is no use in going any farther, and the road runs on alone. To the traveller from the South, perhaps, Scotland begins most distinctly with that change from the straight-driven main line, careless of rivers to be crossed and cuttings and embankments, to the quiet little line winding with the stream, and stopping every three or four minutes with admirable punctuality at tiny stations, equally deserted and equally superb with solid granite and flaring advertise- ments. The first sharp sense of change from South to North belongs, perhaps, to the journey on the main line, when it comes rushing in at the carriage-window on the keen air of the Northern dawn, black with the half-burnt coal-dust of the droning engine, cold with the dry coldness of unmelted snow. But it is a distincter change from the level travelling and the long distances of the night express to the neighbourly, gossiping little train which pays its punctual visits along the river valley, hardly passing for more than a minute out of sight of the bed of the stream. Here, between low, grassy banks, the river tumbles shallow and broad and bubbling, with no deep Teaches out of the current to hold the running fish ; here, under a wooded hillside, dark, foam-flecked ribands of water heave and swirl; there, behind a ridge of grey, yellow-lichened stones, lies a long, tranquil stretch of brimming smoothness, where, if anywhere, salmon should be lying ; a mile away, a sudden bend of the stream shines in the sun like a patch of sky spilt on the ridged ploughs. Once or twice the little train halts within a few yards of the water, and there is a fascina- tion in guessing, from the carriage-window, how the river should be fished.
Deeside has many aspects, from the broad rush of the winter spate to the blazing sunshine and thin, threading streams of Midsummer. But, perhaps just because the first impression is the one which abides, no river can be more alluring for those who have visited it for the early spring fishing than the Dee of March and April. The March BIM hardly melts the drifted snow which lies in the hollows of the bank, under the flank of the pine-wood, along the shadowing stones of the bridge; but there is nothing wet or dismal in the wind that blows over the shining drift. Such snow never lies in the South in March, nor in Southern England are there those astonishingly strong contrasts of heat and cold, of whiteness and brilliance of colour, of the warm hospitality of a wayside inn and the awful loneliness of frost, bound hills. There are few stranger differences of climate, even in Scotland, than the lower sun-warmed valley of the Dee rushing into greenness and flower in the first few days of April, and the utter desolation of the higher hills which rise beyond its sheltering pine-woods and the villages and farm cottages that stand along the banks. This year, although the winter has been exceptionally mild and free from prolonged hard frosts, the snow is still lying late and deep on the mountains, so that the river will be running big, in all probability, late into the spring. In such years the contrast of the valley and the mountains becomes all the stronger. In the valley the primroses stud the spate-bleached grasses of the river-banks ; the birch copses have put on the deep plum-colour dresses,which they will change in a fortnight for green ; the larches have already broken out their crimson tufts ; the alders line the water, filmy and vague, against the strong, decided firs and pines, like ghosts of trees ; the dog- roses in which the clumsy fisherman catches his fly are bursting out more branches to catch more flies. And there on the right, as you look up the stream, stands Morven streaked and slashed with snow, gleaming under cloudless blue; and beyond Morven to the south, Loolmagar, not two
hundred feet lower than the great Ben Macdhui, one un- broken pile of rock, iced and drifted and rounded with snow of no calculable depth, but of an appalling dreariness. There is no more startling contrast of life and desolation than to stare through field-glasses at that lonely desert, to bear at your elbow the chaffinch trying over his sudden, joyous little summer song, and to traverse from ten miles away the white and dreadful leagues of those untrampled snows.
Twenty years ago Deeside, like the banks of other rivers, Scottish and English, was less rich in bird life than it is to- day. The golden eagle is now protected by the owners of nearly all Scottish deer-forests, and south of the Dee, in forests like Caenlochan. the great eagles soar and swoop honoured and unmolested. But a tamer and almost a more domestic game-bird is gradually spreading the area of its home northward. The huge capercaillie, reintroduced into Scotland from Sweden at the end of the eighteenth century, has increased in the central pine-woods of Perthshire so fast and with such evident liking for its surroundings that it now nests many miles north even of the Dee, and along Deeside is so common as to be hardly worth looking at twice,—that is, by the accus- tomed inhabitants. The present writer's gillie a few days ago told him that capercaillie had nested every year lately within fifty yards of his house, and that his little boy once had a fine collection of birds' eggs,—fourteen or fifteen kinds, of which the "capper's " was one. The " capper " is not a rare bird when its egg comes into the first fourteen kinds of any collection. The eggs of the Deeside birds to be seen on any April day, indeed—though the provisions of the Wild Birds' Protection Acts fortunately and rightly protect most of them from capture—would make a nucleus for a collection which would drive a properly minded schoolboy into frenzies of naturalistic fervour. Even from the high road that skirts the Dee from Aberdeen to Balmoral you may sight ten or a dozen birds which you might look for in vain along fifty miles of a road in the Southern counties. The dipper, of course, and his sweet, sudden pipings and skimming flight belong to all mountain streams and wet, rocky places, and so does the grey wagtail, with his yellow underfeathers and dainty balancin,gs and bowings ; and of commoner inland water- birds, the sheldrake and the white-faced coot, and the mallard and moorhen, are interesting to watch, but nothing particularly rare in the South. Still, they are tame enough to take very little notice of highway traffic. The really fascinating thing is to find them intermixed with birds which belong exclusively to wildness and to the North. You will not see the caper- caillie from the road ; he belongs to the wood ; but on the rough heather-ground and among the birch-copses on the road you can watch the cock grouse fluttering and flaunting himself before his coy partner ; curlew flit and cry from wayside pools ; three or four blackcock solemnly stalk a stubble ; a pair of hooded crows forage savagely and lonelily at distant corners of the same field ; blackheaded gulls walk with rooks and jackdaws; and, most brilliant group of all, you round a corner in the road, and come upon fifty or a hundred oyster- catchers feeding with plovers on a fallow. Those black and white shining bodies and bright red bills strike an almost unnatural note of distinction; and so, in the evening, does the quiet, batlike flitting of a woodcock over the pine-trees. Wood- cock in an English winter associate themselves with covert. shooting and cartridges. By the Dee in April they grace their name as they should.
For two years the Deeside spring fishing has failed, and this year, for whatever reason, it has hitherto been worse than ever. It has been, in fact, the worst spring season on record, and the difficulty is to get at any convincing reason. One gillie will tell you that the winter has been too warm, and that the salmon know there is no snow-water coming down from the hills ; another, that the salmon hate an east wind, and are waiting at the mouth of the river for the wind to shift to the west or north-west. Another, perhaps, holds the rather plausible theory that in the days when the river was systematically netted, the netters cleared the bottoms of the lower pools to attract the fish, and that now the pools are no longer cleaned they are less attractive and hold fewer fish. Another hints at the dire working of a particular net, whose captures are never chronicled in the papers, and tells you that over two thousand fish have found their way from it "straight to the London market." If that were true, it would account for the small numbers of the salmon that find their way to the upper pools; but when you try to locate the net difficulties increase. Whatever may be true or untrue, it is plain, undisputed fact that there are very few clean fish in the river. But the privilege of fishing for them in such surroundings remains; and the philosophical angler, changing his Gordon to Mar Lodge, and unwillingly trying the gudgeon after the fly, and the prawn after the gudgeon in vain, still can watch the charm and the colour of the river glow and fade, and from each pool add something to his memories of the abiding enchantment of the Dee.
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