FISHING- IN A BLIZZARD.
TO arrive at a Highland railway station in March, to look out with eagerness from the carriage-window at the river parallel with the railway, and to find it running at its summer level, is a disconcerting beginning to an expedition of three days' fishing. Three days are not long enough to hope for a change. A bank-high spate could not run down in less than a week, and less than a bank-high flood, probably, would not draw up a fresh run of fish. Nor is there much hope in the wind or the sky of rain which might bring a freshet, or a sudden "soft," which, perhaps, might shift the fish from the lower pools. The wind lies between north and north-west, and the sky either threatens snow or whizzes it down between bursts of sunlight; the water will not rise, but will become steadily colder. Donald, the gillie, selecting flies by the river bank, is not reassuring. " We will not get fush until we get more watter, I am sure of that," he observes, but eyes the Mar Lodge he has chosen with something like toleration. "If there's a fresh fush there, I am sure he will tak' it ; I am sure he will." He doubts, probably, if there is a fresh fish.
But the crunch of shingle under foot, the lapping of clear water about brogues aed waders, the bright colours of the stones under the water, the play of the limber rod in the hand—all these bring exhilarating hopes of unexpected things. Hope and expectation vary at the different pools. Here at the Green Banks—what salmon river has not somewhere a pool under green banks?—you must wade deep into water running over boulders of any size from a pudding to a potato-sack, and that means some slippery going. Here, at the Flats, the wading is easier ; the fish lie, if there are fish, on the edge of the dark ripples in mid-stream, and the river is shallow half-way across. It is a pool which it is a pleasure to fish because of the open air all about it; there are no disturbing eddies and cross-currents of wind. Below, in the Pot, the water tumbles from falls into a tre- mendous cleft of rock, unfathomed and as black as bottle-glass. From unseen depths tiny bubbles fizz up and up through the dark, rising like a cloud of fish-scales tothe surfaceand breaking like soda-water. The bubbles break the surface, but never a fish. Neither the Green Banks, nor the Flats, nor the Pot, nor the Bridge, nor the delightfully named Burn of Angels below the Bridge yield the sign of a fin or a tail; not even a kelt splashes. The promise of weather turns for the worse. Sudden squalls tear down stream, whipping spray as they go; then a squall whisks up stream, tossed back from the opposite bank or curled over by the draught of the river-bed under the woo d laehind. The gut cast, just about to fall at the intended angle, is flung up the current instead of down; the spun minnow, caught by a gust half-way across the river, plops where it should not. The sky and the water darken with snow ; the snowstorm blows clear, the sun breaks from torn blue, the wind shifts a point; hope rises and falls again. One hope remains constant, but it is of the river birds, and not of fishermen. March has come for the birds of the salmon river ; March with melting ice and winds in the west, and snow-water pouring down from the hills. Plovers tumble and cry in the wind, on the grass and the plough ; dippers dart up and down stream, like black kingfishers, singing as they go ; overhead comes the sudden sweet whistle of the oyster-catcher, winging his separate way over the river from the estuary sands.
The wind is at its worst just above and below the bridge. Wind on a river which runs between high banks, or under a wooded bank on one side and open meadow on the other, is full of tricks which can be disconcerting even to a Scottish gillie who knows every atone in the stream. You may glance at the flying clouds in the blue above and know that it blows from the north-west, with more north than west, as you can feel by the sting in it, and then as you calculate for a steady breeze on your left shoulder, suddenly there comes a puff, or a draught, or a whirling current from the so
east which whips your cast off the water or drops the fly at an impossible angle up stream. But above and below the bridge, flung as bridges should be by light stone arches high over the stream, the vagaries of the wind are more puzzling than ever. The hollow under the bridge acts as a funnel, and sucks air through it in gusts and gales ; the surface of the river blackens and crinkles, clears to icy smoothness, blackens and crinkles again in twenty scattering patches. Donald, waiting on the bank behind, shouts counsel : "'Tie the wind, don't ye see ; ye canna keep the fly on the waiter, don't ye see ? " You do see, very plainly, but advice has no effect on the wind under the bridge, which whips bands of ice round your wrists, flicks snow into your left ear, spatters hail over the shingle at your feet and the bubbling current beyond. Yet there is something reassuring, in all the difficulty and discomfort of casting, in the very feel of the rod, in the play and the familiarity of it, in the unlikely hopes which it has so often answered. The swing and fall of the cast, the weight of the line felt at the rod-point, become memories themselves and bring memories with them ; of other days, perhaps of blazing April sunshine as hopeless as any March snow, with primroses clustered on the bank and cloudless blue in a sky of east winds—and even then, in that hopeless weather, the sudden "rug" under water and the rod-top strained straight
with the line to mid - river. Or, as the evening follows afternoon, and the moon rides out behind tawny vapour into mid-heaven, there may come recollections of an evening almost as wild, a wind almost as high, in that very spot, when the mood of the river and the fish in it seemed suddenly to change from sulkiness to vigour and promise ; it was the one " taking " movement of the day, and you had waited for it. Will the mood change to-night, with the moon in the same place and the light still good for a quarter of an hour? A fish plunges at the tail of the pool; was he " right," or not? It is suddenly too dark to see. The air blackens; a tremendous gust tears under the bridge, snow drives level with the river ; you turn, and can see nothing on any side but eddying, drifting snow.
It was all to be expected from the beginning, of course, for salmon love falling snow and icy water no more than wading fishermen do. They will come at the fly in February, no doubt, when the bank is solid snow and ice stands at the rim of flowing water; but when they have once felt the warmer movement of the river in March, snow and cold seem to numb them to torpor. They will move again, and a blank day, even three blank days, in March will matter nothing if there are more fish waiting in the reaches below. But as far, at all events, as one river, the Dee, is concerned, the difficult question remains, Where are the fresh fish P They have not run up since the week when the river first opened; are they waiting, then, at the mouth of the river? The disquieting point is that the reports are bad from the nets. The fish which find their way to the market are said not only to have a larger proportion than usual marked or wounded by seals and floating ice—which looks as if the numbers of all fish concerned were smaller than usual—but it is also said that many of the salmon are thin and badly nourished. There is at least a possibility that the trawlers in the sea outside have been disturbing the salmon's natural feeding grounds, so that the fish cannot get the supply of young herrings which are their staple diet. That may or may not he so, but it seems to suggest at least as good a reason as any other for the scarcity of fish. Steam trawlers, as all fishermen know, do an immense amount of harm all round the coast by perpetually dragging nets over ground that should be left undisturbed, and by the consequent destruction of imma- ture and spawning fish. If, to add to the mischief which they do to sea-fishing, they interfere with the fishing of rivers where high prices are paid not only for rentals of beats but for nets at the mouth of the river, there is surely room for some sort of official inquiry. Such an inquiry would be assured at least of some very willing witnesses.
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