Country life
The one that got away
Leanda de Lisle
C I've never seen so much countryside,' my youngest son, Dominic, announced as we drove through Sutherland. In the eight years of his life he has spent one night in a city, but, as he recognised, there's country- side and there's countryside. The ribbon road wound on through marshy glens and slate grey hills without a house or a field to mark where men lived or worked. There would be no 'popping out' to the corner shop from the lodge where we were to be guests, and I wondered how the boys would cope without the promise of a video to dis- tract them from killing each other.
I needn't have worried. At least I needn't have worried about the boys fighting. No sooner had we arrived than the boys ran off somewhere over the horizon. They played so long and, as became clear over the next couple of days, so happily that I knew they were doing something they shouldn't. On the third day I followed them and found Dominic climbing down a 15-foot waterfall in my wellington boots. Below, his older brothers leapt from one glassy wet boulder to another, oblivious to my screams of rage. Our host took the 'boys will (and should) be boys' point of view, but it seemed fool- ish of my eldest son, Rupert, to explain that, this week, he was thinking of joining the SAS. 'It will be interesting to see how you cope out stalking then,' he was told with a smirk.
Our host had shot his first stag when he was ten and he was keen for Rupert to shoot one too — unless he was a bit sensi- tive about killing things, as our host's wife had suggested he might be. 'Sensitive, no,' I thought to myself, 'but totally irresponsible, yes.' Rupert's father and I hummed and hawed and were frankly relieved when the stalker put an end to matters, saying he wouldn't allow anyone under 17 to handle a rifle. However, both Rupert and his brother were determined to accompany their father on the hill. 'You may have to run 15 miles in the rain,' I warned, knowing that at least one of them never stands when he can lean. They frowned at me furiously. `Well, if you want to go you can, but be under no illusion: you could find yourself lying in a bog for an hour and you are not to whine.'
In the event, the boys climbed, ran and crawled over the hills in sun and rain with- out a murmur of complaint. Only their brother, Dominic, failed to be impressed. He had stayed behind to fish for brown trout. He has an absolute passion for fish, be it catching them, eating them, or, er, playing with them — something he encour- aged in our host's four-year-old daughter. Once she was a sweet little girl who liked plastic ponies and baby dolls. Now she makes cooing noises at dead trout and uses their corpses as puppets.
Mind you, I'm a little jealous that she caught more fish than I did. I had hoped to catch a salmon, but you're not allowed to use things that can achieve this easily like a spinner, which flashes madly and attracts them instantly. You have to use a fly. It was explained to me that a salmon wouldn't want to eat it, but if you flick it at them they get annoyed and take the bite. Unless it's too sunny or too cloudy, in which case they just sulk.
Remarkably, one day, when the cloud was low, and the salmon were supposedly mooching around at the bottom of the lochs, I got a bite. I had spent hours casting and recasting with great enthusiasm (so much so that the gillie had to rescue the top half of my rod when it flew into the water like one of Captain Ahab's har- poons), but I was gawping at the view at the crucial moment, and by the time I understood that I had to get my rod up it was too late. The fish had gone. 'You'd have thought you'd feel something the size of a salmon on your line,' I exclaimed between curses. The boy in the waterproof trousers smiled and said it had certainly been a ten-pounder. I suppose that's what comes of admiring so much countryside.
'In Hertford, Hereford and Hampshire, hurri- canes hardly happen: discuss.'
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