Complete Fictional Works of John Buchan (Illustrated)

by John Buchan

  The streams are now past their infancy and in their first youth. In my experience I have found them of two types, the “highland” and the “lowland.” In the first the waters fall steeply in pools, which are often long dark slits in little rock canyons. Dwarf birch and alder and mountain ash stud the rock walls, and now and then draw together into copses. Such streams are a genus by themselves and not miniature rivers, as are the second type, the more languid “lowland” waters. In the latter the fall is slight, and many yards of almost motionless current may intervene between the pools. Such pools are commonly long and shallow, with a stream at the head and tail, and their shores are often shelves of gravel. They imitate exactly, on a small scale, the habits of the larger rivers. The first kind is to be found in any mountain land, like the Highlands, or Galloway, or Wales, and now and then in the gentler Tweedside hills, wherever these are rough and heathery. The second is the more familiar, and I have fished many scores of the type from Galloway to Berwick, and from the Cheviots to Devon.

  The worm was useful in exploring the deeper pools after rain, but it was now that I first took to the fly. I began in the “highland” type, the lovely Powsail which joins Tweed at Merlin’s Grave below Drummelzier village. Its pools were deep and clear, and into each tumbled a small cataract, so I found it easier to fish up than down stream — a valuable lesson for the fly- fisher. It was an elementary business with little art in it, for the casts were perforce short, and the configuration of the land enabled the angler to keep well in cover. My flies never varied from a couple of plain black hackles (which we called “black spiders”), on coarsish gut. From April to August the pools were the best chance, in September the little runs and stickles. The fish averaged three or four to the pound, and I had never anything beyond a pound weight.

  This was in the “highland” type. In the “lowland” the prospects of good fish were greater, but there was also an excellent chance of no fish at all. For such streams would sink in dry weather to the slenderest trickles. Then, I regret to say, I would altogether abandon the rod and take to my naked hands, having behind me the authority of John Bunyan:

  “Yet fish there be that neither Hook, nor Line,

  Nor Snare, nor Net, nor Engine can make thine;

  They must be grop’t for, and be tickled too,

  Or they will not be catch’t, whate’er you do.”

  I was an expert “guddler,” scooping up trout from below stones in the channel and under the deep-cut banks. These “lowland” burns could become degraded indeed, choked with rubbish in passing a farmyard, or at the outlet of a village. But sometimes, when they looped through a broad pasture-land, they afforded pools and streams from which trout could only be taken by casting fine and far. They had occasional big fish, too, for, though it was never my luck, I have seen trout of two pounds and more taken from them. I was ill-equipped for fly-fishing, since my rod was the two upper joints of my grandfather’s salmon rod, my reel and line were indifferent, and my gut was far too coarse for slender waters and bright weather. But it was there and then that the possibilities of the art began to dawn on me, and fly-fishing became for me a necessity of life.

  I liked those hobbledehoy waters best in the early spring. The “highland” ones were wonderful in autumn when the heather was still in flower and the bracken was yellowing, and the rowans flamed scarlet from the rocks. Beautiful were the “lowland” streams in high summer when the banks were feathered with meadowsweet and the pastures bright with rock-rose and thyme. But I liked them best when the turf was still yellow, like old court velvet, or just beginning to green after the winter:

  “A month before the month of May,

  And the spring comes slowly up this way.”

  In April there was an ineffable freshness and purity in the cold grey waters and the austere shores. Also one had more generously than at any other season the companionship of birds. In a glen in Morvern I have looked down from the edge of a little ravine at the nest and eggs of a golden eagle in a sprawling birch. In the grassy glens the angler could scarcely avoid stumbling on the nests of lapwing and grouse, snipe and sandpiper; with a little trouble he could find those of the redshank and the curlew, and one notable day in Sutherland I added a greenshank to my list. Also spring is the time when the hill lambs are born, and one day there is a bleating in the valleys, and presently the hillsides are sprinkled with vociferous younglings which, if of the Cheviots breed, are white as a snowdrift.

  In such places I never felt the awesome solitude that belonged to the uppermost green “hopes.” There was evidence of human occupation everywhere — a drove road, a field of roots in the midst of heather, a moorland farm-town with horses and cows at graze, a farm road with a postman on it, even a hamlet where old women washed the family clothes in the burn. Yet they were quiet places and in their own fashion very lonely — lonely because the world had never known them, or had forgotten them. There were no fields, as in England, each called by an ancient name; the slender tributaries were often innominate, or described in the large-scale maps as “Ugly Grain” or “Middle Grain”; they mattered only to the farmer as the feeding-ground for his hirsels. They were unvisited, except by a rare angler or a shepherd “looking” his sheep. No legend was intertwined with them, and no ballad gave them fame, or if they had a ballad the local application was forgotten. The Douglas Burn in Yarrow is the reputed scene of a famous ballad story, but I never thought of that when I fished its waters. In Tweedsmuir Kingledores Burn saw the slaying of Lord Fleming by those red-handed bandits, the Tweedies of Drummelzier, but it is a tale known only to the antiquary. Those moorland waters have to flow further down the haughs before they properly enter human life.

  My time for the “hopes” was the morning, for at that distance I had to put up my rod in the early afternoon to be home for tea. But to many of the burns the journey was short, and with them I associated especially the summer twilights when the dew had begun to fall and the hill pastures were incense- breathing like Araby, with mint and meadowsweet and thyme and heather. I noticed then something which I have often since observed, that there was a short spell just before the dark when no fish would take. I have caught trout when the pools were red and gold with the pageant in the west, and I have caught them when dusk had fallen and there was scarcely light enough to cast by. But there would come a time when there seemed to be a sudden hush in the world, when nature was “breathless with adoration” and the trout had halted to reflect on their sins. It was a time which I associated with that magical word µÅÆ·¼¹± which Plato uses in the Phaedo when he describes Socrates making ready for death. It was the hour to which Wordsworth no doubt referred as the “light of setting suns” which was the dwelling of “something far more deeply interfused.” It was the time when in earlier ages devout men in the Hebrides would see far in the western sea the shadowy outline of St. Brandan’s isles. When that hour came I would lay down my rod until the flop of a rising fish told me that the wheels of the world were going round again. With salmon it made no difference, they being brazen creatures from the outer seas, but the humble and pious trout observe the holy season. It was not for nothing that in the Sixteenth Iliad Homer applied the epithet [Greek characters] to fish.

  CHAPTER II — THE MIDDLE COURSES

  I

  By the middle courses I mean what in Scotland and northern England is described as a “water.” It may be the middle course of a considerable stream which presently reaches the dignity of a river. Old folk in Tweedsmuir used to speak of the “water of Tweed.” So in the ballads:

  “Annan waters wadin’ deep,

  And my love Annie’s wondrous bonny.”

  . . . . .

  “The roar of the Clyde water

  Wad hae dar’d a hundred men.”

  Or it may be only a substantial tributary, like Ettrick or Teviot. Or it may be a river on its own account, finding its end in sea or lake, but a river on a modest scale, no bigger than those affluents I have named Such are the Lune
and the Coquet, the Usk in Wales, and those pleasant streams of the west which derive from Exmoor and Dartmoor. My measure is not only by size, for in this chapter I do not take account of the smaller Highland rivers like the Brora and the Helmsdale, the Thurso and the Laxford, whose business is with salmon, or the famous dry-fly streams of the south. I am still concerned with trout, and with waters which have not lost the scent of the hills.

  It is in this class that I find the river of my dreams. I have two landscapes in my mind which have always ravished my fancy. One is a morning scene. It is spring — say mid-April; a small fresh wind is blowing; my viewpoint is somewhere among the foothills where a mountain land breaks down to the plains. Below me is a glen with green fields and the smoke of hearth-fires and running water, and a far-off echo of human bustle, including the clack of a mill wheel. The glen runs out into the blue dimness of a great champaign, with the spires of cities in it, and on the far rim a silver belt of sea. A white road winds down the valley and into the plain, and I know that it will take me past a hundred blessed nooks into an April world of adventure and youth.

  The other scene belongs to the afternoon, not the languorous afternoon of the poets, but a season which is only the mellowing of the freshness of morning. It is a wide tract of pasture, backed by little wooded hills, mostly oaks and beeches, but with clumps of tall Scots firs. Behind, fading into the sunset, are round-shouldered blue mountains. In the pasture there are shapely little coverts, as in the park of a great mansion. Through it winds a little river, very clear and very quiet, with long smooth streams and pools edged with fine gravel. The banks are open so that there is nothing to impede the angler. There are cattle at graze, and a faithful company of birds and bees. It is a place long-settled and cared for, with the flavour of a demesne, a place in close contact with human life.

  My little rivers are also in touch with history. It is along their courses that you will find the chief memorials of the past. In the Borders it is rare to find a famous castle in the glen of a burn — Hermitage is one of the few I can call to mind; but the valleys of the “waters” are strewn with shards of old masonry, each on its promontory of hill, and each linked with some resounding name In some parts these ruins are in sight of each other, for in their day of pride it was their business by lit beacons to pass the news that the enemy was marching. Rede and Coquet and Till, Esk and Eden, Liddel and Teviot, Ettrick and Yarrow and Leader; Lyne and Manor and Tweed itself — each mile almost of their course has its tower, now mostly a jagged stone tooth hung with ivy; and it is the same with the tributaries of Tay and the streams of Angus, and northern waters like the Don (the Scottish Loire), the Ythan and the Findhorn. With the castles go the ballads, the most famous are strung on a thread of little streams.

  I like a place where history can be easily reconstructed, and except for a few dry-stone dykes and some planting, those glens have not greatly changed since the ancient days of sturt and strife. The peel-tower had a massy stone foundation which could not be destroyed, but the roof-tree and thatch and wooden outbuildings must have been constantly flaming to heaven. We can picture stormy dawns when the plenishing of a farm moved southward under the prick of raiders’ spears, and moonlit nights when in the “hot-trod” men died for half a dozen lean cattle. It was a life which bred hardy fighters and fine poets, for from it came some of the world’s greatest ballads, and it taught a stiff creed of honour and loyalty. But it had few of the gentler graces, and neither Roman Pope nor Scottish King could teach it decorum. Archbishops might lay on the malefactors their most terrible curse—”I condemn them perpetually to the deep pit of hell, to remain with Lucifer and all his fellows, and their bodies to the gallows on the Barrow Mure, first to be hangit, syne riven and ruggit with dogs, swine, and other wild beasts abominable to all the world.” But to hang a Borderer you had first to catch him — no easy matter, and for the thunders of the Church he and his kind cared not a straw.

  I have called those valleys my favourite kind of landscape, and they are also the places linked with my happiest fishing memories. But I have in mind one tract of country where the prospect is most pleasing but the fishing is vile. It is the land which lies roughly between Llandovery in the south and Plinlimmon in the north, Rhayader in the east and the valley of Teify in the west. Giraldus Cambrensis, who travelled in those parts with Archbishop Baldwin at the end of the twelfth century, and incidentally found beavers in the Teify, called it the “mountains of Elanydd.” It is a land of sheep-walks rising at one point to a height of two thousand feet, with shallow vales, and wide stretches of bent and bog. There are no highways, no villages, no inns, and the postman visits the moorland farms perhaps twice a week. Especially it is the cradle of rivers, Elan, Towey, Teify, Ystwyth, and a dozen lesser ones, and their vales are the very flower of moorland peace. But there are few fish in those bright waters till they have left the uplands. Take the Towey, which in its lower reaches is a respectable sea-trout river. In its upper valley, above the cave of Tom Tym Katti, it flows in noble streams and long deep pools through a pastoral paradise. There you will find air like mid-ocean, and curious bog plants, and if you are fortunate you may see the honey buzzard and the last kites left in Britain. But you will be luckier than me if you get more than a few meagre trout.

  II

  In the middle courses I have done most of my fishing for trout and my ‘prentice days were spent on streams which ran swift and open and very clear. It was wet-fly fishing, though, after I had been entered to the dry-fly, I often tried that mode with success on waters very unlike the Hampshire chalk streams. On two occasions only have I forsaken the artificial fly. In low water, fishing upstream, I have sometimes in my youth had good baskets with the red worm. In the may-fly season I followed the local practice, and in the small hours just before dawn had considerable success dapping with the natural fly.

  These chapters are not a practical manual, for I have no special arts to expound or secrets to reveal. Also in my attitude to the sport I am lamentably unscientific. I admire the shooter who has theories about the ballistics of his craft, but I have no wish to imitate him. Nor am I inclined to follow the angler who has elaborate views on optics — how the light strikes the fish’s eye, and at what angle the fly is seen — or on entomology, for insects are a part of nature for which I have no taste — or on ichthyology — or on that mysterious subject, the working of a fish’s mind Some even connect the habits of fish with the phases of the moon; which seems to me a more promising line, for astrology may well be relevant, since the Fishes are a sign of the zodiac. I do not want to know too much about trout, for I like to leave some room for mystery. Indeed, I should prefer to keep science out of the business altogether. Izaak Walton gave us reams of the variety, popular in his day, but they are not his best chapters. I am not interested either in the elaborate gadgets with which the angler is now fitted out. Indeed, my disinclination to fish with bait, natural or artificial, is largely due to my dislike of its complex apparatus. I have few theories, and I want only a modest equipment. For trout, wet-fly or dry-fly. I do not use more than a dozen patterns, though I believe in varying the size; for salmon about the same. I like old and well-tried rods and reels — everything old except the gut. When I see the bursting fly-books and tackle boxes of my friends I do not envy them:

  “Perish the wish, for inly satisfied,

  Above their pomps I hold my ragged pride.”

  I have few maxims, and they are all deductions from experience. Keep well back from the water, for trout are extraordinarily susceptible, not to noise but to vibration. Trout are voracious; a very young trout will eat its own weight every ten days — and therefore, though there is no rise apparent, they are probably somehow and somewhere on the feed. Your fly must show signs of life, for a trout does not feed on dead meat. A fish cannot detect delicate shades of colour and must see a fly as more or less a grey silhouette against the background of the sky. Therefore to achieve this silhouette, you must use a light-coloured fly on a dark
day and a dark fly on a bright one. But what may matter a great deal is the size of the fly and the fineness of your tackle. Finally, when you are fishing for a rising trout, do not cast at him but at some point in the air above him. These are a few of the rules which I believe I have proved by experience, but I am ready to admit that they all have their exceptions. Indeed, except for the “dark day, light fly and vice versa” principle, I am very chary of dogmatising.

  What makes the difference between a successful and a less successful angler? Scarcely the length and delicacy of his casting. In salmon fishing the length of a cast may be important, and in certain Welsh, Devonian and Highland streams, where the banks are thickly wooded and one must wade up the channel, it may be necessary to cast fine and far. But, generally speaking, most fishermen of experience attain to a fair level of expert casting. Nor is it the ability to select the appropriate fly. I do not believe there is ever any completely appropriate fly, except on the broad principle I have stated above, with the rider that in the twilight, when moths are glimmering, a little fantasy may be permitted. Nor is it any extra skill in striking and playing a fish. The differentia in my view is knowledge of the particular water and the habits of the trout in it — where and at what season are the likeliest lies. In the bare pasturelands of my youth that was all important. I have had a good basket on a stream where my companion not only caught no fish but saw none. If a man knows his stream he will know that the haunts of fish will be different in April and in August, in low water and in full water. So, both for trout and salmon, I would maintain that, after a certain standard of technique has been attained, what makes the difference among anglers is just knowledge, local knowledge — as Alan Breck defined courage, “great penetration and knowledge of affairs.”