The Camerons

by Robert Crichton

  Gillon knew they were there, he could sense them there, he could smell them there, but he knew he couldn’t go down and look for them in the pools; he was going to have to be shown. He found a pool that he felt was perfect and then he waited, pretending that he was strolling, walking up the path and coming down it again, which was where the water bailiff caught him. Gillon never heard him coming.

  “Looking for something?” The bailiff touched him on the shoulder with a gaff. Gillon was pleased with himself that he didn’t jump, that he didn’t even turn and apologize for being there.

  “Yes, I’m looking for one of the big ones. They say they’re all through here but I’ve never seen one.”

  “There’s no fishing here. The streams are closed.”

  Gillon continued to study the stream, and then turned to look at the man and was sorry when he showed surprised. The man was the image of Mr. Drysdale, the water bailiff from Strathnairn. A breed, Gillon thought. A breed created by God for this one purpose in life.

  “I don’t want to catch one; I want to see one.”

  “You don’t catch a salmon, you kill a salmon.”

  “But you don’t have to kill one to see one, do you? They tell me they sometimes run to thirty pounds.”

  “Thirty?” He was scoffing at Gillon. “Forty. Fifty, man.” He was proud of his fish, proud of his stream.

  “No?”

  “That’s fact.”

  “Have you ever seen one that size? With your own eyes?”

  “Seen? I’ve killed them that size. Fifty-three.”

  “Fifty-three pounds?”

  “Fifty-three.”

  The bailiff was studying Gillon closely. Flint-gray eyes, not conditioned to belief.

  “But I don’t know where to look for them.”

  “I told you, the stream is closed.”

  “Aye, that’s why I’m here. They told me to come out when all the anglers are gone. Where do you see them, then, in the quiet pools or in the rapids? I suspect the rapids.”

  “Who told you?” His voice was as cold as any bailiff’s heart.

  “The people at Loch Leven Inn. Is it true what they told me, that the female builds a nest for her eggs in the sand? A nest?” The bailiff couldn’t take his eyes off Gillon’s hands.

  “You’re a workingman.”

  Gillon felt numb. It was a terrible thrust but he managed to keep talking.

  “Aye, like you I suppose. Not like some of these toffs. I have to earn my way.”

  “And a workingman along a salmon stream is a poacher.”

  “Poacher?” Gillon forced himself to sound amused. “How can you poach a fish when you can’t find one?”

  “There are ways, there are ways,” the bailiff said, and as soon as he said it Gillon knew that he must have concluded he wasn’t one.

  “You don’t have the broad accent,” the bailiff said, telling Gillon the reason for his trust.

  “Broad accent? I wouldn’t know about that. I’m from the Highlands, you see. Cromarty Hills. We run a bull farm there. Shorthorns crossed with Galloways. When we work, we work. When we’re off, we’re off. That’s what I like about it.”

  He studied Gillon a last time and turned back in the direction he had been coming from.

  “I’m Maccallum. Come on, then. You might as well see one properly,” the bailiff said, and Gillon followed him down the stream at a rapid pace.

  “I’m here studying the birds,” Gillon said.

  “That’s fine, but if you want to see fish you had better close your mouth. Fish have ears.”

  He had him now, teaching him, investing in him. Two Scotchmen, that was the point; not Sassenach gentlemen with gillies doing their fishing for them.

  “Now I’ll show you what a Scottish salmon stream is all about.”

  * * *

  He showed Gillon hens in a gin-clear pool nudging stones and sand and gravel into a redd where they would lay their eggs, and long, haggard kelts, spent from spawning and spilling their milt all over the redds, and then he came to pools, all of them too deep, where the cocks were at rest, sluggish in the cold water, saving their energy for the rapids ahead of them. They went downstream, always closer to the point where the fish came in from the salt water, down to the pools where the clean fish, the ones that hadn’t spawned yet, would be. Before the bailiff pointed it out, Gillon saw the pool.

  “Quiet now. Move slow,” Maccallum said, and went slowly down to the side of the stream, and there it was, as he knew it would be, lying close to the bottom of the shallow pool, the shadow of its body enormous on the water.

  His fish—Gillon’s fish. The pool shallow enough, the water clear enough, away from the roiling water just above it.

  “Look at him,” the bailiff said. Now there wasn’t a shadow but the salmon itself, so big in the water that Gillon was startled by it, almost frightened by it.

  “A bull,” Maccallum said. “A bull salmon. You can go a month and not see one, a year. You can go a lifetime and never kill one.”

  “He’s too beautiful to kill.”

  “He was born to be killed.”

  Gillon asked how long he thought the fish would stay there and the bailiff told him that if the weather stayed cold he’d hold there for a day or two at the least. Gillon felt his heart racing. There was his fish, asleep in the pool, waiting. The bailiff suddenly clapped his hands, causing Gillon to jump, but the salmon didn’t move.

  “This one will stay for days,” Maccallum said. “Do you know what I’m going to do? I’m going to come back here Monday morning and kill him before the toffs get on the water.”

  “I thought the water bailiff wasn’t supposed to take a fish.” That was an error but the bailiff didn’t notice. They were brothers in crime now.

  “Once a winter, every once in a while when you see a cock salmon like that cock salmon, we bend a little rule.”

  He winked at Gillon and so Gillon winked back and said it would be a shame but he would be gone by then.

  24

  The waiting was the hard part. A fire was too dangerous and it was cold, but Gillon made a little shelter of pine boughs up above the pool and waited for darkness and, after darkness, for the water bailiff’s last sweep of the stream to make sure no one was trying to take fish by torchlight. At eight o’clock, Gillon estimated, he passed, Maccallum or one of his men, trotting upstream in the dark, and Gillon got up from his pine bed, stiff from the cold but excited. He had to know if his fish was still in the pool. He began working his way down the steep side of the glen.

  He was hungry, he was starving again. It had all begun with giving in to the egg the day before and the big breakfast in the morning. He had broken the chain of denial and was paying for it. There was no doubt it was better to go without than to have and then have not.

  He studied the pool for any movement. At times the wind riffled the water and he thought his fish was moving, but then it passed and he waited again until the water stirred—that would be the fish moving in its sleep to balance itself—he waited for the large silver shadow to rise to the surface and break water, but it didn’t. He was beginning to be able to see in the darkness again. And then it came up, the silver of its healthiness and cleanliness glinting arrogantly from its curved sides before sinking back down again.

  “You’re mine,” Gillon whispered to it. “Now you belong to me.”

  * * *

  He opened his coat and finally managed to make his numb fingers undo the buttons of his shirt. He wanted to move fast now, but his feet, partially frozen, made moving slow and clumsy. He uncoiled the oiled line he had wrapped around his waist and took the grappling hook out of the crown of his hat. By then, he was so cold he couldn’t feel the wind on his body. He seemed to have passed through to the other side of coldness and it worried him. When he couldn’t thread the grappling hook to the line he went back upstream and did it under water. The line slid through the eye.

  He didn’t worry about the fish any longer. He had
complete confidence in his fish; he knew where it was and what it was doing. It wouldn’t help him but it would wait for him. He dragged out the pine pole he had found earlier in the afternoon and worked it over the pool, having to stand in the water to do it—the water burned his feet—and finally he got one end on a boulder on the other side of the pool. Straddling the pole, he edged his way out over the salmon pool, knowing that if he fell from it he would probably drown in the cold black water. His fish was waiting for him. There was a moon now, nearing the full, and stars, and Gillon thought he could see the battered back of the fish, bruised and scarred from its beatings against the stones and weirs and rapids on the way up. This was almost certainly its second spawning, one of the rare salmon to make the journey twice, and that made Gillon feel better. He wouldn’t deny his fish its function in life.

  “I’ll make this quick,” Gillon said. “I’ll make this as painless as possible.”

  Stupid to talk to a fish, he thought, but he wanted to, and if he understood the fish the way he felt he did, it would be a calming thing to do. He dropped in the line and the grappling hook hung before the salmon’s eyes. Gillon knew the fish wouldn’t take the hook, the hook must take the fish, and he eased the hook along the silvery head of the fish, a barb almost touching the salmon’s eye at one time, until the grapple was actually resting on the gill cover of the fish. Although he was trembling now with cold and excitement, he let it slide down with enormous care until the hooks were under the gill flap; then he ripped.

  He must have hurt it a great deal; the barbs must have raked the scales of the fish and even the tissue itself. The fish leaped and then went to the bottom of the pool and stayed there, a blackness of shadow to be seen moving back and forth in pain or anger, rubbing its head against the edge of a stone, trying, Gillon thought, to soothe the hurt or scrape off the lice it had accumulated on its gills in the ocean. When he put the grapple back in the water the fish flicked its tail and went to the far part of the pool. The grapple wasn’t going to work. He tried it once more, giving it the Ballyshannon waggle, jiggling it in front of the fish’s eyes in hopes it would finally get furious and snap at it, but salmon have more patience than men. A stream of bubbles rose to the surface. The fish, Gillon was certain, was spitting at him, and in a perverse way he was proud of it.

  The fish was safe for him; that much he knew now. It wasn’t going to accept his grapple, but it wasn’t going to run—not a winter salmon in those icy waters. He had the fish but the fish had him, both of them trapped by desire, the fish’s to continue upstream and spawn, Gillon’s to kill. The question now was how. He thought of trying to drop something on it, to smash it with a heavy rock, but the fish had gone to a far part of his room, as Gillon had come to think of it, to sulk, and a rock would only waver its way down.

  But then the word “room” seized him and he experienced a surge of exhilaration. Just as any good miner knew how to seal off one room from another room, or part of a room from another part, in case of fire or flood in the pit, Gillon could seal off part of the pool by making a brattice of rocks and clay, using stone the way he did when packing roof pillars to keep the mine roof from falling in.

  It was all so clear that it made him laugh aloud at the rightness of things. Because he was a hungry miner he was here to steal a fish, and the reason he would steal his fish when others would fail was because he was a hungry miner. He would make his brattice and he would pen his salmon in it and he would do it in wet and darkness because for the better part of his life he had been working in wet and darkness this glen had never known.

  It would be best, he reasoned, to work in all his clothes and dry them in front of a fire later. He would have to risk that, a fire at three or four in the morning, because he was never going to be able to carry his fish over the top of the glen and out of there in that snow and cold unless everything on him was dry. Neither he nor his fish would ever make it home.

  He began building the first of his brattices, standing in water above his knees. He had hands for stone, an instinct for it, knowing even in the darkness where to reach for the next right one. At making a pack to support a mine roof, Gillon was considered the best in Lady Jane No. 2. And since the stones he found were mainly flat, the work of ages of water, the packing went swiftly. He could work that way for hours, bent over double, working from the waist and from the butt, and his little restraining dam rose and was finished without his having to stop. Only a pit jock could do that, Gillon thought. Now the salmon could no longer retreat to the deeper, darker part of the pool. The hemming in of his great fish was begun.

  The salmon could, if it wanted, go forward, but Gillon had gambled that it wasn’t ready to go that way yet. And it would not go back, that being against every natural pull in its migrating body. The pain in his feet had begun again and Gillon didn’t know if that was a good sign or a bad one. He wanted to get out of the stream and start his fire but was afraid to. It would be the egg all over again. Better to learn to live with his pain. The water had not begun to turn to ice; it must be about forty degrees, Gillon thought, and his feet wouldn’t freeze in forty degrees, not if the rest of his body was out of the water. As long as the water ran, his blood would flow and he began the second brattice.

  * * *

  He had no idea what time it was when he finished the second wall and came out of the water. Through the tops of the pines he could see stars and the moon, which would help swallow the glare of the fire he would need to start.

  There were three walls now, the boulders in front of the fish and a wall on each side of him. He could try the fish now, assuming that it wouldn’t go back, or he could build one more brattice, locking it in the pool. He went back into the water and began to build again. In perhaps an hour the pen was built, and the time for killing had come.

  The water in the pool was three feet deep, too deep for Gillon to hurt the fish with rocks or to club it with his brass-knobbed walking stick. Now was the time to start his fire, a little one, a tempting one at the edge of the pool, because the salmon was like the Druid in its way, in love with the fire and the sun, helplessly drawn to them. He lit the fire and he waited, and when his fish’s silvery head suddenly split the surface, he struck.

  He thought he hit it, he was sure he had, but the head dipped under and the fish flicked away. He slashed at the water but it was no good. He dropped a heavy stone in the pool and the salmon let it brush its flank.

  “Arrogant bastard!” Gillon shouted.

  He was angry now, because he didn’t want to face the reality of what he was going to have to do. The night was running out on him. If he wanted his salmon, he was going to have to go in after it.

  * * *

  He had heard of it when he was young, the wrestling of the fish. The initiation to manhood in the west of Scotland along the Highland shores, the boys being sent into the tide pools to kill their first salmon with their hands or a knife. But the water would be warm then and the pool shallow and the fish not as savage as a salmon on its drive to reproduce itself. He felt sorry for what he was going to do—for himself, but as much for his fish. He knew what it had endured to come this far—the years in the North Atlantic on the never-ending run from the porpoises and seals, sea lions and sharks, and finally the run for home, hundreds of ocean miles, then up the rushing rivers and snow-fed streams to here, to this pool, waiting its fate at the hands of Gillon Cameron, miner and poacher.

  He climbed over a brattice and stood in the back of the pool. The fish made no move at all. He took a step and moved the fish forward, and then another, herding the fish against the boulders at the head of his pen, the fish finally touching the boulders, its lips touching stone, always facing upstream where its goal lay, and before giving himself a chance to think, Gillon leaped.

  The strength of the fish, the force of its effort to get free, was shocking, as shocking as the iciness of the water on Gillon’s body. He held the salmon in his arms, thrusting it up against the smooth stone, trying to crus
h it against the rock while the fish whipped in his arms, bending its body back and forth to spring itself free, and finally it did, with one powerful movement that Gillon couldn’t control, and sank back to the bottom of the pool, stunned and possibly hurt.

  “I’m sorry,” Gillon said.

  He leaned against the boulder and let the water run from his shirt and trousers into the pool. I must be mad, Gillon thought. He tried to see himself as he was—in a pool he had made, in a forest in the dead of night, in the dead of winter, in danger of being hurt, in danger of freezing to death, in danger of jail, trying to kill a forty-pound fish with his bare hands, hands that were bleeding, ripped by the fish’s bony fins.

  He found a stone, a small pointed one. He hadn’t wanted to cut his fish or disfigure it but now he knew he would have to.

  “I am sorry,” Gillon said, and dropped again. He got his arms around the fish and tried to lift it up out of the pool, but the dorsal fin was cutting his chest and the fish’s tail was beating his thighs. He drove the stone into the back of the fish’s head and let it drop back into the water. The fish was at least five feet long.

  His salmon was hurt, frantic now, coming out of its cold-induced coma to fight for its life and meet its obligation to create new life. It swam into one brattice, actually hitting the stones with its mouth, and then struck at it with its tail, trying to knock the wall down. It would jump now, Gillon knew.

  There was no room to run in the pool and so the jump, when it came, was almost straight up and slow, barely arching, the body of the fish beautiful in that light, all gold and silver from the fire on the shore, and Gillon jammed it with his stone with such force that it fell back down into the pool with almost no resistance. Gillon looked at it lying a little on one side at the bottom.