The Stream

by Brian Clarke

  The nymph moved cautiously at first and then more quickly, darting about the stream bed between the clusters of silt and fragments of weed with an urgency that could almost have been taken for excitement. It was as if she were enjoying the novelty of space and the captivation of freedom when the trout tilted down and took her.

  The mayfly nymphs hatched in ones and twos after that. The trout with the scar took several behind the round stone he had won and several more from behind his flat stone and two more as they left the stream bed behind the big stone he now hid under when danger threatened.

  Not long after the trout with the scar managed to avoid the stab-stab-stab of the heron’s beak by frenziedly twisting this way and that, on the same day that the bale-eyed pike had two more goes at him, nymphs began to leave the stream bed to hatch in procession. The mayflies lifted into the radiant emptiness above them while the buttercups opened and the hawthorns unfurled their lace and the first borehole was being sunk in the search for water.

  It was on the day that the old man took the letter from the bank from the back of the drawer and read it through slowly several times before returning it that the hatch of mayflies reached its peak. By the time the drilling had to stop for the day and the water caterpillars were on the move again and the salmon that had been singled out by the Clearwater from far away had been singled out by the stream and was settling into the deep pool beneath the kingfisher’s nest, the stream was filled with nymphs swimming upwards beyond numbering and the air was filled with hatched flies beyond numbering.

  All the little trout that lived in the shallows above Top Bend and downstream from the falls and in the riffling water below the spawning gravels in each of the streams that crossed the meadows to the west, fed on the hatching mayflies until they could feed no more. The big trout on the outsides of all the bends where the currents funnelled flies into their waiting mouths, gorged. The dark nose of the great fish close to the bank by the island, the one that lay behind the projecting root and that had owned that place since the drought had begun, made rings on the surface among the floating flies without ending. Even the weak fish that had been driven away to the least good places by fish that were stronger and more determined, eased the aches in their guts. Only the blind fish near the place where the bear’s skull had lain buried so long and the old fish that had buried itself in the weed alongside Picket Close to die, missed out. On the day after the Department of Transport and Industry issued its reminder that the Broadchalk and the Clearwater rivers were to be protected absolutely and the search for piped water was moved even further away to make sure that they were, the mayflies were dancing so densely on the air that their wings gauzed the sun. The swifts were screaming and the swallows were swooping. The old man was looking at it all and rejoicing. The great fields on the high hills were being sprayed again.

  Year 2, June

  the caterpillar on the plant behind the trout with the scar was a great caterpillar. He was at least as long as the hyphens in the letter the old man had received from the bank. He moved with that curious, high-stepping walk that some caterpillars have, drawing his body up into a loop and reaching forward, then looping and reaching again.

  Each time he moved, the grub of the little black fly that the old man would have called a caterpillar if he had seen it because he called any grub a caterpillar if it looped and reached, laid out the safety line that the law of continuing had given him. He had already used the line twice in emergencies, each time when one of the furnace-eyed caddis grubs had crept along the plant he was holding and lunged. Both times he had let go of the plant and the current had plucked him away and the silken thread had tethered him in the water far out of danger, exactly as the law of continuing had intended. Both times when the caddis grubs had seemed to tire of waiting and had gone away hungry, the caterpillar that was at least as long as a hyphen in ordinary-sized typescript had wound in the line again and hauled himself back to safety.

  It was on the day that work started on Stinston Bridge and the Financial Times reported that Cogent Electronics and Top Oil were on the point of signing for sites on the development that the caterpillar that lived by catching food from the current, moved a long way down his plant.

  He laid out a lot of line and covered a great distance, perhaps the width of a small trout’s tail, before he found a place on the plant where he could get all the food he wanted. When he found the place he took a firm hold and settled there.

  The caterpillar had moved further out from the base of the plant because of something the law of continuing had told him. The law of continuing had told him that the slower the water flowed the less the plant would move and the less the plant moved the less water he could be swept through and the less water he was swept through, the less food he was likely to catch. It was because of this that the water caterpillar moved further down the crowfoot plant: this and the fact he had been told the fastest-moving parts of any plant at any time were its extremities; this and the fact that the current had begun to slow in a way that only a water caterpillar and some of the nymphs that lived on stones and a few others could detect.

  By the time the sun was setting and Jim Hampton of Hamptons was suddenly realising just how hard the new Asian imports were hurting his business, the caterpillar that lived by panning and fishing was covering much more water. By the time the sun had set he had already caught one of the cells of chokeweed that the trout with the scar had displaced with his tail.

  Year 2, July

  the salmon that settled into the deep pool beneath the kingfisher’s nest at Bottom Bend lay close to the stream bed, scarcely moving.

  He had been a year in the seas to the north and west, harrying the little fish that hung in chain-mail curtains; then there had come an emptiness inside him for all he had eaten, a hunger as though for food but not for food and he had headed south again.

  The salmon that had left the stream as a little fish and was returning as a great fish had stayed close to the coast when he neared it. He had passed the salmon farm in the bay where the tame fish in the cages were fed on wild fish that had been caught and ground down and processed and pressed into biscuits. He had passed the ship that had its holds full of wild fish on their way to power stations where they would be burned as fuel because they were so cheap and the other ship that had its hold full of wild fish on their way to be turned into fertiliser for spreading on the land. He had passed the ship that was flushing oil from its tanks where no one could detect it and the nets that had broken away from trawlers so that they drifted like shrouds, catching fish to no purpose.

  The salmon that had left the stream a year before had still been far out to sea when he smelled the familiarity in the water and the scents of the Broadchalk began to gather him to them. He had reached the place in the estuary where the car ferries chuntered and the bright dinghies bounced and the water patted and lapped against their hulls before the scents of the Clearwater singled him out. He had passed the place where the plastic bags tumbled and the flat fish shuffled like stones over the bottom before he glimpsed the fleeting light and saw here and gone and here again the images of the golden gravels and the swaying plants and the caddis grubs crawling and the mayfly nymphs darting that the law of continuing put into his head as an enticement.

  The salmon had stayed a week in the estuary of the Broadchalk River, drifting in and out with the tide while his body was made safe to move from salt water to fresh water and then he swam forward again. He swam without stopping under the road bridge that carried three lanes of traffic each way and leapt the leap in Farley while the visitors gasped and the cameras clicked.

  Only when the braids of the Broadchalk loosened and he found the Clearwater River did he slow. Only when he had swum up the Clearwater to the deep water opposite the place where the stream came in, did he rest. And then, on one of the days when the fields on the high hills were being sprayed with water and fertilisers again and the dust was rising over the earthworks beyond Stinston Bridge again
and a borehole was being sunk in search of a water supply that would meet the demands made by the Minister and Cogent Electronics, he crossed the Clearwater like a grey shadow sidling and entered the stream that had given birth to the images he could see in his head.

  The salmon that settled into the deep pool below the kingfisher’s nest at Bottom Bend and who had been told he would not eat again before spawning because no salmon that entered a river ate again before spawning, did not move until the feather that the cygnet had lost, drifted over him. He rose from the stream bed into the light and touched the feather with his nose because of the pictures of flickering mayflies it created in his head; but then he saw the falsity and the pointlessness of it all and sank to the bottom again to wait and the world closed over him.

  Year 2, August

  another row. Well, not a row exactly, they both always tried to keep it this side of a row. Another heated discussion about the farm, anyway.

  He had never understood his father. The two of them were like chalk and cheese. His father still got excited when he saw an owl or an orchid or when the mayflies hatched. His father still talked about the salmon in the stream as ‘the secret’. Amazing the difference a generation made. And an education. Odd, though. Odd that as a lad with a father like that he should have been interested in a farm as farm and not as a great place to play.

  His own friends had been surprised at him, as well – not that there had been many of those, stuck out here. As a boy he’d even played farms. ‘I’m going to grow this here and that there. The other will grow better if we do so-and-so. No, it’s worth more than that, mister, I’ve worked hard to grow it.’ It had set the pattern for a lifetime. A farm was a business was a business. Might as well build on it if it’s not producing. Or lay a golf course.

  Interesting he’d turned out that way, though. Maybe his father had just pushed him too hard. Even after a long day in the fields Dad would come back and insist on taking him to see something he’d found. Interminable walks. ‘Look at this, look at that. See the other, see it, see it? Look at the way this … Isn’t that wonderful, isn’t the other amazing?’ Isn’t it boring. His father not just showing him but demanding a reaction, requiring an enthusiasm to match his own. Maybe that was what had made him the way he was. Force-feeding. Overdose.

  The young man had crossed Foremeadow and Aftdown and Penny Furlong before he realised where he was. He stopped on Barrows, just downstream from the falls, and looked around, idly tossing a stone from hand to hand.

  What a mess. The house in a state, the barn roof loose, the tractor on its last legs – well, wheels. And the land! Ditches clogged and overgrown, hedges out of control, pretty well all the land along the lower stream tussocked and useless. It didn’t have to be like this. This drought wasn’t going to last for ever and there was so much that could be done. The new drainage techniques he’d read about could make a big difference, a huge difference. The hedges taken out so the fields could be made a workable size. Some treatment with those new compounds. Some of the modern hybrids planted. The subsidies and grants to take the pain out. New equipment with the easier loans – the place could be transformed. Would his father listen? Would he!

  The young man lobbed the stone into the stream as he turned and headed back. He didn’t notice where the stone landed, or see the little fish it crushed and stunned or see the whole packed shoal burst into a thinned circle around the empty place where the stone went in and where the dark clouds lifted and the water fizzed.

  He didn’t notice the joyous bellyflop his young dog made when it retrieved the stone, or see the white bellies that winked or the mouths that stayed open or the eyes that stared when the dog had gone back to him barking and jumping.

  The tiny fish that had felt the pain and then no pain, the fry that had her back broken when the stone landed on her, was caught on the surge of water the dog sent out and was carried away on the current.

  When the stream had tumbled her over and over so that there were in her world only slabs of light and slabs of dark; after it had turned her slowly on the eddies and spun her on the whirlpool; after it had drifted her belly-up and twitching across the stream from the high bank where the martins nested to the shallow water on the other side, the trout with the scar that owned that place angled his fins and slid a little to one side and accepted her.

  It seemed a long time after the trout with the scar had taken the little fish and met his own needs of the moment and after the young man walking the fields with his own needs and dreams had moved away, that the last of the dark silt in the empty place settled.

  Year 2, September

  the great fish that the otter chased had escaped from the trout farm on the Clearwater River in the flood.

  The Clearwater had risen just as the stream had risen and it had washed over the flat land into the ponds where the little farmed trout were kept and fed and the fish had been swept into the river like spilled silver coins.

  Then the floodwater had washed over the grass to the pools where the medium-sized trout were being fed until there were precisely so many of them to the pound and kilo before they were killed and these fish were washed into the river as well.

  As the mole was drowning in his tunnel under Hinters, the waters of the Clearwater washed over the gravelled track where the great refrigerated lorries came and went each week and poured into the pools where the big farmed trout were kept for breeding.

  It was the largest of all these trout that the otter chased. The trout had lived in the Clearwater ever since the flood, taking the feeding places of any fish she chose because the special biscuits she had been fed on at the farm had made her awesome and immense. She was three times bigger than the wild trout that had lived on what the river alone could provide, the one that owned the place where the bank jutted out just upstream from the farm. She was more than three times bigger than the trout that owned the big stone directly opposite, the one that had also had to feed on what the law of continuing had decreed should be adequate. The great trout from the farm was so big that no wild fish could resist her when she wanted its space and the food that space carried.

  When she drove away the great wild trout from the place where the bank jutted out, that fish drove away the fish behind the stone and took its place and the fish behind the stone drove away a fish that lived nearby and took that place. All the way up the river and down, all of the fish that had escaped from the trout farm in the flood drove the wild fish away from the lies the law of continuing had said they should have and those wild fish drove away smaller fish of their own kind to make spaces for themselves.

  Every move was a bad move for the wild fish because each fish was driven from a place that had proved adequate to its needs to a place that only had enough food passing through it to sustain something smaller. Even the largest of the escaped trout grew thinner because the farm food had made them bigger than any fish the law of continuing had meant the river to feed.

  Around the time the water caterpillar was on the move again, the great trout that the otter was to chase was already feeling the cramps in her gut. Around the time that the salmon returning from the sea was settling into the deep pool beneath the kingfisher’s nest at Bottom Bend, the coarse flakes of flesh along the great trout’s flanks showed like ridges under her skin. By the time Ethical Pharmaceuticals had announced its intention to take the site between Cogent Electronics and Top Oil and the new bridge at Stinston had been completed and the young man was lobbing his stone into the stream and breaking the little fish’s back, the great farmed trout was lean and dark and the changes that the law of continuing required of her, had begun.

  The law of continuing that made demands on farm fish just as it made demands on fish in the river, drew out what goodness remained in her body and filled the slack cavities inside her with eggs, then it moved her to the place on the Clearwater where the stream entered and sent her up it.

  She passed the coot’s nest under the old bridge on Longate on the same day
that the Phase One road was completed and she reached the three old posts opposite the swans’ nest around the time the young protesters were deciding to dig tunnels to slow the advance of the bulldozers. She lay for a long time in the pool close to the fallen willow and all the fish there were displaced downstream by one.

  The trout with the scar had felt the same panic as the little fish when the great farmed trout shrugged her way from the quiet pool by the fallen willow to the lit shallows of the Cattle Drink. He had seen the little fish dashing and winnowing upstream past him, seeking places to hide under the plants and stones. The trout with the scar slid softly as a shadow away to allow the great fish through, watching her all the time. The farmed trout passed the place that the trout with the scar had left and hesitated by the stones with the little fish under them, jostling head-down and feeling safe though their tails were in the open and waving like fringes of weed.

  For a long time the great fish idled near the high bank by the place where the sand martins nested before driving herself forward to the shallows beneath the falls. The farmed trout had no mate but still the law of continuing demanded she do what she could. It seized her and made her roll onto her side and thrash about but gave her no high note and no bright light to help her. She squeezed and contracted without a mate to stroke her and a few loose eggs spilled out.