The Stream

by Brian Clarke

  At the entrance to the Clearwater she turned right and headed upstream. She was far around the bend when the salmon that had leapt three times behind her earlier in the night, slid into the pool opposite the stream entrance where the salmon always rested and rested there. She was far away and asleep in her holt when the letter was typed.

  Year 4, August

  the last of the young man’s harvest had been collected by the supermarket chain and the first land to have been harvested had already been ploughed and sprayed again by the time Paul Tyler sent his letter to the Minister.

  Tyler’s management team had thought it a good idea. The whole development had been pretty contentious but it had gone as smoothly as these things do and everything was looking good. The area for miles around was beginning to feel the benefits of the jobs and money and fresh blood pouring in. There was still a way to go but the end was in sight. What better than to get the Minister, the local man who had proved so supportive to the project, to come down and officially open it, so to speak – to cut a ribbon or something, make a speech? The Minister would know what to say to get a headline. It would round the whole thing off nicely. In about a year seemed right. Things should be ship-shape in a year.

  The week the letter was sent was an education for the salmon. It was not that the little salmon had not been told. The law of continuing had told every salmon that ever swam about the thing in the water. The law of continuing had whispered to the little salmon even when he was still curled up in his egg and blind that warm water was to be avoided. The law of continuing had not mentioned that warm water contained less oxygen than cool water, but it had told the little salmon there was a thing in warm water that would press on his gills if it got the chance.

  The law of continuing had told the little salmon that the thing in warm water could press on his gills so hard it could make them heavy and difficult to move. It had told the little salmon that if he stayed in warm water long enough, lights would prickle his eyes. It had even said that if he ever stayed in warm water too long, the thing would press on his gills so hard that he would not be able to move them at all and then black waves would roll over the sun. All of this had been explained clearly to the little salmon that the heron accidentally dropped.

  By the time Paul Tyler’s letter arrived in the Minister’s office, the little salmon that the heron had accidentally dropped into the chokeweed had still not been able to find a way out. Though the little salmon found himself in a clearing in the chokeweed, every avenue he explored was closed off as though by a portcullis or a tangled web. The longer he looked and the hotter the sun blazed and the more the chokeweed inhaled the fertilisers in the water, the more the cells divided and abutted end to end and the more dense the web became and the less the current was able to pass through it to keep him cool.

  By the time the Minister’s office had replied that the Minister would be pleased to come and officially open the development in a year’s time, the young salmon that was trapped in the chokeweed seemed to be learning that all he had been told about the thing in the water was true. He began to open and close his mouth quickly and to push out with his gills very hard and then he started dashing about between the green walls that drew in about him and the green floor that lifted under him and the green ceiling that lowered as though to catch and hold him.

  On the afternoon when the sun burned hotter than it had burned at any time since the otter had encountered the mink, all movement of water through the clearing stopped. Then it was as though the little salmon could feel the thing in the water pressing on his gills with an effortless power and the pricklings in his eyes begin. He seemed to summon himself up as if from outside of himself and started to drive at the chokeweed blindly.

  By the time the Minister’s acceptance was firmly in his diary and the last of the young man’s land had been ploughed and sprayed again and the first land to have been ploughed and sprayed had already been seeded again, the little salmon’s education was almost complete. Though he pressed out with his gills his gills would scarcely move out and the light from his sun was fading.

  Year 4, September

  the great salmon that had done all the leaping on the night the otter encountered the mink, had been waiting in the Clearwater opposite the mouth of the stream a long time. He had been far away when the law of continuing had sent the scents through the water to find him and guide him back.

  He had entered the Broadchalk when the last of the mayflies were still dying in the fields where the hedgerows used to be. He had leapt the leap in Farley as the visitor was asking if many salmon still came into the Broadchalk and someone was saying yes but for some reason not as many as before.

  The great salmon had entered the Clearwater around the time the young man was arranging delivery of the new, improved fertiliser; yet for all the length of his journey and for all that he had been in the Clearwater so long and had lain so long in the pool opposite the stream entrance, the taste in the water coming out of the stream still held him back.

  It was not until the trees on the skyline were wrestling with the wind and the leaves were being stripped away like migrating birds that the urgency of the salmon’s need overcame the reluctance that restrained him and he moved.

  The salmon crossed the Clearwater like a grey shadow sidling and followed the same line up the stream that the otter had taken. He swam past the coot’s nest that still lay littered with eggshells and where the marks of the mink’s feet were impressed in the dust, eased up the gentle bend along what had been Picket Close, edged around the shingle banks and stopped in the pool at Bottom Bend because salmon had always stopped there and because anyway the water beyond was too shallow for him to swim in.

  The salmon did not move from the pool beneath the kingfisher’s nest at Bottom Bend once he arrived there. He did not move even when the surface became prickled with rain and puddles formed on the banks.

  Though it rained as much as it had often rained at that time in the past, the water around the salmon did not lighten or lift because of the springs and the plan. The plan that the law of continuing had made had no pipes in it anywhere and the rain that had been sent was being sucked from the ground that fed the springs faster than it could fall. And so the salmon lay close to the stream bed, leaden and dull. The pictures he had been given to help bring him there, the images of bouncing light and clean gravels and drifting nymphs and the glimpsed outlines of mayflies flickering overhead, might have faded from the salmon’s head utterly. The ache in his gut was growing and the stink of the chokeweed was putting a catch in his gills because the chokeweed was dying as it always died when the cool weather came.

  During the week when the starlings began to flock and swirl as though caught in wild currents and the Minister’s office asked if the date of the official opening could be moved from the Tuesday to the Thursday, the bed of the stream suddenly reached up and touched the salmon on his belly and seemed to waken him as though from a dream. It was as if a high fright passed through him. He suddenly turned and dashed downstream, swimming faster and faster, sending waves slopping up the banks and making the rushes shush and sway.

  All the fish that saw the salmon seemed to become seized with his urgency and fright and to pass it to others. All along the stream from the entrance where the wash of the salmon carried the dark cloud out into the Clearwater to the gravels below the falls that no salmon could now reach, the trout began to whirl and dash about and leap into the air and to open their jaws and flare their gills and to jostle for one another’s places.

  Year 4, October

  the mink that had sensed no danger when the otter had come but that had still waited until the otter’s silhouette had melted into the skyline before rejoining her kits, had been on her own since the last of the kits had left.

  She had made many dens since the young men in masks had freed her from her cage and she had found the stream, but the hole under the fallen willow was the best.

  The tangled roots screened it fr
om the front. There was only one small hole on the upstream side where the water had poured in during the flood and a larger hole at the downstream side where the water had poured out. Between the two holes and reaching deep into the bank there was the lofted space she had lined with old leaves and pieces of rush and it was in here, about the time the mayflies were hatching, that she had delivered her young.

  Never once had the den been found by the men working the machines on the field overhead and never once had she been spotted entering or leaving by the men on the machines on the wide field opposite, though twice one of them had found half-eaten coots on the bank that he did not think could be the work of a fox.

  The stream had been an excellent place at first. It had so many hiding places and hunting places and so much cover. The kits had thrived on all the trout she had caught by swimming and diving and on all the coots and ducks and water hens she had at first brought to them and that later they had learned to take for themselves; and because of all the moles and voles that had been there. Her kits were fluid and strong when they left. Their teeth were sharp and their coats were bright. Their noses reached for every smell that was available for reaching and their eyes let no movement go.

  From time to time, the mink that had been freed from her cage by the young men in masks because it was a kindness would bestow the gift of stillness on a vole or a rabbit or a bird if one moved near because the law of continuing had given all mink that gift to bestow.

  She saw the vole that would not be still on the morning the Minister’s officials wrote and moved the day of the opening back from the Thursday to the Tuesday again. She saw it move soon after she awoke and went to the edge of her den. The movement was near the place where, the night before, the fox had jumped foursquare on the skyline and had later trotted off with a limpness in his mouth.

  The mink held onto the movement that teased the corner of her eye near the place where the alder used to be. There was a dim shape in the entrance to the hole in the bank. A strand of weed was hanging out from the hole and steadily edging into it, glistening and wet. Once she had seized the movement, it was as though the space between it and the mink’s brain had the power of seduction; as though that single distraction had become the purpose of existence.

  The mink slipped out from her den and moved upstream along the bank, past the places with the smells without heeding them, past the places with shadows without pausing. She smelled only vole and saw only the hole in the bank where the long wet strand was slowly being drawn upwards, catching the light. She slid into the water and swam from her own bank towards the other.

  The mink left the stream with a movement so fluid it joined the water with the land. She was hurrying but not running, undulating and turning, everywhere her body following the line of the earth. It was as though the roots and the stones and the mounds and the awkwardnesses and the dips of the bank were lying down before her. It was as though there was the smell of vole everywhere and the beckoning of weed everywhere; as though the whole valley was filled with the hush of the grasses parting and with her hot, caught breaths and with the clicks that her claws made when they caught the edges of stones.

  The vole had made other galleries in the bank, just as the voles before him had made galleries before the mink had come and bitten through their necks to bestow the gift of stillness. The bank beneath the old sand martins’ nests was filled with passageways and chambers that generation upon generation of voles had made, though all that was in most of them now were bones and empty shells and the stench of rat.

  All the passages and galleries had been lived in until the drought had come. Many of them had been lived in until the boreholes had been sunk so far away from the Broadchalk and the Clearwater that the water abstracted could not affect either of them. Then cracks had begun to pattern the walls and fine dust and small stones had sprinkled down from the roofs and the mink had arrived.

  The gallery where the vole with the weed was crouching had not been made long. The vole had made it himself and he was in his usual place close to the tunnel entrance, with the shoot clasped between his feet the way a squirrel holds a nut.

  The sun reflected from the water and reached in behind him, casting moving shadows through the chambers he had made. A brilliance edged the haired root that hung from the roof by his head.

  The shoot of weed was as crisp as water-celery and the sounds of chewing filled the vole’s head. He could hear nothing beyond them. From time to time he seemed to pause and savour a mouthful and then he would draw in more of the long, green strand and chew that.

  The sun lit the wet weed hanging out from the hole. Even from a long way down the bank, far beyond the places that the soft pad and click of paws had already passed and where the hot breaths left on the air had cooled again and the parted grasses were still again, the weed glinted like an enticement beneath the entrance to the tunnel.

  Each time the vole ate a little more and pulled in a little more, the glistening strand lifted. Each time it lifted it seemed that the mink that had been freed from her cage by the young men in masks because it was a kindness, was urged forward. Each time it moved it seemed to make the mink more eager to bestow the gift of stillness that was hers to bestow. Each time the strand lifted her hot breaths rasped faster and her claws clicked quicker and the silence was tightened about her to a high-wire hum.

  Year 4, November

  the chokeweed had stopped growing not long after the young salmon that the heron had dropped was learning there really was a thing in the water that could press on his gills and close them. By the time the weather had cooled and the morning mists had come, the chokeweed had begun to soften and decay.

  It was not that the fertilisers seeping in from the fields had lost their potency and that the stream no longer contained the richness the chokeweed needed to thrive that it stopped growing. It was because the time had come when the law of continuing had instructed chokeweed everywhere to stop growing, that it stopped. The law of continuing had never allowed chokeweed to grow if the weather was cold and dull, which was why chokeweed mostly decayed in winter. The plan had always been clear that chokeweed would need sunlight and warmth before it could thrive.

  And so once the short, dark days started to gather, the chokeweed that had claimed all the shallow places and that had reached out its long tentacles to explore most of the deeps, began to darken and break down and drift away.

  A dead weight of chokeweed pulled up the withered roots of the water crowfoot that had long since died for want of current near the Otter Stone and sent the leeches and the flat worms and the things that lived in tubes lashing and crawling to find new places.

  A dead weight of it pushed against the lank plants behind the island and pulled them away. It pushed and tumbled like dark capes over the slow-water weeds on the long, straight reaches, but mostly they lowered themselves under it and the leeches and the flatworms and the crawlers and the biters that had made their homes in the silt there were able to hang on.

  All around the insides of the bends from Top Bend downstream, all along the sides of the island and the backwaters either side of the falls, all through the place where the cattle used to drink and the swans had finally left for good, the matted clumps of chokeweed tumbled and turned. They rolled mute and blind all the way below Bottom Bend to the new concrete bridge where the coot’s nest lay with the blown dust and seeds and broken shells inside it and where the pad marks of the mink that had been freed as a kindness were impressed in the ground.

  The matted clumps slid over the stone that had the grub of the brown-winged caddis fly on it, close to the bank where the bear’s skull lay buried and though the caddis grub gripped the stone with all the power her legs had in them, she was pulled away as though her legs had no power.

  The chokeweed tumbled through the deep water not far from the place where the elk had stumbled a second time on his way to drown in the swamp and though the nymph on the stone there clung with all the power she could find and th
ough she strained and clung until a redness must have pulsed through her head and the sinews in her legs must have burned and snapped, the stoneclinger was swept away as though her clinging meant nothing.

  The chokeweed brushed away the water snail that had been moving from the grey stone to the brown stone not far from the place where the man in the deer pelt had first spoken to the girl whose smile had been like the sun coming out and it left the water snail upturned high and dry in his shell in the margins with his blind foot searching and sucking wetly on the air.

  A sullen weight of chokeweed pushed against the sycamore that had fallen across the stream’s mouth and became so tangled in its branches that the sycamore almost became a dam.

  It was about the time that the trout near the sycamore turned around and tried to move into the Clearwater at last and found she could not, that the machines were started up again. It was just as the trout with the scar had to move aside when the fallen willow flexed under the weight of chokeweed caught in it and the silt trapped at its base lifted black as a threat, that the first machine began to work the first of the wide, flat fields again.

  On the day the invitations to the opening ceremony were printed, the wind whipped up. It blew so hard that the two trees deliberately left beside the farm were reminded of its power and made to worship before it. The wind whirled the topsoil into the air like genies. It settled a film over the stream that the fish could not see through and the film gritted in their gills when it sank.