I turned once, memorized the marks on the shore, then set out to sea. There was a moderate, irregular swell with a few white horses. The waves had the knapped faces of flints; their chipped crests spangled with sunlight. Ahead of me a fulmar glided down to the surface, half-wheeled then soared away.
I let the line out, lodged the spool beside my foot and passed the twine across my leg, just below the knee. As I paddled, I could feel the weight tripping across the rocks of the reef. Occasionally the line would drag, and I pulled it in to find clumps of crusty pink seaweed attached to the hooks, or leathery ropes of ribbon weed, sometimes twelve feet long. Half a mile from the land I crossed a band of lilac jellyfish. They could almost have been oilspots, a faint, two-dimensional bleaching of the water, but occasionally the wind would lift them, and they roiled, fat and rubbery, through the surface. They poured under the boat in their thousands. Some carried orange nematocysts on their tentacles. Seedy, segmented, the jellyfish looked like burst figs.
On the far side of the reef a crabber made his lonely rounds, hauling up his pots, rebaiting them, threading them back down the line as his boat chugged slowly between the buoys. I could smell the bait and diesel across half a mile of sea. He headed back to shore and I was alone.
Towards the edge of the reef the swell rose. The line felt its way through the sea like an extension of my senses, an antenna attached to my skin, twitching and trembling. From time to time the spool jumped up and the twine snapped taut across my knee, but when I stopped and pulled I felt only the weight dropping back as the wave that had lifted the line passed by. I was now a mile or more from the shore, but I had not yet found what I was looking for. Every time I encountered it, it seemed to be a little further from land than before.
A mile beyond the reef a gannet skimmed past me. It rose a few yards into the air, folded its wings and fell like a dart into the water, raising a plume of spray. It sat in the surface swallowing what it had caught, flew on then dived again. I gave chase, but still the line throbbed limply through the water. The sky had clouded over, the wind had stiffened, and now the rain began to spatter. The sea felt like a half-set jelly.
I paddled west for three hours, straight out to sea. The land became an olive smear, the seaside town to the south a faint pale line. The waves were rising and the rain pelted into my face like birdshot. I had travelled six or seven miles from the shore, further than I had been before. Yet still I had not found the place.
On the horizon, I saw a flock of dark birds. Convinced that they had found the fish, I raised my pace to ramming speed. They disappeared, then appeared again, whirling a few feet above the waves. As I came closer I saw that they were shearwaters, about fifty of them, rising, turning, then landing on the sea again. A knot of birds peeled off from the flock and circled me. Their black velvet wings almost brushed the waves. They were so close that I could see the glints in their eyes. They were not feeding–just looking. The faint sense of loneliness that had crept up on me as I headed away from land dispersed.
The birds settled on the water again and I stopped a short distance away. There was no sound except the sloshing of the waves and the wind, whistling high and very faint, through the shock cords on the boat. The birds were silent.
Every time I go to sea I seek this place, a place in which I feel a kind of peace I have never found on land. Others discover it on mountains, in deserts or by the methodical clearing of their minds through meditation. But my place was here; a here that was always different but always felt the same; a here that seemed to move further from the shore with every journey. The salt was encrusted on the back of my hands, my fingers were scored and shrivelled. The wind ravelled through my mind, the water rocked me. Nothing existed except the sea, the birds, the breeze. My mind blew empty.
I put down my paddle and watched the birds. They trod water, preserving the distance between us. Squalls of rain drummed against my forehead. The waves, higher now, lifted the bows and swung the kayak round: I had to pick up the paddle and occasionally turn the boat to face the wind. The drops raised little spines on the face of the waves. Here was my shrine, the place of safety in which the water cradled me, in which I freed myself from knowing.
After a while I began to move south, parallel to the distant shore. I travelled for about a mile, then stopped and allowed the wind to carry me. I might have drifted all the way to land, but I began to feel cold, so I started to paddle again. I was now so tired that, even with the wind behind me, the sea felt lumpy and stiff.
About three miles from the coast I passed two brown guillemots, dipping their beaks in the water, occasionally standing up to flutter their wings. As I paddled past them, they held their heads in the air, watching me from the corners of their eyes, but not leaving the sea. Soon afterwards I felt a sharp, unmistakable tug against my knee. I yanked the line, then pulled it in, hand over hand. I could almost hear the electric twanging on the cord. As the tackle approached the boat it jinked about crazily. I saw a white flash far down in the green, and soon afterwards pulled the fish into the boat. It bounced around on the deck, then drummed on the plastic with rapid shivers. I broke its neck.
The mackerel’s back was the same deep emerald as the water, slashed with black stripes, which swirled and broke across the head. The belly was white and taut, narrowing to a slim wrist and the crisply forked tail of a swift. Its eye was a disc of cold jet. My fellow predator, cold-blooded daemon, brother disciple of Orion.
After another mile I felt the lightest tap on the line. I picked it up and pulled, but there was nothing. I pulled again and it was almost wrenched from my hand. Whatever had tugged before had come back when it saw the lures rise. This felt different: heavier and less jagged. The white flash showed me that I had three fish–a full hand. I hauled them in, trying to hold the line clear as they landed on the boat and threw themselves about: a moment’s inattention would leave me with a twenty-minute tangle. As soon as I had stowed them I turned the boat and paddled back to where I had hooked them. I circled the water but could not find a shoal.
I ate the chocolate and tramped on. The sun flickered for a moment and the sea turned to fresh-cast lead. Then the clouds closed and the rain came down again.
Half a mile from the coast I hit a small shoal and pulled in half a dozen mackerel. Then I found myself in a strand of jellyfish so dense that in places it scarcely seemed to contain water. They poured under my boat in a column just a yard wide, heading away from land. The mackerel came up sporadically, in twos and threes. A driftline perhaps, which could explain why the predators had clustered around this strip: the plankton, like the jellyfish, had been corralled by a gentle rip tide, and the bait fish had followed them.
I watched the moon jellies rolling over each other like bubbles in a lava lamp. At one point the procession broke. There were a few yards of clear water, then I was startled by a monstrous ghostly jelly, pale and hideous, leading the next battalion. It took me a moment to see that it was a white plastic bag, parachuted taut in the water, the jellyfish king whose subjects followed him out to sea.
I drifted with them, sawing the line up and down. When I paddled, the jellyfish bumped against the line, causing me to stop and test the signal, to see what manner of life was tapping out its message from the gloom. I searched in vain for a baitball.
As usual in such matters, there were as many opinions about why the mackerel had scarcely appeared this year as there were people to ask. A local fishmonger told me with great authority that a monstrous new ship was operating in the Irish Sea, fishing not with a net but with a vacuum tube that sucked up the mackerel and everything else that came its way, which it turned into fishmeal for use as fertilizer and animal feed. It had been licensed by the Environment Agency to catch 500 tonnes of mackerel a day, and had received a £13 million subsidy from the European Commission. I checked this story and soon discovered that the Environment Agency has no jurisdiction at sea, that vacuum tubes are used not for fishing but for sucking the catch out of the net
s, that there is no such fishmeal operation in the Irish Sea and that no boat is licensed to take such a tonnage. Otherwise the explanation was impeccable.
Others blamed the dolphins which, they said, had come into the bay in greater numbers than usual this year (the records suggested otherwise), or the north-west winds that had predominated since the end of May and were alleged to have broken up the shoals. Some people pointed to the black landings by a group of crooked fishermen in Scotland (they took £63 million-worth of over-quota mackerel and herring1); others to the failure by the European Union, Norway, Iceland and the Faroes to decide how many fish each nation should take, now that the shoals were moving further north in the winter;2 or to overfishing in the Cantabrian Sea by the Spanish fleet, which had recently netted almost twice the tonnage its quota permits.3
I have not been able to establish whether or not the fish which migrate into Cardigan Bay belong to the same populations as those being hammered in other waters. In any case, the mackerel which enter the bay, even in better years, when you can pull 100 or 200 into the boat in an hour or so, are the tattered remnants of what was once a mighty population. Within living memory, local fishermen say, the shoals were three miles long;4 today you would be lucky to find one which stretches to a hundred yards. The European Union classifies the mackerel stock in the Irish Sea as being ‘within safe biological limits’,5 but this says more about our reduced expectations of what a healthy population looks like than the state of the species.
There was another bump on the line and I pulled up a small brown fish. I hesitated before I swung it in. Brown fish, on this coast, are brought in carefully, in case they belong to the species which, for anglers, is the most dangerous animal in British waters.
I first snared one on my virgin voyage into Cardigan Bay. I had been catching mackerel, which dashed around wildly when I hooked them. But this thing stayed down and shook its head. I could feel the vibrations all the way up the line. I brought it to the surface and saw that it was about eighteen inches long, etiolated, mottled brown and white.
As I lifted it out of the water it started thrashing madly. I swung it towards my free hand, but just before I grabbed it, some ancient alarm, long buried in the basal ganglia, sounded. I dropped the fish on the boat and studied it as it rattled around the deck. I thought I knew every species in British waters, but I had never seen anything like this. Fins ran the length of its body, shimmering purple and green. It had a snake’s stripes on its flanks, bug eyes on the top of its head and a huge, upturned mouth. Suddenly, from some long-forgotten book or poster, the name swam into my mind.
This was not a member of the lesser species, which hides in the sand at low tide, ruining the holidays of bare-footed children. It was a greater weever, which, I later read, could make grown men weep and rage with pain. Like the smaller species, it has three poisoned spines on its dorsal fin and one on each gill cover. The pain, if not quickly treated, can last for days. A local woman, fishing on a charter boat, sat on one that someone had landed on the deck and spent six weeks in a wheelchair. A man I met was unable to move his left hand for six months. Few people have been killed by weevers, but if you are stung in a kayak and have no means of treatment, you will not make your own way back to land. The pain and shock ensure that paddling is impossible.
I managed, after nearly falling out of the boat, to shake the creature off the hook. Since then I have always carried a club with me. Whenever I catch a weever, I draw it against the side of the kayak and hit it very hard. It has firm white flesh, which makes an excellent bouillabaisse or curry. In the Mediterranean the charter boats allow anglers to take all the fish they catch except the weevers, which the crews keep for themselves.
On some occasions in the previous season I had caught weevers in greater numbers than mackerel. I had never been stung on the boat, but one day, filleting the fish on the shore while my partner made a fire in the dunes, my hand slipped and I impaled my thumb on a spine. It felt as if I had put my thumb on a workbench, raised a hammer and hit it as hard as I could. I went rigid with pain, then felt a panic-inducing numbness spreading up my arm, across my shoulder and into my chest. But, even as my brain flooded with red light, the wheels began to spin. The cure for weever stings is hot water, applied as quickly as possible. There was no hot water on the beach. But it could not be the water that cured you, as skin is waterproof. It must be the heat. The poison must be heat-sensitive. It did not matter what the source of heat was. Where was heat? I cast around, my eyes flickering, and saw the smoke rising from the dunes.
I ran up the beach, crouching over my arm, jumped over the dunes and thrust my thumb into the flames. My partner stared at me as if I had gone mad. But the effect was remarkable. Within a minute the pain began to subside. I held my thumb so close to the fire that it almost scorched; the pain from the flames was less urgent than the pain from the venom. Soon my screaming nerves fell still. The numbness subsided, and within half an hour I felt as well as I had before I impaled myself.
But the fish I brought into the boat now was not a weever. It had a high square forehead, a delicate beaked mouth, damasked chestnut flanks shot with gold, and crimson fins like Spanish fans, flecked with turquoise. Under the throat were long bony fingers, which it used to probe the sediments for food. Seen from the front, the tub gurnard looked like a goose, its eyes set high on the sides of its beaked head. From the side, it was as pretty as an aquarium fish. I released it and it flicked back into the deep.
Now the waves were breaking on the shingle a few hundred yards from where I sat. Still trailing the line, my arms heavy, legs trembling with effort, I made my way north, towards the row of white breakers on the edge of the reef. I wound the cord back onto the spool, secured the hooks and stowed it. Soon afterwards I crossed the salt barrier. It was a neat white line of foam. On one side the water was green and clear; on the other it was brown and turbid: fresh water pouring from the river and fanning out into the sea. The change was as abrupt as the colouring on a diagram.
I wove through the breaking waves. They beat themselves against the boulders in the rivermouth. They flicked the back of the boat around, threatening to tip me broadside into the rocky surf. I caught the end of a large roller; it swung me round and smashed the prow down onto a rock. I back-paddled, skidded across the face of the next breaker, then found a passage between two waves. My paddle bit the water and I pushed myself into the rivermouth.
The whitewater in the river had been slowed by the rising tide, and I was able, clinging to the inside of the meanders, to make way against it. Small flatfish torpedoed away beneath the hull. After a few hundred yards, the riverbed rose and the force of the water gathered. I hauled at the paddle, but soon came to a standstill. I wedged the paddle between the rocks and slid out of the boat. But, unstrung by tiredness, I lost my footing, fell headfirst into the water and caught my ankle in the paddle’s leash. The boat started to drift downstream, pulling me with it. I thrashed until I grabbed the leash. I freed myself just as my face was being dragged under the water, then dived down the river to catch the kayak. I turned it and began to wade back upstream, so tired that I could scarcely breast the river.
In the quiet waters beyond the railway bridge I pulled the stern onto the shore, and shook the boat to slide the fish in the hold down to the bow hatch. Their backs had turned a deep aquamarine and their bellies had taken on a pink iridescent flash. They glowed in the evening light.
I fetched a board and another knife from the car. I filleted one of the mackerel, exposing the clean, translucent bone, then pinned the tail of the fillet to the board with my penknife and skinned it with the other knife. The flesh tasted of raw steak. I filleted two more fish and ate them. I sat on the riverbank for a while, watching the mullet dimpling the surface and the crows landing momentarily on the rusty bridge then flapping away when they saw me. I gutted the remaining fish. It was not a great haul, but for the first time on the boat that summer I had caught more energy than I had used.
> 3
Foreshadowings
In this world’s youth wise Nature did make haste,
Things ripen’d sooner, and did longer last.
John Donne
The Progress of the Soul
It began with a call from my friend Ritchie Tassell. ‘There’s something I want you to see. How soon can you get here?’
‘I’m on the beach. One hour?’
‘That’ll do.’
I threw my wetsuit into the car and set off around the estuary. If Ritchie, who had seen almost everything, thought it was worth my while, it would be.
In the marshes beside the track, the sedge warblers churred and buzzed. Swallows dipped over the ditches and flickered above the heads of the sheep. The scent of bog myrtle, which–honey and camphor–put me in mind of the Victorians, rose on the still air. Ritchie had lent me a pair of binoculars. We waited.
‘There he is!’
At that distance, to my inexpert eye, it could have been a buzzard or a black-backed gull. But as it flapped up the estuary, with a strangely awkward beat, I noticed two things. First, that something was swaying and planing beneath it. Secondly, that it was too dark for a gull, too white for a buzzard. It took me a moment.
‘Jesus H Christ on a bike!’
‘That’s what I said. More or less.’
‘I can’t quite believe what I’m seeing.’
‘He’s been here for three days. If he settles it’ll be the first time since the seventeenth century.’
The bird was heading towards us. About twenty yards before it reached the track, it turned and flapped slowly past in profile. It was carrying a large flatfish. After another one hundred yards or so it landed on a fencepost and started tearing at the fish.
Ritchie was, indirectly, responsible. He had reasoned that the ospreys which had been breeding in Scotland since 1954 would migrate along this coast on their way to and from Africa, pausing to refuel in the estuaries and lakes. He had also guessed that the young birds would be looking for territory. He found the tallest spruce tree on his side of the valley, roped himself up, cut off the top and built a wooden platform fifty feet from the ground. He covered it in twigs and splattered white paint over it to look like droppings: this, apparently, is the best means of persuading ospreys to move in.
Feral Page 4