Across the valley, from his cottage beside the estuary, a keen naturalist had watched these preparations. It was not long before he had persuaded the local wildlife trust to build a platform of its own; it planted a telegraph pole beside the railway track, and nailed a sheet of plywood across the top.
‘It was a no-brainer,’ said Ritchie. ‘He could choose a nice little residence deep in the woods, in the top of a tree overlooking the estuary, or an exposed pole right next to the railway line. Of course the little sod chose the wildlife trust’s effort. Not that I’m bitter or anything.’
I was only half listening. I was still struggling to take in what I had just seen. My heart pounded. I was filled with wild yearning: of the kind that used to afflict me when I woke from that perennial pre-adolescent dream of floating down the stairs, my feet a few inches above the carpet. I had felt it only once in recent years; in fact just a month before I saw the osprey.
Demonstrating–as I do about once a fortnight–a startling absence of the survival instinct with which other people are blessed, I had launched my kayak from the town beach at Pwlldiwaelod into a ten-foot swell. On the way through the waves the boat had back-flipped, somersaulting over me and dashing my head on the shingle. I was lucky not to have been knocked out. Needless to say, I tried again. This time, I broke through the waves and paddled out to sea. Now, after catching a few fish, I was returning to land. The tide had risen, and ugly, jumbled breakers were smashing on the seawall. Two hundred yards from the shore, I hesitated. Even from where I sat I could see that the waves were stained brown by the shingle they flung up. I could hear them crack and sough against the wall. Fear ran over my skin like cold water. I scanned the shore for a better way in, but saw nothing.
Behind me I heard a monstrous hiss: a freak wave was about to break over my head. I ducked and braced the paddle against the water. Nothing happened. I turned round. The rollers came in steadily: high, white-capped, but, at this distance from the shore, not yet threatening. Astonished, I swivelled round, desperately seeking an explanation. It rose from the water beside the boat: a hooked grey fin, scarred and pitted, whose tip skimmed just under the shaft of my paddle. I knew what it was, but the shock of it enhanced my rising fear and I nearly panicked. I glanced this way and that, almost believing that I was under attack.
Then a remarkable thing happened. From the stern I heard a different sound: a crash and a rush of water. I turned and a gigantic bull dolphin soared into the air and almost over my head. As he flew past, he fixed his eye on mine. We held each other’s gaze until he walloped back into the water. I stared at the spot, willing him to resurface, but I did not see him again. I turned and faced the shore once more, now without fear. Instead I felt a heart-wrenching exhilaration that lent me, for a moment, clarity. I studied the seawall and noticed something I had not seen before: a distant slipway taking the force of the waves. In its lee were two or three yards of calmer water.
I cut across the waves until, fifty yards from the shore, I lined up with their strike and pointed the prow at the quieter patch. It reappeared every few seconds as a breaker fell back; then it was swept away in the next assault on the wall. Above the roar of the waves, I could hear the pebbles rattling against the battlements like grapeshot, as the sea sucked and sagged at the stonework. I dug the paddle in and charged the shore. I held back for a moment as a wave rolled past me, then flew at the gap. I jumped from the boat as it slid into the lee of the slipway, and clambered onto the concrete wedge, just before the kayak smashed against the seawall. The collision reduced my fishing rod to splinters. It is a stretch to say that the dolphin saved my life, but without that shift in focus I might have been flotsam.
Twice in one year I had heard the call–that high, wild note of exaltation–after a drought of sensation that had persisted since early adulthood; a drought I had come to accept as a condition of middle age, like the loss of the upper reaches of hearing.
That night, after a pint with Ritchie and a long vigil in the garden, watching the light fading from the sky and the first of the stars flashing into view above the mountains, I was struck by something that had not occurred to me before. Flatfish live on the seafloor. Ospreys catch their prey close to the surface. The facts did not marry.
As soon as I could get away the following week, I took the boat into the estuary. I was hoping to see the bird again, but also to try to discover what the fish were doing. I missed the osprey. But after an hour or two of poking around the margins of the sandbanks, my question was answered. I found a spot in which flounders had gathered in such numbers that they rested not on the sand but upon each other. They lay in no more than a foot of water and cruised over my bare feet, shuddering away in puffs of sand when I moved.
I spent that evening in the garage, rummaging in boxes and pushing aside paint tins, flowerpots, flints, fossils and packets of seed. Long after I had ceased to believe in its existence, I found it underneath the bottles I had dug up in an ancient rubbish dump when I was a child. It was a small slim package wrapped in yellowed newsprint, spotted with rust and oil. I read:
A reunião aconteceu na Secretar–
–plicou o comandante de Polícia Fe–
–ará, no próximo dia 11 de Junho, d–
As I unwrapped the package, the paper disintegrated in my hands and the precious object fell into my palm. It was the first time I had seen it since I had bought it in a market beside the River Solimões eighteen years before. Hand-forged, beautifully finished, it had cost me less than a pound.
In a friend’s overgrown hedge I found a hazel pole that grew straight for ten feet. I whipped the weapon to the pole with fine cord, then ran a stone along the points. They scarcely needed it: the trident was still needle-sharp. The shank had been left square and rough to take the cord, but the points were round, polished and perfectly tapered. Each had four barbs, identically angled and chamfered. It had been forged for harpooning arapaimas–among the largest freshwater fish in the world–but I would make do with lesser prey.
Two weeks passed before I could return to the water. I paddled to where the fish had been. But in the shifting sands in the middle of the estuary, there is no ‘where’: no fixed point to which you can return. I tracked back and forth like a dog that had lost the scent, beached the boat, waded through the shallows, crossed the channels and circled the pools. I saw nothing except the silvery mullet, which swirled away as they felt the kayak approaching. The flounders had gone; the flatfish forum was buried under a sandbar.
Now, three years after I had first seen the osprey, I decided to try again. There was a gentle hubbub on the beach: an ice-cream van, a handful of cars, some children wading and splashing in the narrow runnels trapped by the sandbars when the tide had pulled the plug. Beyond the cars I saw a wonderful sight. An ancient woman wearing iridescent ski goggles and a blanket over her knees was riding her electric wheelchair at full tilt. Sand spurted from the wheels. She skidded around in tight circles, jolted forward and fishtailed through the ruts left by the cars. Someone’s heart was still beating.
I looked across the rivermouth. It was dead low tide. On the sea this would be called low-water slack, but in the estuary there is no slack: water runs in odd directions throughout the cycle. Two broad channels and a web of creeks, some connected, some blind, cut through a desert of sand. Across the water the sun fell on the pastel shades of Drefursennaidd. The boats at anchor in the lane beside the harbour looked as bright as bath toys. The weather curtain fell halfway up the estuary: the hills beyond were hidden behind silver sheets of rain. It is like this for much of the year: Drefursennaidd has half the rainfall of Llanaelwyd, ten miles inland; Llanaelwyd, in turn, has half the rainfall of Mwrllwch, five miles to the north.
I strapped the spear to the side of the boat, rigged up an anchor, bowlined a dry bag to one of the cleats beside the stern well, loaded the pockets of my life-jacket with a knife, a notepad, Polaroids and a spool of cord and dragged the kayak down to a ditch in which a trickle
of water still ran.
In this rill it looked as if a battle were being fought. Sand gobies shot off in puffs of smoke like artillery shells. Baby flatfish raised trails of ack-ack fire as they scudded away, tails hitting the mud every few inches. Battalions of heavy armour trundled sideways, claws swivel-ling towards me. Soon the water was deep enough to lift the boat, and I set off upstream.
It was dead still. The water rippled away from the kayak, startling giant mullet at the edges of the channel. They furrowed round in semi-circles, then shot away in explosions of spray. Ringed plovers pattered along the shore with strange throaty warblings, then glided ahead of me on sickle wings. I could smell rotting seaweed and hear the strange music of the mudflats: the fizz and snap of millions of tiny creatures shifting in their burrows. On the sandbanks was the wreckage of stumps and branches brought down by the recent floods.
A knot in brick-red breeding plumage ran along the sand dipping its head, then took off with a long swooping whistle. A bumblebee trapped in the surface film broadcast frantic barcode ripples: sound made visible. I stopped paddling and drifted upriver, into the maze.
As I moved up the estuary I started tasting the water. Salt meant that I was travelling up a cul-de-sac, fresh or brackish that I was following a channel connected to the river. On most days it worked. But so much rain had fallen in the past week that the water everywhere tasted slightly fresh: the tides must have been pushing it back and forth. I know of no other way of navigating the labyrinth of channels. There are no visual clues: even when you leave the boat and stand on the banks you can see only the major cuts. The runnels, which are two or three feet lower than the domed surface of the sand, are invisible until you are almost on top of them.
I paddled blindly and soon came to a network of bayous, trenches scoured out by the currents, connected only by a thread of water. I slipped out of the boat and began to drag it up this trickle. Whenever I stepped into deeper water I felt shrimps battering against my feet. They moved like a film missing most of its frames: they appeared, disappeared, appeared again a few inches away, darting with flicks so rapid that they were impossible to follow. On the bank a cormorant dried its wings.
The water was warm and murky, the colour of weak tea. The sand had settled into a pattern of scooped ripples, each of which had trapped a pool of dark humus: the ridges formed pale crescents as regular as wallpaper. The stream soon became navigable again, but now it was flowing towards me. I pushed on up, tasting, paddling, peering over the side. Orange-legged shore crabs backed into the sand as the shadow of the boat passed over them. Fat cockles lay a little agape, the shells edged with a pink frill of flesh. Cockle. The word rolled about in my head: round, hinged, opening and closing like the creature it described.
A curlew crossed the tidal desert ahead of me, casting its sad looping call across the water. Lost in the flats, I no longer had a sense of scale. Rounding a bend in the stream, I was amazed to see two people standing on a sandbank. As I approached they opened their wings and flapped away. Sheep moved along the distant edge of the saltmarsh in single file.
The bayous coalesced into a wide, shallow pan. Wading across it, I felt something flutter over my feet. I turned and saw a brown diamond fluking away. It stopped just a few yards from me and buried itself. I marked the spot in my mind, swiftly unstrapped the spear, removed the corks and left the boat to drift, then stalked across to where the fish had settled. It could not have moved: I would have seen puffs of mud hanging in the water. But it had vanished. I probed a couple of likely-looking mounds, but the spear just sank into the sand. The flounder had disappeared like a ghost passing through a wall. I cast around, imagining that I must have lost the mark, but I found no trace of it.
I anchored the boat, removed my life vest and cagoule and drew from the dry bag an item seldom seen on a kayak, a white business shirt. I had realized, a few days before, that most of the birds that feed on fish–gulls, gannets, shearwaters, guillemots, herons, ospreys–have white bellies, enabling them to disappear against the sky. I stalked up the channel with the spear over my shoulder, moving my big feet as quietly as I could. I must have cut an odd figure.
I soon disturbed a flatfish–too small to spear–and watched as it settled back into the mud. Now I understood what had happened before. Instead of making a hump on the sand, it curled itself around a ripple, perfectly mimicking not only the colour but also the shape of the riverbed. Even when I hovered right over it, it was impossible to see. It did not dart off until I almost trod on it.
By now I had crossed the weather curtain. The wind whipped the water and the rain pitted the surface: spotting fish became still harder. One or two fair-sized flounders darted off, but into deeper water where I could see nothing. I went back and fetched the boat. As I paddled upstream, I saw the great slurping mouths of mullet protruding from the water. I was tempted to fling the spear at them, but knew that it was useless. Soon the stream I was following petered out in a wilderness of sand and empty cockle shells. It would take at least an hour for the tide to connect it to a main channel. The weather was worsening, so I turned round.
The flow had changed again: I had travelled against it in both directions. I returned to where I had seen a broken lobster pot marooned in the middle of the flats; now the sea was lapping round it. The wind rose; I struggled against air and water. As the tide flowed past me I marvelled at its filing system. There were lanes of twigs half a mile long, strands of seaweed, then a drift packed with what at first I took to be dead shrimps. There were millions: I feared for a moment that there had been a plague or a poisoning. But when I scooped some up I saw that they were cast-off skins: perfect little suits of armour, with a gauntlet for every pleopod and palp. Nowhere did I see twigs in the shrimp lane or shrimp skins among the seaweed; the current had chosen a stream for each of them.
A week later I tried again, perhaps for the last time. I launched the boat at the head of the estuary. My plan was to intercept the flounders on their way out of the tidal creeks that fed into the rivermouth. Here the drowsy summer pastures met the scoured flats of the windfunnel. Sheltered by bluffs and embankments, cattle flicked their tails in the deep July meadows. Two dabchicks flipped underwater as I approached; a kingfisher blurred along the bank.
I found the mouth of a stream, hidden between walls of reed. I passed between the banks, cut off by the rustling screens from other sights and sounds. The reeds gave way to wild banks of bramble, hemp agrimony, knapweed and vetch. Where an oak had fallen across the water, I stowed my paddle, lay back in the boat and pulled myself under the branches. The water was so clear that I seemed to be drifting through air. I could see every speck and fibre on the bed. But not only did I spot no fish, I saw no life of any kind: no beetles, skaters, nymphs or shrimps. No dragonflies patrolled the banks, no caddis or mayflies danced over the water. Perhaps this stream had passed through old lead mines. Lead has been worked here since the Romans, and even mines abandoned many years ago produce effluvia so toxic that almost nothing survives in the water it contaminates. Two streams meet in a village close to where I live. One bustles with trout and bullheads, the other is dead. One day, a friend who lives in the village tells me, the ducks kept there strayed from their usual haunts in the living stream and dabbled for a while in the other. They were all found belly up.
I slid down the stream and back into the estuary. As I rounded the last bend in the river, the wind buffeted me. I could see, across miles of water, all the way to the sea. Here, within the fortress of cloud that guarded the hills, the land was ochre, olive, viridian. Beyond the weather curtain, in the coastal sunshine, the fields, brightened by fertilizer, seemed almost to fluoresce. At the mouth of the estuary, the dunes appeared to float free of their surroundings. Separated from the foreground by a shimmering silver line, they hovered like Laputa over the mudflats.
A flock of Canada geese that had been bobbing and craning their necks on the bank took off, leaving a mess of moulted feathers tumbling over the mud. M
erganser fledglings pounded the water as they flapped after their mother, who ungallantly abandoned them and circled the estuary. The tide was now roaring out. As it met the wind, it rose into standing waves, in which the boat seemed to be glued to the water: I had to lean forward and place the paddle almost beside the bows to make any progress. I travelled up creeks so narrow that when I met an obstruction I had to reverse out. I rode down the banks of the main channel, peering into the water, and saw nothing but mud and broken branches.
Before long the current pulled me past the mudbanks and into the empty quarter, the wide tract of sand I had explored before. But this time, riding the main channel, I found myself colliding with geysers, thick with sand and dead leaves, that rose unexpectedly in the middle of the river, sometimes with such force that I felt them thump and lift the boat as I passed over. A buoy buried in this boiling water seemed to plough away upstream, like a great fishing float pulled by a shark.
I drifted past the bank of a sandbar, my spear raised, scanning the clear water in the margins. The ubiquitous, uncatchable mullet exploded away. I startled two large flounders, but both ribboned off before I had a chance to thrust the harpoon. A platoon of oystercatchers in black and white uniforms, wings clamped smartly to their sides, turned as one body and marched across the sand as I approached. I saw the reflection of the spear on the water, and I was struck by a thought that had not occurred to me before: I was restoring the kayak to its original function. Both the technology and the name have been–like anorak and parka–borrowed from Arctic peoples. Just as I stalked the edges of the sandbanks with my harpoon, they patrolled the margins of the ice-floes. Here, however, they would have starved.
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