by Brian Clarke
the
stream
BRIAN CLARKE
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Before Year One
Year 1, January
Year 1, February
Year 1, March
Year 1, April
Year 1, May
Year 1, June
Year 1, July
Year 1, August
Year 1, September
Year 1, October
Year 1, November
Year 1, December
Year 2, January
Year 2, February
Year 2, March
Year 2, April
Year 2, May
Year 2, June
Year 2, July
Year 2, August
Year 2, September
Year 2, October
Year 2, November
Year 2, December
Year 3, January
Year 3, February
Year 3, March
Year 3, April
Year 3, May
Year 3, June
Year 3, July
Year 3, August
Year 3, September
Year 3, October
Year 3, November
Year 3, December
Year 4, January
Year 4, February
Year 4, March
Year 4, April
Year 4, May
Year 4, June
Year 4, July
Year 4, August
Year 4, September
Year 4, October
Year 4, November
Year 4, December
Year 5, January
Year 5, February
Year 5, March
Year 5, April
Year 5, May
Year 5, June
Year 5, July
Year 5, August
Copyright
For my grandchildren
Before Year One
the law of continuing, the law that governed all things, had long since made the plan.
The stream would be fed by springs that ran from the wooded slopes facing in all around. It would rise and fall as the springs rose and fell. It would rise in winter when the springs flowed strongest and it would fall in summer when the springs shrank back.
The law of continuing, the law that decreed all things, had made all life in the stream to fit in with this plan. It had told the fish to mate after the rains had begun because their eggs would need plenty of cool water. It had told the insects they should mostly come out in summer because they would need warmth and light. It had told the plants that needed fast water to root where the fast water flowed and the plants that needed slow water to live in the sheltered places.
The law of continuing, the law that governed all life, had decreed that there should only be so much water to support so many plants, so many plants to support so many insects, so many insects to support so many fish.
It had told the trout that lived in the stream and the salmon that came and went that there were only so many places for fish to live, and these were places that had food in them and somewhere for a fish to hide. It had whispered to the tiny fish while they were still curled up in their eggs and blind that the best of these places would go to the strongest fish and that if any fish wanted to own a best place it would have to fight to win and hold it.
The stream in the valley that the steep, wooded slopes guarded like a secret, ran into a big river that flowed into a great river that emptied into the sea far away. Its banks were fringed with branched burr-reed and brooklime, meadowsweet and hemp agrimony, purple loosestrife and flag iris and cress. On the banks around the island and along the gentle reach downstream from the Cattle Drink and the Otter Stone, willows and alders grew. Many birds nested along the banks of the stream and in the rushes and shrubs which bordered them and in the hawthorns that bordered the fields and in the great trees that stood in the fields. Many wild flowers grew there also and in summer the insects gauzed and hummed, catching the light.
The law of continuing had planned things this way. They had been planned this way since before the counting of the years had begun. They had been planned this way before the wolves had prowled there or the bears had roared there or the wild pigs had truffled in the loose-littered ground.
Year 1, January
the two fish knew what the plan was because the law of continuing had written it deep inside them.
They were to find their way separately to the shallows, just downstream from the falls and there the male fish would see the female and claim her. When she had been claimed and while the cock fish kept all other males at bay, the hen fish would surrender herself utterly.
The law of continuing would take her and use her. It would thrash her down on the gravels so that her tail and flank would dislodge the stones. When she had been thrashed down long enough and hard enough, a scoop would be made in the stream bed. When the scoop was the right size and depth, she would be settled into it and the male fish would be laid alongside her, his flank close to her flank.
They would touch.
When their flanks touched it was to be like a current of shocks flooding through them. A high note would come and it would fill their heads and a bright light would fine and fine to a piercing point until their whole world seized and shuddered and then her eggs would stream out and his milt would stream over them.
Once he had fertilised the eggs, the male fish would be free to go. The hen fish would have to stay a little longer. She would be taken a little upstream of the scoop she had made and thrashed down again. The law of continuing would make the turbulence she created catch under the stones and gravels again and carry them lightly downstream to settle over the eggs. Only when the eggs were covered by stones and properly protected would the hen fish be free to leave. That was the plan. They both had it in them.
And so, the moment the soft stroking of the male fish’s flank left her side and the last of her eggs and his milt had gone, the hen trout moved a little upstream of the scoop she had dug in the gravels, rolled onto her side and began to beat down again. Water bloomed beneath her scratched flank and torn tail, small stones rocked and hesitated and then lifted. The current slipped beneath them and caught and buoyed them, carrying them downstream as though weightless, as if objects in space.
The hen trout gathered herself again, moved forward again over the same place in the gravels and again beat down. The currents reached under the stones exactly as written and settled them over the eggs.
The law of continuing used the hen fish for a long time, sometimes making her movements so violent that they were visible from above. Twice the kingfisher saw her tail break the surface, its soft filaments winking in the low winter light.
When the eggs that she had laid were protected by the gravel she had steadily built over them, when they were safe and hidden under the cool, clear water that the law of continuing had always provided, the hen fish that had travelled upstream from the shingle banks to spawn lay still for a few moments until she was told she could go; then she allowed the current to carry her gently downstream tail-first, angling her fins and her body so that she was carried diagonally towards the side, instinctively seeking quiet water, out of the flow.
A little way downstream, not far from the Cattle Drink, she came to the log that lay on the stream bed and settled behind it. Her skin was dull and her belly was scraped. The red and black rosettes that had dappled her sides were scratched and smudged. Her gut was slack. Her vent was stretched and its rim was raw. She was numb and blunt edged. Her eyes were unseeing. She did not notice the heron.
Wherever the heron
was, he always seemed to be a part of that place. Even high in the beech tree on the wooded slope he seemed a part of the tree and a part of the sky. His long, thin legs and broad, straight bill looked like the branches all around. His hunched, grey shoulders and white breast dissolved into the sky behind. On the ground, wary and stalking, his movements were so coiled and slow that they seemed to have no beginning and no end.
He began his glide a long way from the stream, bending his wings around a curve of air, sliding down it until he neared the water. When he was close to the Cattle Drink and just a little above the surface, he brought his legs forward and then vertical, and then dropped.
For a long time the heron stood without moving, his long neck held rigid and high, his bright eyes moving sharply from place to place, his head tilting this way and that, straining for a movement or a sound. Then he began to move upstream. He moved with his slow, stilted, pushing gait, the only turbulence the thin, downstream trickling from each reedy leg.
A little way from the log, on the edge of the calm water that the log sheltered behind it, he saw what he often saw and knew what it meant. The law of continuing had told the heron that at this time of year, at this time of day, there was usually food to be found there. The trout was lying just upstream of the stone where the spawned fish always rested. It kept resolving and dissolving through the winks of light and reflections of clouds. Its tail shrugged slowly. Its gills pumped quickly. Its mouth opened and closed, gleaming white.
The heron stiffened, dropped his head forward and froze. The bright, yellow eyes and hard black pupils burned. And then, as though it were another part of him, in some way independent and detached, his right leg lifted a little and eased forward. His body did not move, his head and neck did not move, but his right leg moved forward. Then his left leg lifted, bent slightly at the knee and it also pushed forward, the thin vein of turbulence wriggling behind it scarcely there at all, making no noise. And then again a leg slowly and then again a leg, until the heron stood directly above and behind the trout, which had not moved. The long feathers behind his head whisped gently on the breeze, accentuating his stillness. Only the soft easings and crinklings of the stream and the low-pitched, nervous creak of the moorhen broke the silence.
And so the trout did not notice the heron. She did not notice as gradually some of the light above her went, or see the grey shade that gradually drifted into the periphery of her vision like a small cloud, or see it gradually resolve and take on firmer lines that became elongated and drew near.
It was only at the last moment that there was a long instant’s dawning, a brief consciousness of something, something, and the trout brought her dulled eyes into focus and saw the heron’s beak and the water surface open.
The lower bill took her through the flank, the upper bill closed over her back and the trout felt the crushing weight of air.
The heron carried the trout to the bank, splashing water and light onto the dry shingle there. Then he dropped her, picked her up across the gills and flipped back his head. The trout’s body straightened to a brief vertical, the heron opened his bill wide and the fish slid head-first down. The heron kept his head high and squeezed and contracted and squeezed and contracted, forcing the fish down the way a snake swallows a frog. Then the sliding bulge was gone. The heron preened himself, uttered a soft cry and laboured on dark wings over the alders.
On the gravels where the hen fish had spawned as the law of continuing required, the cool water was burbling and pushing through the stones. In one of the eggs, one of the eggs that had not missed the scoop or been eaten in the meantime by a loach or a minnow or by another trout or by a bullhead, or that the moorhen had not taken when she was in that place; in the egg that was safe in the space that had the grey stones all around it and the brown stone as a roof, the slow swelling and inward folding of the cells began.
Year 1, February
‘oK. Tell me.’ Jo Hamilton, Chair of SAVE, the local environmental pressure group, was already late. She cradled the telephone between her cheek and her shoulder, put her foot on the chair beside the wall and began to scribble on the pad on her knee. Terry was well connected. He was also usually calm. It was clear he was agitated.
‘The Stinston plan is back on the agenda. For real, this time. Huge. The Minister is making an announcement next month.’
Hamilton shook her head again, slowly. ‘So the grapevine was right, all along?’
‘Pretty well.’ Terry Summers paused. ‘But not on the scale of it. This is no foot-in-the-door scheme. They’re going for the whole hog.’
‘What details have you got?’
‘They want to widen the road along the valley from Farley all the way. It looks like Transport and Industry’s old long-term plan, enlarged. They want to link the port and the south road with the M439. Instead of turning Stinston into an overflow for Farley they want to make it into some kind of hub in its own right, to rejuvenate the whole region. They want some kind of park there, an industrial park or a science park, something like that.’
‘Ye gods. How much detail have you got?’
Summers glanced down at his notes. ‘According to my contact, the plan for the new road will mean the old bridge at Stinston going and a new one being built to cope with the traffic. Apparently—’
Hamilton cut in again. ‘What about the Frontage? What about the Hangers?’
‘Let me get there, Jo, let me get there. I was going to say. The plan is to cut into Stinston Hill so they can bypass the village. The lower part of the Frontage will go. So will a chunk of the Hangers.’
Hamilton pulled the chair away from the wall and sat down, the telephone now clamped to one ear, a hand clamped over the other to shut out her husband’s voice. She winced when he pointed at his watch, showing her the time. ‘How sure are we about all this, Terry? We’re very late onto it.’
‘Dead sure. There’s no doubt. There’s going to be a public inquiry starting in May. They’re determined to get it through.’ Summers paused. ‘It’s going to be hard to argue against jobs around here. They’re talking about attracting lots of big companies. Hundreds of jobs, thousands. In fact we can’t argue against them. We shouldn’t. It’s impossible.’
There was a long silence. He could hear her thinking. She could hear him waiting for a reaction. She spoke at last.
‘You’re right, of course. This place is on its last legs after the recession. More jobs would be a godsend. We can’t oppose the plan in principle.’ She paused. He could hear her voice tighten. ‘But there has to be a sense of balance. We have to do what we can. We have to alleviate the impact, somehow. We can’t just let a beautiful valley be ruined. We can’t just let a 4,000-year-old settlement and one of the last pieces of ancient woodland in the country be bulldozed.’
Summers was nodding to himself. ‘I know. We’re between the Devil and the deep blue. Whatever we do, we could end up looking like a bunch of tree-huggers.’
There was another pause. Hamilton raised a finger, acknowledging her husband again. ‘Terry, I have to go. But we’ve got to get onto this pronto. You ring your lot, I’ll ring my lot. Let’s try to meet here on Tuesday.’
Year 1, March
the egg deep in the gravels might have been lying in a womb. The space that had the grey stones all around it and the brown stone as a roof was safe and dark. The little fish lay curled like a foetus in the soft membrane surrounding it. The noise of the current overhead could have been the roarings and sluicings within some mother’s belly. The slow, rhythmic boom of the brown stone rocking might have been the distant, measured beat of some mother’s heart. The threads of water that pushed and wriggled their way through the spaces between the grey stones and the brown stones on their way downstream to the young salmon that was being made ready for the sea and the nymph of the mayfly being made ready to hatch, bathed the egg with oxygen and kept it cool.
All the changes that the law of continuing had required of the egg, had been completed. Veins had rea
ched around the membrane like a blood-red web. The flutter and then the rhythm of a pulse had begun. Eyes had formed huge and dark, big as soft boulders. An arched spine had taken shape. So had a rib-cage protecting the faint shapes of organs. Sinews had gelled. Fluids had surged backwards and forwards through conduits and junctions. Fins had splayed and stretched. A mouth had opened many times, mutely.
By the time the frosts had gone and the air had warmed and the first of the sweet violets on Longate had opened, a light had dawned in the egg that lay in the gravels, downstream from the falls.
By the time the kingcups at Middle Bend had begun to open the young trout was sensing the membrane around him. Its snugness had become a tension, its tension a tightness, its tightness a confinement that pressured and caged him. Around the time the kingcups at Top Bend were opening like hidden suns and the swans opposite the three old posts were rebuilding their nest, the young trout that felt trapped and pinioned began to push and turn. He stretched and twisted. The membrane clamped around him began to weaken.
By the time the young salmon just downstream was almost ready for the sea and the mayfly nymph was moulting another skin in her burrow deep in the stream bed, it seemed as though the trout in the egg could bear containment no longer.
On the day that the old man in the farm was being lectured by his son again and Jo Hamilton and SAVE’s committee were agreeing their action plan, the trout in the egg arched his back and pressed with his tail in a desperate effort. He pressed and strained and pressed and strained as though the membrane was tightening to suffocate or drown him. And then the law of continuing passed over him and touched him. The young trout gathered himself into himself and strained until his whole world shuddered and his heart pounded and his dark eyes were prickled with light from the inside. The egg’s casing split and the water rummaged it away and the young trout opened his mouth as though giving a sudden cry. The stream rushed into his mouth for the first time and poured out over his gills for the first time and he drew the first breath of his new life from the water.