by Brian Clarke
The old man crouched down to watch as a mayfly close to the bank changed from a nymph to a fly. He saw the nymph that had just swum up from its burrow lie flat in the surface and strain and tremble. He watched as the skin along the nymph’s back split and a great fly with wings emerged from the skin of its old self that had no wings and the old man marvelled at the sight of it as he always marvelled.
Her body was an inch long, the colour of ivory and arched delicately upwards. Her three tails were as long again, as fine-drawn as eyelashes and just as curved. Her wings were an inch tall and hazed with green. They were the shape of chapel windows and held nearly as upright. The old man followed the drifting fly downstream, saw her carried towards the willow that had fallen in the flood and a trout slash at her and miss and then she was gone.
The mayfly that the old man had watched flew towards the bank and then aimed for the elder bush. She avoided the web that was trembling with bodies and flew in through a gap in the leaves and branches. She grasped the first leaf that was unoccupied and hid under it.
There were mayflies everywhere in the bush, clinging under leaves high above ground exactly as the law of continuing had instructed. The law of continuing had written that mayflies should not eat or drink after leaving the water and had told them they would need to stay out of the sun to avoid dehydration. This was why all the flies knew to hide away under leaves, in the shade. It was because the law of continuing had also told them about the frosts that the flies knew to choose leaves high above the ground, where a frost could not strike up at their soft bodies in the night. It was because they were following the plan so long ago written that the mayflies were where they were.
The mayfly that the old man had watched did not move once she had settled. She did not move even though a loud cheer went up at the development because the shell of the main Cogent Electronics building had just been completed. She did not move even when the sun began to fall and the green light that filtered through the leaves began to mellow. She did not move even when the mayflies that had already been there a night and a day and that were ready to mate, fluttered back out of the bush into the open. She did not move even when darkness fell and some of the parts for the production line were unloaded under floodlights at the docks.
It was long after dawn, when the sun was lifting and the space in the bush was becoming suffused with green light again that the mayfly felt a warmth reaching through her. It was long after dawn when she felt the first of the soft, low clicks that the law of continuing sent every mayfly before ridding it of the last skin it would shed and the fly was made ready to mate.
About the time the first nymphs of the day were beginning to hatch in the stream and the spiders in their charnel houses were turning and bundling again, the clicks and pressures the mayfly had felt steadily rising began to quicken and gather and converge into one. And then the mayfly that had waited so long felt the hot rush inside her and the law of continuing come. The law of continuing reached into her far extremities and drew all her strings tight. It made her back arch and strain so that she might have heard it arching and straining and then her blood roared and a red light flooded through her head and fined to a fine point until it snapped and the skin of her back broke open and she arched and trembled and strained and pulled herself upwards and outwards and free.
When it was over, when the crusts of the earth had stopped splitting and roaring and falling away all about her, the mayfly that the trout with the scar had tried to get as she lifted from the surface, settled beside a husk of her old self for the last time. Her tails were longer and more finely drawn and her wings sparkled like water catching the sun.
As afternoon passed and the sun got lower and the shadows within the bush angled and tilted again, the wings of all the mayflies that were to mate that day began to open and close and glisten and wink. The males left first. One by one they began to rustle and flutter like trapped birds under the leaves, catching wing against wing and wing against leaf; and then in ones and twos and dozens they flickered up into the beams of light that slanted down through the bush and aimed for the brilliance outside.
The males gathered behind the bush and formed a dense cloud. They flew upwards and floated downwards, flew upwards and downwards, rising and falling as though singing a high chorus. It was the same behind the broken willow and the alder and the hawthorn heavy with blossom as white as snow. It was the same behind the sycamores and the chestnuts and the beeches and the oaks and the high, tangled hedgerows. The rising and falling of the male flies seemed to fill the whole valley: their rising and falling and their joyous, high song.
The mayfly that had left the stream while the old man was watching, waited for a long time after the last of the males had gone. Then she edged to the tip of the leaf that had kept her safe and lifted tremulously into the lightbeam where fine particles floated. She flew along the lightbeam to the way out it showed her and left.
The mayfly that the trout with the scar had failed to catch flew up into the radiance climbing higher and higher, as though being offered upwards to the singing of hymns. She was thrown aside twice when a swift dived close and made the air churn about her. She was twice brushed by wings that floated down like sycamore keys because the ivory bodies between them had been snapped out by beaks.
Then the mayfly that had come to that place from the fallen willow where the trout with the scar tried to get her, saw the columns of males rising and falling and seemed excited by their odours and overwhelmed by their song. She saw them flying upwards and floating downwards, flying upwards and floating downwards, glittering in the sun and luring her onward. She flew into the middle of them, shining and seductive, the full ripeness of her body heavy with needing, the delirium in the air softening that part of her where her eggs pressed most.
The males took her instantly, first one and then another clasping her tightly and pressing his abdomen to her; and then another and a fourth and a fifth took hold of her, so many males wanting her that she could not bear their weight and together they all fell into the grass.
Later, when the males had left and her body was bursting with ripeness, she lifted from the grass and picked up the scent of the stream again; made for its gleaming course again; and flickered past the hawthorn with its burden of blossom whiter than snow, past all the trembling webs where the spiders were bundling, far beyond the fallen willow that the chokeweed was exploring. Upstream from the Cattle Drink, close to the place where the trout always spawned but not as near to the falls as the salmon usually mated she began flying low, dipping her abdomen onto the water, dropping her eggs in clusters at a time.
As the mayfly dipped and pushed and the chokeweed cells responded to the warmth in the water that should not have been there and Jim Hampton of Hamptons was signing more redundancy notices, the current seized the grey eggs as they fell in clusters and chains and took them as though in collusion to the places that a mayfly’s eggs needed to be.
When she was done, when the last of her eggs had dropped into the space near the willow where her own journey had begun, when she was drained and spent and could fly no more, the mayfly collapsed onto the surface as though her long dream was over. As the low rays slanted and her own light was ebbing, she twisted and writhed on the water and was carried to the place by the fallen willow where the rings of a feeding fish dimpled the surface. And there the trout with the scar tilted up and took her, as the plan had always required.
Year 3, June
the day after his father had been called to the bank the young man spread all his papers on the kitchen table and begged the old man to come and look at them again.
The old man listened again while the young man’s finger traced the plan of the rough meadows and the tussocked fields and the young man talked again of the money to be made if only the land could be prepared in the new way and if the new strains of crops could be planted and the new fertilisers that had been developed were used.
The old man felt the pressure of the you
ng man’s ambition growing by the moment and he glimpsed in his mind here and gone and here again an image of a mayfly jangling in a web. It was as he was reminding his son of how long the farm had been in the family and how what his son wanted to do would change things for ever, that the nuclei in the long cells issued still more instructions.
Even as the old man was saying he would make a decision soon and his son was asking why he did not say never because that was what he really meant, the cells of chokeweed on the roots of the alder at Top Bend began dividing.
It was as the young man was slamming the door and walking out in frustration that the cells that had been instructed to rupture, burst open and the spores burst out.
Before the young man had walked down Foremeadow and Five Acre and East Street and could turn back through Cress towards Homefield, the two hairs that the law of continuing had given each spore had whipped and paddled and driven each spore to the place it needed to be and then settled it down.
Before the long day had ended and the old man had fallen asleep in his chair because he was so weary of arguing and worrying about money, the spores released from the chokeweed cells at Top Bend and Middle Bend and Bottom Bend and everywhere else, were beginning to grow in new places. The spores inhaled the richness that had been seeping into the springs because the fields on the high hills had been sprayed so often and the plants that liked slow water did the same.
In all the margins and on the insides of the bends and in the long, straight reach between Top Bend and Middle Bend and behind the island and downstream from the fallen willow and in the deep pool beneath the kingfisher’s nest and along the wide reach between Picket Close and Longate, the chokeweed and the slow-water plants grew and rejoiced and slowed the water more and created the conditions needed for their own survival.
Year 3, July
the willow that had fallen in the flood had long since stopped hinging on the current. It lay diagonally downstream, still and heavy, forcing all the water the stream carried into a channel around its end. So much water was funnelled into the space between the end of the tree and the bank of Oak Meadow that the current there was fast and deep. Water crowfoot still grew there and was filled with food. A long line of fish lived in descending order of size downstream from the tree, as the law of continuing had instructed. They fed well on the flies that drifted downstream on the surface and on the nymphs and shrimps and larvae that the current carried towards them beneath the surface; but the big trout at the front fed best because he took what he wanted and the others got what was left.
The pike lived in the still water behind the willow, sometimes lying over the dark silt that camouflaged her so well, sometimes lying beneath the foliage that trailed from the branch because that hid her completely. She had plenty of food because of the queue of trout. The queue always offered her its next-best fish when she had taken the fish from the front, because the fish that were lined up in ascending order of size downstream shuffled up to fill the space. There was never any consciousness or plan when the pike hunted. Every movement she made was the right movement to make, every line and drift she took was the right line and drift.
The heron saw the pike begin to move not long after the young man had replied to the advertisement to find out just how much a drainage system cost and after Jack Visconti had toured the new Cogent Electronics site in person to satisfy himself there could be no repeat of Milan. The pike had rested for days, slowly digesting; had stayed like a lain log on the bed of silt, unmoving. And then the heron saw the pike’s eyes brighten and tilt; saw her fins begin a slow easing in the water; noticed the trailing edge of her tail begin to crinkle and flex.
The heron did not see the tension that seized the pike’s body like a slow shock rising, but he saw the fins behind her head reach out and splay. He saw the pike’s body bend on the still water and the small pieces of weed and old leaves and the dark detritus in the place where the great fish had lain so long begin to lift and tumble as though in slow-motion; saw the silt stir and loosen and the pike’s aimed head move forward.
The pike took her familiar route, easing herself along close to the fallen willow and then turning towards the current and its line of food. She stayed close to the stream bed as she neared the trout, sliding forward like an aimed lance drifting; making herself a fact of the stream, another shadow only, a line on the bottom.
The pike was interested only in the fish at the head of the queue: the big fish that kept lifting on the current and sipping down the flies that had begun to hatch. The eyes of the pike were fastened onto that fish as hard as a sprung trap.
The pike used a patch of chokeweed as cover for the last short distance. It was when she was only twice her own length away that she stopped swimming and angled her fins and tail on the water and lay still, so that the current carried her into the open and faced her headon, dark upon dark, a shadow upon a shadow.
The trout was high in the water lifting and sliding, taking flies from the surface. The pike was beneath him and could see his belly gleaming. The trout saw only the flickering wings that sailed towards him; was enjoying the excellence of his place out in bright water, far from the black water where an unease always troubled him.
The trout had taken all the flies he could eat when the unease touched his eye when it should not have touched his eye and made an edged nerve tingle. The rings on the surface were still ebbing above him and the last fly he had taken was still in his throat. He turned head-on to the shadow that troubled him but saw only the pike’s jaws and the glaciers rending and the ravening rush begin.
The trout with the scar saw nothing from his place in the queue downstream. He saw only the swirl in the water and the panic of the other fish and the scales that had been rasped from the big trout’s flanks winking past him on the current.
Later, when calm had returned and the silt had settled and the heron had gone; when the pike again rested like a lain log on the stream bed close to the bank and when the other fishes were shuffling up to take their new places in the queue, the trout with the scar edged up one position, also. The biggest trout in the queue, the one that had been second before, had moved forward to take the first position as the law of continuing had told him. It was a little downstream from the willow and a little in from the current; a little out from the line and drift that the pike always took.
Year 3, August
the man in the deer pelt had spent a long time looking into the fire on the night before he died. It was something he often did, sitting in front of the smouldering logs long after the world around him had darkened to smudges.
He had no fear of the shadows that danced and reared. He had learned not to be afraid of the wolves that prowled there or the bears that roared there or of the shufflings of the pigs in the nearby dusk. He knew the wolves and the bears would stay away from the firelight. He liked looking at the pictures the hot embers showed him because they reminded him of his day and often showed him his future.
There was, on the night before he died, nothing in the fire that seemed to show his future though he looked hard for signs of it in the embers and in the yellow, licking flames and in the gases that bubbled and wheezed from the ends of the logs.
There was much about the hunt, he could see all of that clearly.
Near the edge of the fire was one of the logs that stopped the embers spreading. The bark had lifted from it in the heat. Its crinkled edge, black against the brightness behind, showed the woods on the skyline in that day’s dawn. The long, curved strip of ash that had turned from orange to white was the big river below. Here and there in the hot breaths of the fire, shapes and colours changed and showed him the rest.
The small embers showed him the shapes of the round huts all about him and, in the wisps of ashes glowing and shimmering when the night airs touched them, he saw people moving. To the back of the fire, amid the group of sticks that leaned on one another like toppled trees, he could see the pig he had hunted that day, the axe in his hands, the pi
g’s wide eyes, the pig’s tongue lolling and dripping. To the right, in front of the unburned piece of wood that was dark like the cave in the hillside behind him, he could see the lit wisps of embers moving. These were the children running towards him when they saw the pig being carried back home.
It was only when he heard the roar of the bear that was next day to kill him that the man in the deer pelt lifted his eyes to the horizon and thought again as he often did, of the girl.
He had seen the girl a long time before, the day his group had met the other group on the edge of the small valley in the place where the sun rose. He remembered the day well because of the girl and because there had been no fighting and there often was fighting when one group stumbled into the territory of another group and was seen.
He had noticed the girl straight away, even as both sides were showing they were peaceful and were offering the other no threat. His eyes had met her eyes and she had smiled. Her smile had dazzled and warmed him. It had been like the sun coming out.
Later, the two of them had sat together by the little stream where the speckled fish splashed and rolled and tried to catch the big flies with the tall wings that kept coming out of the water and flying under the leaves. He had given her the perfectly round stone he had found in the water and she had studied it closely in her hand. She had smiled again, the same smile, the smile that had been like the sun coming out. She still had the stone clutched in her hand when his group moved on.
The night before he died, the night before the bear killed him and long after the girl had been killed by the jealousy behind the swung club, the man in the deer pelt had spent a long time looking into the fire. After he died, he had spent a long time undisturbed where they laid him.