by Brian Clarke
And so all the green fields that had once lain to the east of the stream and to the west, except for the section of Foremeadow that had been fenced off for the mares, were levelled and drained and treated and combed and made to look from the air like pegged-out skins. The fine lines that the tractors had cut through them were perfectly straight and perfectly spaced and the drills that had been prepared were precisely the right depth. The new seeds had been sown at regular intervals in them and all the prescribed fertilisers and pesticides were at work.
The young man who had finally made the old man see sense and who was confident now of making money by moving forward instead of losing it by clinging to the past, walked the land often to see what was being accomplished. He no longer seemed to be in such deep thought when he walked, or constantly to be throwing a chosen stone from one hand into the other and he took many photographs so that some day he could show them to the children that he and his fiancée were planning to have.
The old man who made himself busy about the farm knew in his heart that the decision had been inevitable, though he only looked at the photographs when the young man pressed him and he often felt a weariness roll over him like a wave.
Year 4, January
she had never spawned at the falls before. Each time she had spawned before it had been in the Tussock Stream because that was where the law of continuing had told her to spawn.
A few trout had swum up the Tussock Stream to spawn since before the counting of the years had begun. The elk with the tic in his brain, the one that was on his way to drown in the swamp, had terrified the fish in the Tussock Stream the day he blundered in among them. The man in the deer pelt and the girl whose smile had been like the sun coming out had watched the newly-hatched fry flashing in the Tussock Stream on the day he gave her the perfectly round stone. Claudius Nepos had often used his broadsword to skewer fish in the Tussock Stream because he liked their eggs so much. Henry de Montfort’s feckless dog would chase the fish in the Tussock Stream every chance it got. It was while he was watching a hen fish dig her scoop in the Tussock Stream that the old man’s father had noticed the stone axe that was now in Farley museum. There had never been a year when the trout had not spawned there.
The hen fish that the trout with the scar claimed close to the falls had spawned in the Tussock Stream twice before. The first time had been on the day that the shares in Plantains and Greenmount had begun to soar because of the contracts the two firms had won on the development. That first time, the water in the Tussock Stream had been as clear and cool as when the law of continuing first made the stream. Springs had even welled up through the bed of the Tussock Stream that year to wash her eggs from beneath while the current kept them clean on top. The hen fish had managed to spawn in the Tussock Stream the following year as well, not long after the Ministry issued another caution that the Broadchalk and the Clearwater were to be protected absolutely and the search for piped water was moved further away to make sure they were. That year, though, the hen fish had to choose a place much nearer the mouth of the Tussock Stream because higher up silt had settled in the margins and rushes and cress had grown out to secure it.
It was on the same day that the young man received the letter asking him to go to the bank for a review of progress that the hen trout learned she would not be able to spawn in the Tussock Stream a third year. Though the hen trout looked high and low for the gravels she needed if she were to spawn, she could not look high enough because all the gravel had been grubbed up from the stream bed and tipped out onto the banks as part of the drainage plan.
On the same day that the young man went to the bank to give his report on progress and house prices in Old Stinston reached an all-time high because most executives working on the development wanted a character house in a village and not one of the new ones that were being built on estates, there were many trout on the gravels downstream from the falls. They were all jostling in the centre of the stream because so many good spawning places towards the bank had been lost to silt and dead chokeweed.
The trout with the scar saw the hen fish from the Tussock Stream as soon as she neared the falls and he stayed with her as though her own shadow. The hen fish quartered the gravels near the falls looking for somewhere to spawn, but everywhere she went and the trout with the scar followed fish were already rolling and splashing and digging in the best places.
It was only on the day when the new borehole for Cogent Electronics was allowed against technical advice and one of the geologists said there were now so many holes in that area he imagined you could tear the place off like a postage stamp, that the hen fish from the Tussock Stream found a good spot to spawn. She moved onto the low mound where the gravel was as clean as gravel could be the moment the fish already on it had moved away.
The hen fish rolled onto her side there and began to dig up the same gravel the other fish had just dug up. When she rolled and twisted and the clean stones lifted, the eggs that had just been laid under them by the other fish were exposed and carried downstream on the current.
The splashes the hen fish made flew so high into the air that Sid Hughes stopped his tractor to see what was happening. He crept low behind the hawthorn bush that for some reason had not been pulled out when the other bushes had been pulled out and crouched down.
Hughes watched the fish for a long time. He saw them dashing about and rolling onto their sides and making a commotion and sometimes he saw stones being buoyed and lifted and carried downstream as though weightless, but he could not see the eggs laid by earlier fish being lifted and exposed and carried downstream as well. He could not see the little fish that had the hollow flanks and the great hungers inside them darting out from behind their stones to eat the drifting eggs and did not know why the trout waiting to spawn kept ranging from side to side and opening their mouths or why the dabchick kept diving so often or why the duck kept up-ending and dabbling about.
Though he spent a long time with his eyes fixed on the fish, Sid Hughes never once glimpsed the light that fined to a bright point inside the head of the trout with the scar, nor did he once catch the high note that sang and sang while the hen fish from the Tussock Stream laid her eggs and the milt from the cock fish flowed. He was at completely the wrong angle to see how thin the two fish were.
Hughes was on the other side of the wide, brown field when the next two trout moved up onto the low mound where the gravel was as clean as gravel could be because it had been dug up so many times. He did not see the hen fish in that pair gradually dig her own scoop in it; nor did he see how fish after fish continued to move onto the same low mounds everywhere because there were so few places left that were suitable for spawning. He did not see how the eggs that had been so perfectly hidden by one pair of fish were each time dug up and exposed by the next. He did not see how the eggs that were not eaten by the fish and the birds were carried into the silted margins and onto the dead chokeweed to die.
Sid Hughes was so fascinated by the behaviour of the fish that morning that he told his mates about them at lunch time and watched them again that afternoon before fastening the chain and dragging out the hawthorn that had somehow been missed. He was on the other side of the stream and clearing out one of the ditches when the last of the trout spawned and only their eggs and a few others remained hidden and undisturbed.
By the time Peter Althorpe was spending most of his time on the Lincoln issue and Simon Goode, the biologist, was preparing for a stint as a witness at the Dorchester inquiry, the fine silt was settling again over the gravels the fish had cleaned. It was settling over the gravels and the eggs beneath them even though the trout had spawned where they had been told to spawn. It was settling over the gravels and casting shadows over the eggs even though this was the same place where there had been no small thing, not even the uttermost small detail, that the plan had not made perfect for spawning.
Year 4, February
it was only days after the supermarket chain offered the young man t
he possibility of a contract that the stone that had been in place without moving since the fields were first sown, tilted a little to one side.
Just after Jo Hamilton and her team sat down to devise something new to attract the media because the torchlight vigil had proved a bit of a flop, the stone tilted so far over that it was scarcely this side of imbalance.
At the exact moment the third helicopter of the week was touching down at the Cogent Electronics site because of the pace things were moving, the stone that had reached the point of imbalance and that had wobbled uncertainly for what seemed an age, tumbled and rolled and crashed into the valley beneath it and earth slid down behind it like loosened shale.
When the low sun came out it lit the top of the stone lying deep in the furrow and the tip of the green shoot that had pushed it aside.
Not long after the road that had been carved into the Frontage and the Hangers was finished, the young man on the farm looked across the flat, combed land and saw the green haze of shoots growing everywhere over it and called the old man to come and look.
Year 4, March
the trout that had once owned the fine place between the island and the Oak Stream but that had afterwards been driven away from that place and many other places because he became old and weak, had given up and buried his head in the weeds a long time ago. He had died around the time the supermarket chain said it might offer the young man a contract but only if his produce was perfect in every detail and if he could deliver what it wanted in bulk.
The two thin fish that had tried to hold their places in the queue behind the trout with the scar both died because no fish anywhere else would let them in after the trout with the scar had driven them away.
The trout that had gradually been sickening like so many of them, the one that had only been able to hold the shallow lie near the Otter Stone where the dead chokeweed put a catch in his gills, died just as the new tractor was leaving the yard.
Even the trout with the scar was thinner than he should have been by the time the kingcups would have been opening if there had been any. Though he had driven away the two thin fish that lived in the queue behind him because he needed their spaces, he could not get enough food. He had an emptiness inside him because of the way the water level had fallen and because so many places that should have been making nymphs and grubs and water caterpillars and flies to feed him had been lost to the silt and to the slow-water plants that were beginning to grow again and to the chokeweed that had died and covered the margins with a kind of brown fungus and to the places around the fungus where only the sliders and the soft-bodied things could live.
The hollow that had been growing in his flanks even before the law of continuing had wrung him out on the gravels, was putting an ache all through him. There was an ache in the guts of all the fish, even inside the fish at the head of the queue behind the fallen willow.
And so, when the tractor left the yard and began to spray the fresh, green shoots with more fertilisers to help them grow and with more insecticides to kill any grubs and beetles that remained in the soil so that the produce could be as perfect as the supermarket chain wanted and its customers now demanded, there were fewer of the older fish in the stream to be disturbed by the vibrations it made and there were fewer young fish because so many eggs had died in the gravels.
When the tractor worked along the edge of the stream and the automatic sprayer sprayed everywhere behind it, the trout that had gradually been sickening like so many of them, the one that had only been able to hold the shallow lie near the Otter Stone where the dead chokeweed put a catch in his gills, was quite unmoved. He was unmoved even when Sid Hughes misjudged the turn and the sprayed granules spattered the surface like hailstones above him. He could not have been less interested when the bank collapsed and covered him.
By the time the lapwing had wheeled and turned and searched for the place where she had laid her eggs year after year but could not find it, the fertiliser that had been in the soil where the bank collapsed was beginning to leach out and the slow-water plants inhaled it as though in delirium. The nuclei in the cells of chokeweed drew it in and rejoiced and sent out more instructions, so that more cells were made into two by the membranes that crept across them and more spores burst out from the thin walls that ruptured.
By the time the cuckoo had quartered the wide, flat fields to find a home for her eggs but could not, the insecticides that had been in the soil where the bank collapsed were dissolving near the shrimp and the shrimp was feeling the stinging start.
The nymph of the grey-winged fly near the mouth of the Barn Stream felt the same kind of stinging after some granules were accidentally sprayed all around her and so did the nymph clinging to the cracked stone between the Oak Stream and the Barn Stream and so did the water caterpillars holding on to the crowfoot plant opposite what had once been Barrows.
The two furnace-eyed grubs that had begun to fight over the shrimp’s body when it settled in the dip beside them stopped fighting one another when their own stinging began. When the stinging rose until it was like a fire raging within them, first the smaller grub lay on its side and then the larger; and the two of them lay side by side near the shrimp ignoring it completely; and they fought and scrabbled with their legs at nothing in the water above them and they bit and clawed at nothing in the water near their heads.
By the time all the land had been sprayed and the uniform shoots were standing straight and strong in their long, neat drills without a blemish or an egg or a living thing upon them, the two grubs and the shrimp were rocking in harmony in the deep dip together, lilting in the current that turned there.
Year 4, April
the time when the changes in the young salmon should have been completed, so that the fish were ready to move downstream to the sea after their time in the stream, had been written into the fish before their lights were switched on.
The time was the same time that had been written into young salmon since before the counting of the years had begun. It was the time when the kingcups would have been gleaming in the rich, damp fields and when the fallow deer does would have been feeling their young beginning to stir inside them.
It was the time when the springs would have been in full flow because the rains would have filled up the hills again, the time when the temperature of the water would not have become too high for the changes in young salmon to be completed. It was that time when the day was the special length that made young salmon want to head for the sea once the changes within them were done.
The message that said young salmon could go to sea when the changes in them were completed and when everything else was right but not before and not after, had been written into every young salmon that had ever swum in the stream.
By the time the trout had begun to spawn and dig up one another’s eggs, the message written into the young salmon had already changed the shapes that had fitted them to the stream and shaped them the way salmon in the sea should be. By the time the first green shoot had unfurled on top of the ploughed ridge and sent the stone crashing into the valley below and sent all the earth tumbling after it like loosened shale, the message written into the young salmon had caused the spots and smudges on their sides to fade and was sending a silver pigment across their skins.
But by the time the flowers on the water crowfoot should have been starting to open and the skylark should have been spilling out his song, the springs had not risen even though for the first time in years it had rained in winter as it used to rain.
By the time the bee that was not there would have been exploring the kingcup flower that was not there and the sedge warbler that was not there would have been cocking her head to the tapping from inside the cuckoo’s egg that was absent, the springs were low and the stream was already close to summer heat.
And so while the work raced ahead in the Broadchalk valley and the sun burned strongly for all the rain there had been and David Hoffmeyer was considering an extension to his site that wou
ld make it so big it would use enough electricity and water for a city of 12,000 people and by the way that was US citizens and not Brits, the message that had been written into all the young salmon was being rewritten by an older message, rarely used. The older message that was rarely used said the springs were not the right height for any salmon to go to sea and that the changes that needed to be completed could not be completed in time because the water was already too warm and it could only get warmer because summer was coming.
The colours on the sides of the young salmon began to darken again and the silver that had begun to migrate over their skins began to fade. The spots and smudges came back again, so that the young fish were camouflaged for life in the stream again and not for life in the sea.
It was on the day that the young men in masks were freeing the mink from her cage as an act of kindness, that it happened. The young salmon in the pool close to the falls, the one that had made a space for himself between the large stone that had the empty snail shell on its near side and the medium-sized stone that had the threads of chokeweed clinging to its far side, seemed to lunge at his neighbour suddenly for no reason. Then all the young salmon began to whirl and jostle with one another because the only time when everything could be right for them to go to the sea had come and gone without everything being right and the ancient message rarely used was preparing them to spend another year in the stream and the threat and the stress of it was bearing upon them.
Year 4, May
it was not that the wind was blowing more strongly than it sometimes did at mayfly time, though there were several days when the crows did more walking than flying and when the dust from the margins of the great, wide fields was spiralled into the air like genies.