How elvers came to mistake a child’s face for the moon

In gratitude

When I was a child an old man taught me to fish with a fly. This was in the days when everything was still possible, when the planet seemed endless. Like all the best teachers, he wove the lessons I was not yet ready to understand into the fabric of the simple skills that a young boy could carry in his pockets. In the years to come, when I was looking for grown-up answers, I would sometimes find that they had been in my possession all along, encoded in some detail of the sacred rituals with which the old man had surrounded the taking of a fish.   

I understand now that he knew he was dying. I think it pained him that my apprenticeship was far from complete. The last but one time we met, on the riverbank by the great drooping willow below which was a mighty trout we would never catch, he insisted on teaching me a new piece of fieldcraft. Unlike his other lessons, which had always been set in the endlessly renewing present moment of the river before us, he said that this one was ‘for later’. He taught me how to thread my line through the tiny eye of a hook with my own eyes closed. Unquestioning, I stashed this new curiosity amongst the other treasures in the deep pocket of my anorak. Then we listened to the song of the river for a long time before we began to fish.  

I grew. The treasures of my anorak pockets were duly transferred to an army-surplus camouflage jacket. The old man had been gone two years and in the hurry and bustle of being a boy I rarely thought of him. I ranged over other rivers, read of other fish.

See me now, a skinny child of fifteen stood up to my hips in a deep, black slack of a fast-flowing river. It is night. Darkness comes in many forms. Tonight there is a crescent moon peering at me, with curiosity and perhaps a little concern, through branches of summer trees which cradle the river in cupped hands. Tonight the river has come alive. Well, that’s a silly thing to say. The river is eternally alive. I mean that tonight a new life has entered the river, and is here now, in the pool where I stand, just five miles from the ocean. Sea Trout have come in off the high tide. The most highly strung of all fish, their presence spreads upstream like panic through a crowd. Ostensibly, they are the reason I am here, trying to sneak unnoticed into their world, trying to be nothing. Wishing, with only a child’s understanding of what it would mean, to possess one of these magical silver fish.

But fly fishing at night is tricksy and I have lost my fly, snagged in the unseen branch of a snickering alder. To replace it, I need to thread an unseeable fibre through the eye of an invisible hook, barely a millimetre wide. If I am unable to perform this feat I will have to retreat, out of the river, out of the night itself. I will have to insult the darkness with torchlight and such an offence would be too grave to be forgiven. At least, not before dawn wipes the slate clean and this most auspicious night of my life has been lost forever.

I fumble in the pockets of memory and retrieve the old man’s instructions. Just as he had shown me, the eye is threaded and my young fingers tie off the simple bloodknot that they have tied a thousand times before. The moon, satisfied that I am river-worthy, goes about her business and leaves me to it. I hold down the waves of fear that come from being alone in deep water late at night. Then I fish. My fly drifts and swims through the upside-down cathedral which lies below the concealing reflections of the water’s surface. Up the line to my waiting fingertips come coded messages describing pebble-smoothed chambers, complex eddies, hidden snags. Visions of shapes and water melodies form between the pad of forefinger and thumb. My fingers are listening for a fish.

I inch my way down the pool, covering the water, nook by eddy, as the old man had described. I do not encounter a fish, much less catch one. They have heard the bass boom of my boy’s racing heart. They have identified the fizz and crackle of a human brain in their midst and glimmered away elsewhere. It will be another two summers before I learn to conceal myself from them.

Still, it was something, I thought back then, to have reached the tail of the pool without stumbling or splashing. To have fished, calmly and with reverence, resisting the night-terrors and the longing for a warm bed. Standing in the shallows I stow my fly, ready for another night. It is time to leave the water and begin the moonlit walk back across the fields to my bike, hidden beneath the hedgerow. But I am reluctant  to be on my way. The story that the night has been telling does not feel as if it is finished.

I feel a new, high note in the water, here at pool’s end where a small feeder-stream enters the main river. It hurries the last few feet down a chute of polished rock, trips and dumps itself unceremoniously into the gravel at my feet, as if afraid that it might miss the last great pilgrim train to the sea. The slide it has worn in the rock is fringed with moss, patiently catching splashes and drips, which it releases to the beat of some internal metronome, down through a miniature rainforest. There is other movement, glistening in these moss-woods. At first I see only a single dark entity moving everywhere upwards through the branches. Bending closer it resolves into individuals. Little black pieces of wiggly spaghetti with eyes which see my pale face and wonder how the moon suddenly got so big, but never mind, we have work to do. Elvers. A fall of elvers come to fill the world with eel. Studiously, they continue to climb. After their five thousand mile journey from the Sargasso Sea they are not about to be distracted by a lunar anomaly.        

For ten minutes they crawl upwards, uncountable, each one that reaches the top of the cascade replaced by another at the bottom. Then nothing but the drip, drip, drip of the moss. And an old man standing beside me in the singing river. The elvers were his final lesson. I am still unravelling it.

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