The pool below the force* and the heavens above

The complicated cosmology of Brown Trout in the Upper Eden

Do you see us? As we flicker into shadows among tree roots, under ledges, in clefts. I doubt it. You are not herons of the piercing eye. The heron, with her numbing stillness, we fear. You with your flap and babble, not so much. We call you shadow-casters - or some would say, less politely, sun-blotters. No, for once you bipeds do not have a leading role in this story. Barely a speaking part.

We are the guild of the force pool and we have held the knowledge since the time of the ice.

Hellgill Force, Upper Eden

When the earth was reborn and the new rivers were ready to be shown to the sun and the stars, the ocean shocked each one alive with a charge of silver Sea Trout. Our ancestors. They pressed inland, shivering over rocks, contradicting cascades, near breaking their hearts to reach this, the force pool. Here we were given spots. We became dappled, variegated, speckled.

You think our livery is camouflage. It is a language. A set of glyphs more subtle and elastic than any you have committed to tablets and parchment. Our symbols and shades could encode the universe if we asked it of them. We do not go in for such vainglory. Our work is here, in the pool below the force. We write the story of our race in the motifs on our flanks. And the story is not yet over. It is our guild’s duty to witness its completion, however many generations that may take.

Spates come to the Upper Eden with little warning. But our eyes, those eyes you so disparage - cold fishes’ eyes you say, blank and without souls - they see the first colouring of the water. Without haste or hurry we side-step under the current to our places of sanctuary. Then we listen to the growing rage of the rainfall, its wildness corralled from stream channel to river bed and hurled into the grindstone of the force. I say that we ‘listen’. That’s the word which the Translator’s Dictionary Trout - English supplies. It feels inadequate. We hear with the fine otolith bones deep inside our heads and with the lateral line which runs the length of our bodies. There is a richness to this, an opulence. We know the shape and the movement of the space around us, even when the water becomes opaque.

The river falls as fast as she rises. After the roiling ruckus of a spate come gifts. Earthworms flooded out of their burrows, grubs washed from the bushes. In winter, if the river is generous, we receive eggs. Tiny gems, more valuable than rubies. Trout eggs. We did not lay them or fertilise them. Ours are safely tucked away under the gravel or else long lost to the flood. These eggs have fallen from above and have been held for us in the water-gyre spinning at the bottom of the waterfall’s long plunge. We say the required devotions and eat them. This winter-gift of eggs is how we know that the old words are true: there is a heaven above the force and in heaven there are trout. Our heaven is not like yours, up there somewhere in the air. What do we care for air, that unbearable choking absence? The heaven above the force is a river, delicate and deep, bristling with caddis and singing with mayflies.

Once every few decades, though we have yet to understand the rules by which the timings are determined, an even greater miracle unfolds. After a spring spate we find, huddled in a corner of the pool, a handful of alevin, their yolk-sacks not yet empty, or a couple of young parr with the seven grey bars of their juvenile markings still clearly visible.  We consult our records but they belong to no known pedigree. The poor creatures are dumbstruck. The alevin never survive for long after they drop into our world. We say the appropriate devotions for them. Occasionally one or two of the parr survive and grow. We find for them a place amongst us. We have always referred to these miraculous off-comers, out of a great fondness for them, as the children of heaven. Though they may stay with us for many years they rarely thrive, preferring the dark places in the margins or the smoothed chambers behind the force. And yet, our bloodlines have sometimes mixed.

As each new child of heaven grows and loses its juvenile thumb-print bars we begin to see the story set down in its skin. It is written in a variant of a script so old that few of us can begin to decipher it. It employs a bold shading of yellow that we have not used in millennia. The hawthorn reds so necessary for our syntax are almost absent, replaced by a complex array of jagged black specks.

Our understanding of these old manuscripts, written afresh on the skin of our foster-children, is still partial and the subject of debate. It seems that they might be developments of some of our own earliest world-narratives. Both versions, ours and theirs, include the motifs of the land forever rising and fracturing while the river constantly wears it back down and levels it. Their version goes further. It seems to suggest that even the force, one day, will be worn away, leaving the river to glide smoothly from heaven to the ocean. We find this hard to comprehend. Would it mean that heaven had fallen or would the world have been redeemed? The guild will have to wait and witness for many more generations before we can unravel this mystery.

*In many of the dialects of northern England the word for waterfall is force.

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