The Fish Ladder (23 page)

I took out
Highland River
from my backpack. I still hadn’t got beyond the opening chapters. I flicked to the end.

His dismay was vague and ludicrous. From his map-gazing he knew that his river should rise in a loch. He could not have been mistaken . . . And here it was coming out of the earth itself. The realism mocked him.

Vague and ludicrous
. . . I took out the map and opened it. I peered at it very closely. There was no loch. I returned to the book.

He went on over the broken ground and came to a round still pool . . . About him the ground was broken and hag-ridden, but he could see he had not yet reached the crest of the watershed. There remained the suggestion of an upward hollow. He came on another small pool like the first. Then another. A primeval no man’s land of out-spewings like water-logged shell holes . . . And then all at once before him again was the tiny stream and lifting his eyes he saw the far half of the loch, Loch Braighe na h’Aibhne, the water-head.

I picked up the map again. Stared at it. Yes, the stream
did
dis­­­appear, and that could be it re-emerging at the very edge of the page. But there was no loch. I glanced at the back cover of the book as it rested on a peaty knoll. Saw the word
Fiction
in the bottom left-hand corner. Again I scrutinised the map:
Braighe na h’Aibhne
was there, but it described a collection of small pools on the high ground to the south. They looked like a collection of dubh lochs. The book was first published in 1937. Could the loch have dis­­appeared? Was this the result of global warming? Had it sunk into the peat as though through a sponge?

The mountain of Morven that had been hard and bright all afternoon, its screes and growths now clearly defined, was gathering about it an imponderable blue.

There was no mountain marked on my map, and no mountain visible before me. I was puzzled by the discrepancies between the novel, the Ordnance Survey map, and the place in which I found myself. The mist continued to blow in ragged wisps and I contemplated turning back. This hole in the ground was of limited interest, especially after I had read of a hard bright mountain and a non-existent loch, its shores
of pure ground quartz, paler than any woman’s face in any old poet’s dream
. I could try to pick up the stream again, as did the character in the novel, but I was wary of setting out over the moor now that a danger more real than the inconvenience of getting lost in mist had occurred to me. That is, the possibility of drowning in the bog. And it would mean walking off the edge of my map. I wanted to cry with frustration.

But I didn’t. It was still early in the morning. I was ravenously hungry. I made a meal of cheese, apples, raisins and chocolate, and drank the water that I was happy to have brought with me. I packed away the book and map and sat down on the peaty knoll. It was a summer morning in August. I unscrewed the cap of my hip flask and sipped the chilly, slightly metallic, Rioja.

Half an hour later the sun had chased off the mist. The wide bowl of the watershed became visible for the first time. It was filled with heather, and pocked with little pools. The land was still rising, faintly, and there appeared to be a ridge along one edge of the bowl. I stepped out of the crease that held the river and headed for the ridge.

I was anxious as I made my way over the open ground, and kept looking behind me for the dip in the land that marked the head of the strath. Every so often I came across another pool, and circumvented it with anxiety. I couldn’t find any deer-tracks and this, too, worried me. And then I stopped, because I could hear a sound I had heard before, a sound like an indrawn breath. Water. A sudden diversity of bright vegetation confirmed the path of the stream. It was flowing just beneath my feet, just beneath the ground, towards the place where I had come from. I followed the sound, bent low so I could hear. Soon I could see it: a trickle barely a hand-span in width. It was leading me towards the ridge. I glanced back to the neck of the valley, anxious lest the mist return. But the visibility held. At the edge of the plateau was a fringe of reeds, and I stepped up onto a bank of peat, before stumbling at the sight before me.

A loch!

The
loch. Its surface, soft as pewter, mirrored the clouds. Salt-white boulders lined a powdery shore of crystal sand, unmarked and clean, its whiteness stained to the colour of cork by the peat. Nothing disturbed the water, not a ripple, not a fly. I was choked by its loveliness; my senses flooded. As I watched, the low clouds shifted, lifted, and there, beyond the farthest shore, was the slate-green flank of a mountain. So this was Morven! The sky behind the clouds was as pale as a thrush’s egg and the surface of the loch took this new palette for its own. I could see the screes, the grassy slopes, the dark outlines of trees and rocks pencilled in by their elongated shadows. But the vision was momentary and a cloud passed over the mountain, cowling the peak, rearranging the features of the slopes, covering up the sun. My eye returned to the loch. Without the bright reflection I could see to the bottom. The powdered quartz continued beneath the water, a few looping tea-coloured tide-marks as it deepened, the occasional shard of bright white rock. Loch Braighe na h’Aibhne. I sat down on the bank overhanging the shore, my feet dangling above the water, not wanting to spoil its surface.

I don’t know how much time passed, but suddenly I felt that I must go. I hadn’t swum, or drunk the water, or even walked around the loch. I had presumed, when I first arrived, first knew that it was true, that I would swim to the centre, inhabit the water, make it my own, and yet even as my fingers began to tug at my clothes I knew that it was not going to happen. I straightened my clothing. The strongest sense had settled on me, concrete as the mist that covered the mountain, that, if I once disturbed the surface, or entered the water, I would upset a balance both chemical and physical. I didn’t even want to contemplate how long it might take before the stillness of the loch could be recovered.

And yet the rain must do it all the time.

I picked up a handful of the quartz sand and poured it into my pocket, over the silky green hazelnuts that I still had from yesterday. I turned away from the loch and retraced the tiny stream, and this seemed straightforward now, despite its passing underground, and it led me back to the funnel of the valley and the muddy oval where the river re-emerged. It was surprisingly easy walking.

I was following in my footprints, and wondering how long they would remain there, when I was struck by the idea that something was passing, or had ended. I tried to push the feeling away from me, and for the most part I was successful, though I was unable to dismiss it entirely. I again passed the place where I had spent the night, but the dew had vanished and the heather regained its shape. There was nothing to suggest I had ever been there.

I disturbed the eagle, still in her place, and was again unnerved by the owl. The deer came and went as they had throughout my trip. There was no sign of the golden frog. A black seabird rose above me and followed me, crying. I supposed it to be an Arctic skua, we were far enough north, and it remained with me for half an hour, adhering to the path of the stream, and then it circled back across the moor, calling, calling, as though I were a fishing boat and we were at sea, and some good might come from following me. Or perhaps it was curiosity, a desire for companionship, the fascination of living things for one another.

I re-entered the part of the river where the traps were set, and paid careful attention to my footing. But my thoughts ran on independently, looping back now to the loch, and to my decision not to swim. Swimming was one of my passions, one of the ways by which I defined myself. Knew myself. I was also surprised that I had not drunk from it. The idea that had brought me here was the idea that there might just be a well at the end of the world, full of wisdom, and answers, and that I might go and look for it. A lot of the stories associated with the well were about forbidden love. The attempt to explain away, or to cover over, children born of what were often single encounters. Even the miraculous story of the birth of Taliesin – born to an enchantress who had swallowed him whole, while he was a grain of corn, and she was a hen – could be interpreted as a ripping yarn to explain away the need to name a father. Why else would his mother have thrown him into the sea? Then there was the paternity of St Finan Cam of Kinitty, he whose mother successfully maintained that she had been impregnated by a salmon – a big fish tale if ever there was one. St Kentigern’s mother claimed her son was miraculously conceived, although his biographer Jocelyn of Furness would have none of it, stating firmly that
that which was born in her womb she received from a human embrace
, although he speculated that she may perhaps have
taken the drink of oblivion
, and therefore been genuinely unable to put together, or to believe, what had happened to her.

Isak Dinesen wrote: ‘Love, with very young people, is a heartless business. We drink at that age from thirst, or to get drunk. It is only later in life that we occupy ourselves with the individuality of our wine.’ Lovemaking is indeed a heartless business for anyone other than the lovers. It annihilates, blinds, burns, bruises, chokes, consumes, crushes, devours, destroys – and I have only reached D. Cupid pierces our hearts with an arrow, orgasm is a little death. Love is not about personal responsibility, or being considerate of other people’s feelings. Love is impulsive, compulsive, addictive. Lovers are selfish, and can be infuriatingly self-righteous, so that more or less anything is felt to be excusable if it is done in the name of love. Consequences have never come into it.

A secret well there was . . . .

from which gushed forth every kind of mysterious evil.

There was none that could look to its bottom

But his two bright eyes would burst:

If he should move to left or right,

He would not come from it without blemish.

Therefore none of them dared approach it . . .

The day unravelled slowly and I followed the thickening ribbon until it again became a brook. I passed the almost ornamental waterfall as it stepped past Poll Roy, and saw it fortified by the tributary at the boundary of the enclosed land, where it once again regained the character of a river. I recovered the Land-Rover track, and the road reasserted itself. I experienced a sense of homecoming as I stepped onto it.

At the farm I came across a rabbit: beheaded and gutted, and left out on the path. I wondered if it was the blind rabbit from yesterday, but could read nothing into the blackening mess, except that a ghillie had been there, and had left the carcass to fatten the hawks against the winter. Soon I was able to make out the cemetery, white as sugar on the green-gold moor. The spidery tombstones again appeared to move.

When I was below the cemetery a glint of light drew my eye. Looking at the place where it had been I caught a second flash, as though someone were signalling across the moors. I listened hard, but could hear nothing above the rustle of the wind, the anxious spill of skylarks. I had regained the place where birds sang. And then a bounced movement: a four-wheel drive was curling up the road; I could hear the constricted voice of an engine in low gear. There were two men inside, one dressed like a country gent, the other in a donkey jacket and woolly hat. They pulled up alongside me.

‘Good afternoon!’ said the country gent.

‘Good afternoon,’ I replied.

‘Are you walking to Dunbeath?’ he asked. When I nodded he told me that they were going to play the pipes for an old friend in the cemetery, and that if I’d like to accompany them they could run me back to the town when they were done.

‘Thank you, that’s really kind. But I’ve walked all the way from the sea to the loch. If you don’t mind, I’d really like to finish the journey on foot. It’s only a few more miles.’

‘The loch?’

‘Yes. Loch Braighe na h’Aibhne.’ I had no idea how to pronounce the Gaelic.

‘There’s a loch?’

‘Yes.’ And I pointed to the moor. ‘Up there.’

‘Well, do you know, I have lived here all my life and I never knew there was a loch!’ He turned to the other man, and I missed what he said, but I felt a perfect bubble of delight, because I knew that my journey had been special, and I thanked them again, and bid them goodbye, and continued on my path. When I got to the place where the track bent I glanced back towards the cemetery. I watched the two men search for the key and unlock the iron gate. The man in the donkey jacket raised his pipes; but the wind was against them and all I could hear were the summer bees and the river. In less than an hour I had reached my car, but I continued beyond it, beneath the stone bridge and the boomerang-shaped viaduct, past a dozen or so fishermen’s cottages. As I approached the harbour I saw two lovers on a wooden bench, caught in the net of their own arms and legs, their noses almost touching. The tips of their fingers wandered, collecting information, each about the other, as much as their senses could withstand. And then behind them, high above the water, came a flick of silver, a comb of falling droplets, and the arching, turning body of a salmon. It must have entered the river mouth, even as I had reached it.
Did you see?
I wanted to cry to the lovers.
Did you see it?
But of course they didn’t, their eyes were closed. But I saw, and my heart filled at this coincidental, timely fish.