His thighs bristle with electric heat that runs through their sinews, as he uses their leverage to push himself to increasing altitudes. The journey is doubled by the fields of rough, loose scree that mottle the mountainside between patches of pine. In winter, these shoals of broken rock become the unstable foundation of the frequent avalanches that threaten the entire range. Under the spring sun, they are a slippery hazard best avoided. Working up a sweat, he pauses a moment to allow the brisk dawn to cool his skin.
Pressing on, he frequently taps his climbing sticks against the rocks along his path. Some folk down at the lodge, in the bleary pre-dawn gloom, had warned him that a mountain lion had been seen around these parts. The last thing he wants to do is creep up on it and scare it. Better to have it hear him coming, so they can both make the effort to stay out of each other’s way. It’s unlikely they’d see each other. A dense bracket of fog clings to the stone edifice, connecting the white clouds somewhere, not far, above, with the breezeless forest that rolls down the side of the slope into the valley beyond. All is encased in obscurity and united by blindness. A model world set in a cloud of milk.
Gravity gives way. For a moment, time veers from its usual course as he scrambles to right himself. Small pebbles go bouncing down the incline and, had he not grabbed the boulder to his right, he’d be going with them. He takes a few, heavy breaths, his heart settling down, and leavers himself from his perch. Pack unloaded, he inspects the damage. A shallow graze on his ankle, no more. The sock is badly worn though.
He takes the time to properly clean the wound. Infection doesn’t need much of a foothold, and a few moments of his time isn’t worth days of illness. It is this logic, and the tang of pure alcohol in his nose, that makes him think of the time little Ellie went careening over her handlebars. Damn near screamed the whole street down. Running from the house, he thought he’d find her hit by a car with bits of bone poking out of her agile frame. But it was just a scraped knee from a bad jump up the curb. He sat with her on the edge of their garden, wiping the tears from her cheek and the pods of blood from her leg. She bawled at the sting of the sanitizing wipes, his explanation about the necessary application falling on deaf, fear-filled ears. He was tempted to stop. He didn’t want to hurt her. He didn’t want her to fear him. But he feared, fears, the uncertainty of sickness more than the certainty of pain. He took his time with the knee, then sat cradling her until the evening came around and they went inside to make dinner.
He’s been wiping the ankle too long and the tissue has gone from pink to red. He finds his temperature elevated and his heart is thumping hard against his ribs. His vision swirls and his brain feels light. Pushing back against this rising dizziness, he leans back to stop himself overbalancing and falling down the slope. It’s like the blood has been drained from his head. It's ten minutes before he feels right enough to sit up on the rock. In that time he lies, his chest rising and falling, eyes closed to the unseen sky above and the memories disturbed by the undercurrent of his thoughts.
He leaves that fractured structure behind and soon finds himself at the lake. It’d be easy to miss even without the fog. The natural depression in the land and a thicket of pine conspire to hide it from the path that leads onto the plateau. He can see little reflected in its glacial surface. Only the fog and himself. Winding around its pebble shore, he finds himself at an outcrop that juts towards the centre of the lake. At his back are the large pines and firs that cover the forest bed in shade, as if sheltering the younger trees from some hunter above. He lowers his heavy pack and sits listening for a while, having little to look at. The soft pap and suck of the water against the smooth stones. The dancing pitch of birdsong, made clear by the cold air.
These mornings are a dime-a-dozen, but so rarely does he wake early enough to appreciate them. There had been a time when they made a frequent appearance in his life. His youngest, Alison, had a spree of bad dreams lasting two years. Induced by Marie’s treatment and its inevitability, so said his mother, in not-so-kind words. He, and Marie, quietly refused the diagnosis while internally accepting the probable truth of it. The contents of Alison’s dreams were kept from him and whispered only into the ear of his wife. That stung a little. As uncomfortable as it is to admit, some children are closer to one parent than the other. He’d always been able to communicate with his youngest without the obfuscation that clouded his conversations with Ellie. The opposite was true between Marie and Alison. But the dreams were strictly encoded to the mother, not the father. What disturbed him most was Marie’s refusal to relay what had been entrusted to her. Delicately, she assured him it was nothing to worry about. That was partly what kept him up those nights. That and the reduced room in their bed made by Alison’s thrashing. So often he found himself awake and attuning to the rhythm of the day long before the rest of his small family. He’d sit on the chair in their room with the window eased open and listen to the dawn chorus, long before the first purs of car engines disturbed the roads. By the copper light of sunrise, he’d see the sleeping curl of Marie and Alison, wrapped in blankets and dreams, their faces relaxed into their natural states.
Through the glass, that image crystalizes, fed on the sediment of his reverie. He sits with it awhile, on the edge of the lake. Then he begins to unpack his tackle, as the nostalgia dissolves back into murkier details of reality.
He builds the light rod and ties some line to a tree to stretch it out. He wets the leader in his mouth and uses the slickness to knot the lure in place. Gossamer strands of saliva stick to his fingers. Then he takes the time to arrange all his possessions into places he can reach them; the net, board, knife and the cool box half-filled with ice, which he tops up with lake water. All else he carries in his hand or on his jacket.
The first cast splashes and sends out concentric ripples across the lake. The top-lure slices a path back towards him and the tick of the reel counts its progress. He sees the shimmer of a follow. The broadside of the trout lurks beneath the lure for a moment, before disappearing into the depths. Too fast or too slow? Always hard to tell if the fish is too wary or not excited enough. On the second cast, he strikes and feels the hook. It hammers the lure. Bouncing from the waters, the trout pivots in the air before splashing out of sight. The sound is immense across the stillness of the lake. He watches his line extend into the gloom of the fog and keeps the tension held firm in his hands. He feels it tiring. The rod bends almost double, but already he is beginning to reel in, pushing the suppleness of the instrument as far as it will go.
After a minute, his arms are tired but the whole body of the trout is exhausted. It sits in his net by the water, flexing its powerful body to no effect. He uses the pliers to unhook the lure and takes the fish by the gills to the board he has set up on the shore. He must act quickly and calmly, before the suffocation stresses the fish too much and causes it to thrash, inflating its flesh with adrenaline and lactic acid.
Lay flat against the grain of the polished wood, the fish eyes him, its mouth opening and closing. He holds its body firmly to the board and gently places a metal pick, something shaped like an oversized sewing needle, to the side of the trout’s head. Then he presses. There is a second of resistance in the flesh, then a dull click as the spike finds its home. The trout's whole body seizes, held in place like one of those singing fish contraptions without a battery. Then it slowly relaxes. It’s braindead now and won’t feel any pain, or so he’s been led to believe. But the muscles still spasm from the failing nervous system and the heart continues to beat on residual cell energy. The next step in the process is to bleed it, to stop any coagulation that may cause rot. He makes cuts inside both gills and one in the artery by the tail. Thick blood runs over his knuckles. Then comes the part he hates most. He takes a long, thin wire, that could be an unwound coat hanger, and inserts it into the cut at the base of the tail. From here he weaves it into the exposed spinal cord and proceeds to thread the metal through until it can extend no more, gritting his teeth against nausea. Then he spends a few minutes twisting the metal around, inside the spine, annihilating the key parts of the trout’s nerves in the process. This stops the majority of the post-mortem thrashing and, in his view, destroys the soul of the fish once and for all. He washes the body of any excess blood and spinal fluid in the lake. Then, to prevent any more muscle movement, he places it in the cool box filled with the icy slurry.
Most people let the fish suffocate or hit them over the head with a bishop. Both processes can stress the meat and induce a tangy flavour that spoils quicker than this method. It's hotly debated whether fish can feel pain or not. But he reckons it's worth his time either way. Both for the sake of the fish and for the sake of his palette when he eats it later.
Marie used to make all sorts from the fish he’d bring home. Then he tried his hand at it too. Pies, roasts, stews. Both of them got pretty good at it. A few months into treatment she quietly started to eat less and less of his offerings. He thinks now that he took that too personally. It wasn’t that she was refusing his cooking, but food altogether. How his frustrations grew, seeing her limp, pale and skinny, but unable to eat the wealth of food stocked in the old kitchen. Though his mind knew it was no fault of hers, he spent hours over the dining table, watching his daughters eat while their mother stared across the room at nothing, wanting to scream all the air from his body. Just pick up a fork and save yourself, Marie. For me. For the kids. But the tumour wouldn’t let her.
Already he’s back at his perch, ready to start casting. There’s a part of him that wishes he’d taken them all with him, on these trips. Shared with them the solitude he found in the palm of nature. But at the time it was his escape. His place, free of work and the world. Even free of his greatest joy; them. And in the moment you always think there will be later. The past and future are just brackets to the present, one filled and one waiting to be filled. An infinite resource to be used. Until it is too late and the finite aspect of life makes itself known. He waits a moment, before he casts, seeing that some of the fog has cleared.
There’s a ripple on the water. It extends across the lake towards him like the first keystroke of a piano. When it touches the edge of the shore, ending its journey, he retraces its passage across the lake to its origin. There, on the opposite bank, a slender figure stoops low by the water.
A pink tongue flicks in and out of the mountain lion’s mouth, lapping up the cold lake water. Her soft pelt eases around powerful muscles. A pink, matte snout tests the air and, finding something odd on the weak breeze, compels her to look up. He sees her jade eyes dart up and lock into his own curious gaze. But her posture doesn’t change. Her ears don’t flatten. Her teeth don’t bare. She drinks and he watches. When she has drunk her fill, she raises her head and takes one last look at the man across the foggy lake.
He watches her turn slowly and make her way back into the brush. Before she gets there she is ambushed by two cubs, who burst from their hiding places and make clawless pounces onto her back. The lioness makes a low growl, that he can hear even at this distance, and the reprimand forces the cubs into a slow trot behind their mother. In one moment, they are there. Then, they are gone.
Paddy Dobson
9th August 2020