Serialisation of ‘Waiting for a Hunter’s Moon’ by Simon Smith
‘Sea sounds were the concomitant of Celtic prayer. Without sea-cadence, prayer to them sounded thin.’- Ronald Blythe, River Diary
I arrive from the western end: slowly, softly, a footpad stalking through the long tufts of marram. Their wet stems, loaded with the day’s early dew, creak like eaves beneath my feet.
We are into the early flushes of spring, but still getting by on meagre rations for now, the watery gruel of sunlight in this early season still not enough to fully energise me after a long, drab winter. Tired, I still seem to travel as much by feel as by sight, a throwback to the late dawn/early dusk format of the winter days from which we are only just beginning to drag ourselves. I crest the first mound, half falling, half resisting in those giant bounding strides which, as kids, we usually reserve for those special times when playing in deep sand or a sudden dump of snow. Each new soft step I take rapidly infills behind me, an egg-timer trickling reminding me that I need to get this job done quickly before I get ready for work, but not so quickly that I don’t have time to take a moment.
Putting the bucket down, I scan the scene, drinking in shadow and wind, movement and depth, involuntarily ending up back in a descriptive writing lesson I taught a group of year 10s yesterday. “When writing a piece of description” I tell my students, “there’s one thing that you need to think about at all times. Just one thing that will make your writing really tick.”
“Are you talking about similes sir? And metaphors?”
“That’s good, Jonathan; they do help to a certain extent, but that’s not what I’m talking about.”
“The senses sir?” asks Chloe. “Using all five senses so that the reader can see and smell and hear everything in the scene?”
“That’s a nice point too, Chloe. Really important. But it’s not what I’m after. Anyone?” Rows of blank faces.
I go on to explain to them that life is the key ingredient — life in all its living, breathing, bright, dark, quiet, loud forms. “Without it” I say, “all you will ever produce is a very pretty, but very flat, painting made out of words. Lovely, but nothing more than a still image when there should be a blurring cascade of film.” I try to go into more depth, explaining how we exist not just in space but in time, time that passes us in an ever-moving torrent of change: the tick of a clock; the movement of the sun across a wall; the rising of a tide. Although they produce some very nice pieces of writing, most of them lack the spark I’m speaking of. Marking the pieces later, I realised, not without a sense of irony, that this wasn’t something that could be easily taught in a classroom. It was no lecture theatre theory that taught me what I try to teach others; it was actually being in places like this, at times just like this.
The eastern flanks of the sand dunes rising behind me catch the first of the early light like sunstruck gables, the penumbra at their wide concave bases slowly dissipating in a yellowy-white half-light that gradually dilutes into the morning’s slow-growing dawning.
My journey presses on upstream. As the estuary funnels and narrows into the river, my progress meanders along with it so that I am pushed further upstream, past chunks of driftwood and and the dogged spikes of sea holly.
It is low tide now; I can smell it. There is nothing that can replicate the tang of the estuary at low tide, that unique mixture of muddy clay, ozone and rotting bladder wrack that worms its way into the head via the nostrils and refuses to let go. It is one of those few places, like a cool, damp wooded grove or agricultural fields mantled in their ammoniac reek of chicken shit, that are first experienced through smells and which, after that first encounter, are immediately locked away in the memory bank only to be dusted off years later when a chance visit to a similar place immediately sets the senses off on a journey across your Proustian mind map.
Finally, I reach the spot I’m looking for, its dark, glossy backdrop of river mud and its ossuary silence inhabiting the place as always. A strange image, perhaps, but then, no; an accurate one. Ever since I was a child this place has held the same kind of fascination that inhabited my imagination when roaming old churchyards: the skeletal frames of shopping trolleys quietly going about the collection of barnacles on their exposed ribs; sections of old net and fishing line jostled about by successive tides sounding a sinewy twang where they are stretched to breaking point by the tide’s power, strung out between rocks and rotting wooden posts; large shining lumps of black slag littering the banks like chits of bone working their route to the surface of a Neolithic burial site.
Working quickly, I unclip the lid from my bucket and am immediately smacked about the head by the pungent stench of fish — sprats and mackerel — minced up with white bread and a dash of water to form an oily paste. Scrabbling around in the driftwood and loose pebbles littering the ground around my feet, quickly yields ten rounded, palm-sized pebbles to add weight. Around them, the oily fish paste is moulded until each ball is around the size of a fist, before each of them is hurled with a splash into the brown flow of the river’s waters.
All of this — the time, the effort, the preparation, may all have been in vain. It’s still perhaps a little early in the year for what I’m intending, although I have been successful around this time in past years. They might not come. Still, the offerings have been made, and now all I can do is wait, hope that the timing is right, and keep faith that they will make their appearance.
*
The day, like so many others, is blurred by work, nearly ten hours passing before I find myself in the same spot, marked out by the crumbling wooden stump, a rotting tooth protruding from the bank. Among a few such stumps this one is easily identified by the large rust-orange nail poking out, the spot where, nearly twenty years ago, I came across three eels skewered by the head and left to dangle as convicts on a gibbet. More than half my lifetime later and the image is still vivid in my mind, a reminder that, despite all our supposed cleverness and development, human beings are no more than animals after all.
The water is once again approaching low slack, so I take the opportunity to send out a few more of the fishy bread balls that sink straight to the bottom, accompanied by a few floating crusts to add some surface attraction. Not long now.
Looking around, I see that I am alone. In fact, it doesn’t appear that many people, if any, have been here all day. This is a place where noise is not required. Here, silence loses its sideline status as a mere space filler and becomes dominant, something to be kept and valued as an integral presence.
Five minutes pass.
Ten.
Fifteen.
Small fragments of detritus begin to float back inward from the sea; the fresh influx of water fleshes out the few remaining channels until they begin to pulse like capillaries. The handful of trawlers and small charter boats are nudged awake from their half-drunk listing.
Not yet. No, not yet.
Keep your eyes open; wait.
Soon. If they are going to come, it will be soon.
The water gently laps up against the rock bank I’m standing on. Twenty feet out, there’s…no; just a scrap of wood.
Shit! A sudden clacking cacophony makes my heart leap suddenly as a pair of gulls squirl and squabble over a few scraps of mackerel skin and briefly snatch my attention.
Shadows. Everywhere I look I seem to see shadows and shapes that shift and twist just beneath the surface:
a tatty old carrier bag here,
a length of pipe lagging there;
ripples
more ripples
a tiny eddy
a puff of mud and then, from the corner of my eye, I see them.
They come.
Just one at first,
then another,
and then they shiver into view like grey ghosts.
These wise old men of the estuary have no need to rush; they come pondering through the silty waters, over the mudflats and the crab holes, the worm beds and the man-made clutter. Rising to the surface they mouth their silent credos over and over again, utterances that echo noiselessly to join the endless flow. I allow myself a brief smile.
There are few fish swimming in British saltwater that can command the devotion received by the mullet. A true sporting fish, it wields a quiet power and knowingness in the British sea angler’s imagination that ensures the return of the acolytes year after frustrating year.
I move away from the water’s edge, avoiding any chance of skylining myself and spooking them. So absorbed have I been in my vigil that I’ve forgotten to tackle up. One clumsy mistake now could unravel all the hours of preparation. In situations like this even my own shadow might become an enemy.
The mullet is a quiet fish, a seemingly contemplative fish, a wary fish, so tackle is used sparingly — a size eight hook, a small clear bubble float and a sandy-coloured specialist carp line chosen for its thinness to strength ratio and the fact that the colour will vanish into the murk of the estuary. A small section of soft white bread is pinched around the hook and cast thirty yards uptide, allowing the bait to trundle slowly back toward me on the tide.
Only a handful of minutes have slipped into the slow turning of the afternoon’s wheels when something catches me off guard by suddenly rising and engulfing the bait with a big wet WALLOP! Instinctively the rod sweeps up with a rapier swish and …keeps going, describing an almost perfect half circle as I theatrically miss the bite and nearly end up on my back.
*
Nearly ninety fishless minutes later and I’m still reliving every movement of that bite, especially the fact that, in missing it, I spooked the fish and cleared the swim. There would have been no sense in fishing on immediately, so it was a case of watching and waiting for the fish to begin showing again.
The water became considerably deeper and faster-moving, so fishing on with the float would have been useless anyway. I decide it’s time to tackle down and go home. Or is it? Glancing across the river, I slurp on the last dregs of my tea whilst watching a boat owner who rowed across from the bank with the rising tide to tinker about between the tiny wheelhouse and the deck; organising, sweeping, flicking scraps overboard in some rusty, mud-caked industrial Welsh rendering of a Constable scene.
The boats! Why didn’t I think of it earlier?
There is, perhaps, one more chance.
Further upstream, where the estuary narrows into the river, the fish will be funnelled past the main mooring area where they might congregate for a while around the submerged hulls before heading even further upstream. The decision is made in a second and five minutes later I’m plopping a legered rig out right next to the nearest of the small boats.
There’s no time for daydreaming, thankfully, as the next bite comes quickly, swinging the rod tip around hard and fast. This is the great paradox of the mullet — it saunters up and down the estuary with all the ponderous acumen of a bourgeois intellectual but attach it to the end of a fishing line and it will go fin to toe like a half-cut docker, never giving so much as an inch without scrapping over it first.
The fish immediately runs off across the tide and then turns uptide, dragging line with it. There are no obvious snags in that direction so I give the fish its head and let it run, hoping it will start to tire itself. Realising that it’s going nowhere, it turns and hares back toward the boats and their mooring ropes and I reverse the rod just in time to exert enough side strain as the mullet hammers its head, jag-jag-jag, in the direction it wants to go, causing the rod’s fine quiver tip to nod appreciatively at its power; back and forth, on and on, the fish ploughs deeply through the brown tide in front of me until, after what seems an arm-aching eternity, there is a silvery roll just beneath the surface. It’s almost time.
One more turn and it’s on the surface; at around three and a half pounds it’s not a big fish by any means, but muscular and serious, decked out in its sober, scholarly hues. For all the tussling, considering the violence of the take and the early fight, the mullet finally capitulates gently enough as I drop to one knee and slide it softly over the lip of the next.
The sun continues its descent toward the horizon, tinting this natural sandy basin with a shimmering backcloth of orange, brown and silver, reducing me to little more than a silhouette that, from the heights of the dunes behind, must look for all the world like that of a man stooping to prayer.
Serialisation of ‘Waiting for a Hunter’s Moon’ by Simon Smith (with permission). This book is published by and can be purchased from Cambria Books HERE
