Collected Short Stories - Patrick O’Brian

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It had been the subject of countless disgusting rows, bellowing, smashing quarrels that had left him shattered in spirit and her exhilarated. Once she had broken his rod, and he, moved out of himself, had beaten her almost to insensibility with the butt-end. This had earned him one undisputed day’s fishing a week, for a deep voice had warned him, against his convictions, never to apologize for this outburst, nor, indeed, to refer to it.

      The day was Thursday, and this Thursday had dawned fair. He had risen before the alarm clock rang, as excited as a boy, and he had walked the four miles up the river with an eager impatience. The locals were sure that he fished the preserved water, and they would willingly have sworn to it; the water-bailiff often hid up for him. But Woollen had never in his days of life put a fly upon forbidden water. As he walked he averted his eyes from the pools with their widening circles of invitation, and pressed on to the ravine at the bottom of the high valley.

      At the top of it, hot and panting, he was in his own place. The lower river, with its chequer-work of farms and small-holdings, was out of sight; his own prison and incubus too. Above there were the impassive mountains, which had always seemed friendly to Woollen, and there was hardly a sign of man. The high valley was notorious for the bog-evil and the poverty of its grazing; no walls divided it – in this it was singular – and the only sign that men had ever been in the valley was a mound with a circle of stones on the top of it. The mound was regular, thirty or forty paces round and five feet high. By some it was called the Torr an Aonar, because it was supposed that an anchorite had lived there, though indeed the stones had been piled by hands that knew nothing of the Cross. Formerly the mound had been at a considerable distance from the water, but the stream changed its course in very rainy winters and now it ran fast round half the mound, following the curve of it.

      Immediately below the mound was a large pool, the best in the upper stream; several times Woollen had seen a trout in it that must have weighed over a quarter of a pound, and twice it had risen to his fly. At present he was still a long way from the mound, fishing the quiet middle stretches. The fish were coming up well – rising a little short, some of them, but already he had caught five. One had been too small even for this stream, but two were gratifyingly heavy. He had missed a dozen or more, but that was nothing to a man so habituated to misfortune.

      He stalked along now, casting well forward with each step. He was throwing a longer line than was necessary, mostly for the pleasure of seeing it go out straight before him; he was casting easily and well, with a slight, constant breeze at his shoulder to lay the cast out flat. His mild, foolish face had an unwonted happiness on it. He talked gently as he went, in a voice a little above a whisper.

      ‘Behind the rock, in the calm place … no, nobody there … try each side.’ His fly was going down just where he wanted it, on the spot he was looking at each time. To the right of the rock the fly danced down the edge of the main current; there was a silver flash under it and Woollen struck, whipping the fish into the air, well out on to the bank. He had found this to be the only way of taking these mercurial little trout, but it still came hard to him to strike with such force and speed. The fish sprang and sprang in the grass until he reached it; it was of due size and he killed it, not without a qualm for its beauty. Thousands of trout he must have caught by now, and still, each time, he had to justify himself for the final killing.

      He smoothed his fly, a red quill in the last stages of decrepitude, and looked over the length of his cast. It had a great many knots in it, most of them clumsy, for he was not a man of his hands, and it was uncommonly short. Both cast and fly would have to last a great while yet, as Woollen knew with a deep certainty. Few things would have given him greater pleasure than a five-pound note to be spent without remorse of conscience in a good tackle shop.

      He went on, along the right bank, fishing steadily. The sun came out hot on the back of his neck. For a long stretch no fish came up, and he saw that it must be about noon. Lunch was cold new potatoes and a white pudding – good for a hungry man. He ate it with his back against the deep bank, where the Uisge came down through a series of rocky pools. The warmth beat down upon him; new-sprung ferns shaded his head with a green, sweet, shade, and he dozed for a while.

      When he woke up the sun had gone in again and the day was overcast, though still warm. His first cast brought out a better fish than he had caught all the morning, and the omen held true. The three rock pools, generally good for a rise apiece, yielded seven fish, not one of them under two ounces. It was odd, Woollen observed aloud as he arranged the fish according to size on the grass, gazing at them with a childish complacence, it was odd how one’s standards changed: he had fished some of the English chalk streams where a half-pound fish was as a minnow; now he was delighted with two-ounce fish. Anything much smaller than that was rather disappointing, but these did in truth look like real trout; small ones, indeed very small ones, but the real fish for all that.

      He went up the river slowly now, for the fish were coming up in a most gallant and determined rise. The Uisge had little trout, but there were many of them on a good day. By the time he reached the pool under the mound his cloth bag was heavy in his pocket, and he had lost certain count of his fish, a thing that had not happened to him since he came into Ireland. He was on the opposite side to the mound, and as he stood at the foot of the pool he saw that the flood had bitten deeper into the round of the Torr an Aonar; there was a deep scar of bare earth, and the low scrub that had lined the far bank at the top was now in the water, most of it lying sideways with branches tearing the water, still anchored by the roots.

      He wanted to cast diagonally up the pool, straight for the mound, for the deepest water was just under it, and there he had raised his good trout before. Formerly he had cast up from where he stood now, dropping his fly into the little smooth place on the far side of the incoming current – a natural weir brought it in with some force – so that it poised momentarily before dragging across and down. Now, with this change, the piece of slack water was very much enlarged, and might hold nothing; also, the half-submerged tangle of dwarf willow and bramble, with all the rushes and grass that it had gathered, made the cast a dangerous one. He was undecided still when he saw a rise in the eddy; he could not see whether it was his fish or not, but he made a couple of air casts, feeling his way across the pool, and then dropped his fly neatly into the middle of the slack water. But he had too long a line out, and when he struck with the rising of the fish he could not whip it cleanly from the water. It darted instantly into the tangle, and before he could reel in, the line was fast knit.

      Woollen crossed the pool at the bottom and came round to the tangle. It was awkward to get at it, because of the slope of the mound, which ran straight into the water here, but with a good deal of trouble he pulled the whole weedy mess up on to the side. The trout was only a very little fish, not the big one at all. Woollen took it carefully in his wet hand and worked the hook out. He went up to the bank overhanging the slack water so that he could put the fish into a quiet place out of the run of the current. Much more of the bank had caved in than he had supposed, looking from the other side. He knelt and held the little fish in the hollow of his hand under the water; it stayed there for a moment before shooting away into the waving green bed, out of sight.

      When he had disentangled his cast and line he began to examine the altered bank, so that he should know the new lie of the pool another day. Huge slices of spongy black earth had been undercut and lay at the bottom with their long grass streaming. One slice had not quite parted; it hung with a deep wide crack between it and the still solid land. Woollen pushed it with his foot and it went over, quite slowly, with a watery sough. The water was shallow under it, and the black earth lay half awash. Woollen was still looking vacantly at it when there was a slight rumble – tremor rather than sound – under his feet and a great stone slab fell flatlings into the thin water and mud, scattering them far out across the pool. Immediately after there was an indescribable rushing noise as a hundred thousand gold coins gushed on to the slab piling up like wheat, cascading, flowing, flowing. All at once the gush stopped: one last coin rolled down, slid down the side of the pile and rang on the stone.

      Woollen had not moved. His breath suspended, his hand to his mouth; his throat was stiff, could not swallow, and his heart was doing strange things even before his reason had grasped the reality of what was before him.

      Two things stabbed into his mind: one the word ‘escape’ and a

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