IT IS THE kingfisher, normally such a silent bird, that is my soundtrack as the autumn swallows up the summer. With every shortening day, from dawn to dusk, he whistles away in each successive corner of Gavelwood. To say he has a preset route would be wrong, but he does have a series of perches that he flits between. The fence posts at the cattle drink. The dead branches that hang out from the alders over Pike Pool. The handrail across Bailey Bridge. The seat in front of Drowners House. Even the ‘Fishing Ends’ sign at the boundary is a regular haunt. There are probably a dozen more he uses that I have not noticed as he criss-crosses between the meadows and streams. Quite why he has to make so much noise I have no idea – that flash of blue is more than enough to announce his presence – but I guess it is a territory thing. His call is more like a whistle, the sort you’d make by blowing short and sharp bursts through the gap of your middle teeth. Confusingly it also sounds a lot like the squeak with which the otters talk to each other, and sometimes at dusk or dawn I look around to see an otter only to catch the kingfisher blue out of the corner of my eye. The volume and frequency of his calls is quite at odds with his spring and summer persona when he barely muttered a word; I assume the nesting and nurturing took all his time back then. But now, freed of his family obligations, marking out his patch is the big priority. Winter is hard on kingfishers, so seeing off all possible competition before the going gets tough makes a certain amount of sense. It is not so much Darwinian survival of the fittest but survival of those who make the pre-emptive strike. The swans are a prime case in point.
There is by my reckoning plenty of space, weed and water for the parents and their three offspring to happily coexist all winter, but the bond with the six-month-old cygnets, still brown-feathered but close in size to the parents, breaks down overnight. One September evening they will be roosting together on the bank in a united family group, the next the cob is driving away his offspring. It is no gentle nudge to send them on their way; it is venomous hissing, biting and wing-beating aggression. The first two will take the hint and leave quickly; the runt of the litter hangs around for a few days longer, making increasingly forlorn attempts to ingratiate himself with his mother, until the attacks by his father make leaving a better option than staying. What fascinates me is how inestimably proud the cob seems to be of his achievement; for the next few days he will pump up and down the Evitt, chest out as he pushes a bow wave of water ahead of him, whilst the pen trails disconsolately behind, maybe regretting how little she fought for her cygnets back in the summer. One can only guess at the tone of the conversation should they ever talk.
Plenty of others are changing their lives as well; the swallows leave, the water voles secure their winter burrows and the bats seek out somewhere to hibernate, appearing less and less frequently with each passing evening. In the air, on the banks and in the fields the creatures and birds are laying in stores and hunkering down. Their best times are past until the spring, with winter survival now the only aim. But for the salmon and trout it is an altogether different story, their most important days still ahead. Under the gathering gloom of autumn the trout change in habit and appearance before my eyes, but the wait for the first salmon grows more anxious with each passing day.
Way down the Evitt, miles downstream of Gavelwood, past Middle Mill and in the brackish, tidal reaches where the pure chalkstream water and the sea mix, stands a white stone, arched bridge at Cams Point. It is very old. If you crane your head over the parapet the keystone is etched with the numerals seventeen hundred and something, the decade and year number damaged long ago so that they are indecipherable today. In my lifetime this was once a road bridge, the major route along the coast, but long since replaced by a concrete flyover and dual carriageway. Today the old bridge is a footpath and cycleway, beneath which the Evitt rushes out between the pillars on the ebb tide, in on the flood tide, with that strange hour betwixt high and low water when the surface looks oily, hanging there, going neither in nor out on the slack tide. Sometimes I break my journey to stop on the old bridge. It fascinates me that all life that migrates between the sea and the river must pass under this arch, no more than 20 yards across. Every eel, every sea trout and every salmon that tastes the chalkstream must pass through. I try to imagine how huge some of the fish that slipped in and out, unobserved by man, must have been. Surely some record-breakers? Plenty of fish will have made the journey in and out the once, but how many have crossed the Atlantic twice, three times, four times or more? The river hides more secrets than it reveals.
I cannot ever recall a time when I have been alone on the bridge; whether it be dawn, dusk or the pitch-black of night, there will always be someone fishing. It is not the fly-fishing of Gavelwood or even some practical spinning; this is hardcore bait fishing for food. The fast-moving water requires a particular technique not seen in many refined fishing books. Take a short, stout rod with a heavy-duty reel wound with thick fishing line. Attach to the end of the line a monstrous weight, with an extra piece of line with hook and bait tied at right angles about a yard above the weight. Poke your rod over the parapet, release the drag and let the weight pull the line off the reel, plopping into the water and then on for a few seconds until it rests on the bottom. Crank the reel to take up the slack, then wait whilst the hook and bait tugs on the tide a few feet above the riverbed ready to tempt an incoming or outgoing fish according to the flow.
The baits used are as varied as the people; you get the kids who while away the hours between fish (or no fish for that matter) listening to music or playing on their smartphones, whilst the old-timers indulge in a slow sort of conversational tennis that seems to cover every subject except fishing. They all have their baits of choice: huge balls of earthworms, prawns, luncheon meat, dead fish, you name it, at some point someone has probably tried it, but for all the variety this is far from being a fish every cast. In fact it is far from being a fish every day. Whenever I stop by and enquire, rarely does anyone seem to have caught anything. Actually more accurately nobody admits to catching anything. The best salmon run happens out of season, and as for a national fishing licence, well, best not to ask. Rookie Environment Agency bailiffs have been known to visit in the past, but they only do it the once. Eels are the most commonly caught fish, as well as the most disliked and commonly derided. Plenty of the bridge anglers will not even touch Anguilla, but there is an old guy who smokes them down on his allotment, so he steps forward to grab them, stuffing them into a hessian sack that gets more mobile as the day progresses. Sea bass are highly prized, sea trout less so, but really it is salmon everyone is after. I don’t need to watch my river to know when the autumn salmon run has started; the number of anglers on the bridge tells me everything I need to know, and once I see them shoulder to shoulder in the early morning mist I know the arrival at Gavelwood is not so far away, spurring me on to put the river to bed before winter closes in.
It is a strange expression, but putting the river to bed is one of those phrases every river keeper uses, and as is the nature of the work we do, each of us has a slightly different take on the phrase. There is a sort of comforting finality to it; the jobs and tasks you have to complete to close the river once the fishing season ends. Some are relatively trivial housekeeping tasks like closing up the Drowners House, other critical to the well-being of the river to take it through winter and safely out to the spring the other side. There are all sorts of things to do; we make a final weed cut, trimming the weed to protect the weed from itself and the river as well. Big rafts of weed are vulnerable to heavy floods, which will tear it out by its roots from the riverbed. If that happens it will take years to re-establish, so we trim the weed back, a sort of pruning if you like, so the floods will flow harmlessly over and around it. The banks of weed we so carefully left in place in the height of summer to hold back the flow are now redundant, ready to be cut away to allow free passage for the water. In some places we will cut the weed in such a way as to redirect the flow to wash away an unwanted bed of silt that has built up or to prevent a reed bed encroaching any further out into the river. The boards in the hatches are removed and the sluice gates opened wide. It is all about letting the river pass through at speed, scouring out the unwanted accumulations of summer and refreshing the gravel riverbeds in time for spawning and the new life that will be created along the riverbed.
The last grass cut done, the scythes and mowers put away, we gather as a team for the most laborious of jobs, gravel-blasting. Years ago, long before my time, there was a certain romance to this, when the work was done by a plough horse and harrow, dragging the tines through the gravel bed to break up the hardening surface. Today we use high-powered water pumps to create soft plumped pillows of gravel at strategic spawning places around Gavelwood, but it is tedious work to the extreme. Fire up the pump, get into the river, push the steel probe into the riverbed to a depth of a foot, and hold it there whilst the water jet separates, dislodges and washes away the silt that has cemented the gravel stones together. When the water runs clean remove the probe and push it back into the next hard section. And so it goes on. For days. There was a time when we could rely on groups of students studying fish science at the local agricultural college turning up for a week of ‘work experience’, but even they seem to have wised up to the monotony. It is one of those tasks easy to talk yourself out of in the short term, but years down the line you’ll reap the whirlwind as the wild fish population spins into decline.
Though we do the blasting mostly with spawning in mind, the gravel on the riverbed deserves more attention than we usually give it, being one of those building blocks around which the chalkstream world revolves. As I plunge the probe down for the umpteenth time all manner of life shows itself. The nymphs are ever-present; big mayfly nymphs are the most visible, darting around oblivious to the changing season, or the occasional bloodworm will twist about, discomfited by the commotion, until he comes to rest again on the riverbed. The jetting displaces shrimps in their hundreds; the trout and grayling downstream of where we are working are in for a heyday. Little snails and mussels tumble a few feet before finding a new home. Best of all, the truly ugly bullheads, aggressive at the best of times, definitely take umbrage at having their patch disturbed. For if anyone is king of the gravel bed it is the miller’s thumb.
It scuds out from the stones under which it hides, to bite everything that passes. If it is food it is eaten. If it is another male it is escorted, nightclub bouncer style, away. If it is a female during the spring breeding season she is pulled into the gravel nest where the eggs will be laid. In common with that other aggressive guy the stickleback, the male bullhead guards the eggs until they hatch, but the offspring leave the nest swiftly before they can be eaten by their father. Charming, but it gets worse. Many river keepers regard them as vermin; voracious eaters of trout and salmon eggs, which by virtue of where they live seems to be a charge that sticks. In short there is nothing beautiful about the bullhead, in demeanour or even appearance, with its brown, mottled camouflage skin and oversized head. Can there be anything good to be said about a fish that is so prevalent yet little observed? With its ability to hide and bottom-dwelling habits nobody really sees it, but in weight terms it is reckoned to account for one quarter of all the fish in the Evitt, or any chalkstream for that matter. When you consider each bullhead only weighs a fraction of an ounce, that is an awful lot of fish. But as ever in a river, the one thing all fish love to eat is other fish, with the trout getting their revenge, hoovering up the bullheads, fat from the protein-rich eggs, to provide the trout with four-fifths of their diet over the winter. Nature often has a great way of evening things up.
By late September the sense that the best is behind us and the worst ahead seems to pervade Gavelwood. With each passing day I get the urge to fish more, in case it might be my last. Way back in the summer I passed up too many opportunities, knowing that there were many more days to come. This time it is different. Today was the first time in months that I felt a tangible shiver of cold, enough to warrant a jacket and to discourage dawdling on my morning rounds to clear the sluices and check the hatches. The Drowners House felt warm inside instead of cool as I collected my rod for the last time. The windows were obscured by condensation, the rafters above strewn with cobwebs as even the spiders got in on the last-minute feeding act. The record book showed nobody had been fishing all week; things must be slowing down. Back outside I was suddenly struck by the brown tinge of the trees; gone is the vivid green of summer, replaced with leaves that have started to crinkle and darken around the edges, with drifted piles on the ground.
But most of all it is the trout that have changed – by now they have seen it all, but driven by a survival imperative they are ready to feed when the right thing comes along. They don’t skulk in the deep pools. They don’t dash away at the slightest sign of a person. They don’t steadfastly refuse all offerings. These are fish that know they have to feed heavily before the winter shuts down the food chain. Fish do definitely act differently as the days start to shorten; they are much bolder in the water, sitting higher, more obviously visible and less easily spooked. Eager though they are to eat as much as they can, they do get choosy. On days like this the fish will follow my fly for feet or even yards, swimming directly under it, at some points almost touching it with his nose. It is not so much fishing, more a game of high-stakes poker as the fish eyes my fly, willing it to be real, but sensing it may not be. This is not the smash-and-grab of the mayfly hatch or the delicate sipping of a tiny fly from the surface on a blazing hot day, but rather a war of attrition. I cast, the fish follows. I cast again, this time twitching the fly to imitate a clumsy sedge, and the fish comes closer still. I try a cast just on the periphery of the trout’s vision, and sure enough, his curiosity aroused, he tracks across to take a look, but at the last moment declines to eat. I should be exasperated, but the more he follows, the more the adrenalin pumps through my veins. I will him to open that mouth, suck down the fly and let me raise my rod to strike in victory. But time and again he calls my bluff. I change the fly. I put on a new tippet. I move a few steps along the bank to alter the drift of my fly. We are becoming the Cold War warriors who can’t bear to give up, but neither is willing to make the first strike. Each time the fish turns away from the fly I am compelled to cast again, and for a while he follows every cast, until he bores of my offering. Clearly some sort of détente is called for, so taking the hint I retreat to a seat on the bank as the watery sun brings a glimmer of brightness to the morning.
After a while it gets really quite warm, so I shed my jacket. The moorhen chirrups. The tops of the reeds in the river margin move as if by some unseen hand, which means the water voles are gathering winter supplies for sure. The swans push by without stopping on their daily patrol to warn and ward off interlopers. The cattle are tearing at the last of the grasses, the meadows close to being grazed out. A flight of ducks land for a moment, think the better of it and quacking with some sort of righteous indignation that I don’t understand, take off as quickly as they arrived. A cloud of tiny olives magically appear without warning or indication of where they came from. They momentarily envelop me as they move along the bank, so I swat them gently away as you would smoke from a campfire. The river flows on by as it has all year.
Soon my trout starts to feed again, establishing a slow rhythm as he rises porpoise-like revealing just his back and dorsal fin, taking hatching nymphs that are caught in the surface film. A last cast for a last fish? It hardly seems to be right when we have both come so far, so I snip off my fly, reel in my line and head off.