An Audience with an Elephant Read Free Page B

ends in a dark snout, and the body appears to be armoured. The surroundings, a farm gate, the field beyond, underline the oddness, for in a farmyard a man is posing beside a thing the size of a basking shark. Alec Allen had caught himself a Royal Sturgeon in the River Towy, at Nantgaredig, near Carmarthen. It was 9 feet 2 inches long, had a girth of 59 inches and weighed 388 pounds.
    Allen was a commercial traveller from Penarth in Glamorganshire, a well known sportsman and hockey referee who in later life was to referee Olympic matches. He was then in his early forties, one of that oddly innocent breed who figure in Saki and Wodehouse, but who latterly seem to have become as extinct as the Great Auk, the sporting bachelor. His great delight was fishing, but in him it was more than a delight. His great friend was Alderman David Price of Nantgaredig, who had known Allen all his life. All they had ever talked about, he recalled with wonder, was fishing.
    In 1933 Allen was traveller for a firm of fishing tackle manufacturers. His father, also a great fisherman, was a traveller for a wallpaper firm, and father and son somehow contrived it that they could travel together in the same car. Both their commercial beats were West Wales, but theirs was a West Wales wonderfully concentrated between the rivers Wye, Teify and Towy. When their friends talk about the Allens it is with amusement, for it was notorious that their business rounds were designed for fishing.
    Off-stage Hitler was ranting, Stalin drawing up lists of victims. Ramsay MacDonald droned his platitudes, and the dole queues lengthened. But in West Wales the Allens went their way, in a car full of tackle and wallpaper, their itineraries perfectly arranged to end in fishing inns beside rivers. The thing has an idyllic quality. It may have been a bit tough on you if your wallpaper shop was nowhere near a river, but nobody seems to have complained. In time the son succeeded the father as wallpaper salesman, but the itineraries did not change.
    The two had rented a stretch of the Towy since 1928, which included some of the deepest pools in the river. But the summer of 1933 had been dry, the water level low, when, walking by one of the pools that July, Alec Allen noted enormous waves suddenly cross it. It puzzled him, but at the time he would have discounted any suspicion that they had been made by a living thing, for it was 15 miles to the sea, and tidal water ended 2 miles lower down.
    A few days later Allen returned to the pool. It was evening, he had a friend with him, Edwin Lewis of Crosshands, and there was a third man, his name lost to history, watching on the bank. Allen began fishing, and at first it was a very quiet evening. But then he felt a slight tug on his line. He pulled on it but this had no effect.
    Alderman Price was fond of telling what happened next, ‘Alec used to tell me that he thought he’d hooked a log. He couldn’t see what it was, except that it was something huge in the shadows. Then the log began to move upstream.’ A faint smile would come over Price’s face. ‘Now Alec knew that logs don’t move upstream.’
    Allen had still no idea of what was in the river. A more imaginative man might have become frightened at that stage, for his line was jerking out under a momentum he had never experienced. In the darkness of the pool he had hooked something which moved with the force of a shark. He played it for 20 minutes, letting the line move out when it went away, and, when it came back, retreating up the bank. But there was no channel of deep water leading away from the pool; if there had been, no salmon line made would have held his catch. Then he saw it.
    Suddenly the creature leapt out of the water. Maddened, it crashed into a shallow run, and there, under them threshing in the low water, Allen was confronted by a bulk that was just not possible. The sightseer ran shouting for his life. Lewis ran forward with the gaff, which he stuck it into