Dispatches from the Sporting Life Read Free Page A

five devoted children, Daniel, Noah, Emma, Martha and Jacob; their lovedones, Jill, Sarah, Nigel and Leanne; and the young grandchildren, Maximilian, Poppy and Simone. A private funeral will be held today in Montreal. A public memorial will take place in the autumn. The family asks that donations be made to the Canadian Cancer Society, Centrâide, Médecins sans Frontières (or, say, the Montreal Canadiens, a true lost cause).
    The month before, the Canadiens, who’d missed the playoffs for the second year in a row, were sold to an American businessman from Colorado. He promised not to move the team south, but the Expos, it soon became apparent, were likely heading that way. I’m glad Pa did not witness this. It was the end of an era—but not unthinkable. Quite the opposite, in fact.
    Love you, Pa.
    Toronto, December 2001

1
An Incompleat Angler’s Journal

    S eptember 13, 1988. Wednesday. Montreal’s Mirabel airport. Before boarding our preferred carrier, British Airways, I loiter close by the insurance vending machine, making sure no shifty-eyed bastard, seeing off his beloved wife, is covering her for two million bucks and then rushing off to embrace his bimbo—“It’s done, baby.” Pretending to tie my shoelaces, I listen to unattended carry-on baggage that might go tick-tick-tick. Then, composing my soul, gulping down just one more cognac, I allow my wife to drag me to the plane. Florence and I are bound for a short stay in London and then on to the Scottish Highlands and the islands of Shetland and Orkney, where, in fulfillment of a long-cherished dream, I will fish for salar, the leaper.
    Salmon.
    The first known image of salmon, discovered by a French archaeologist, was carved into a reindeer bone, circa 12,000 B.C. It was Julius Caesar and hismen, invaders of Western Europe, who dubbed it salar, the leaper. William the Conqueror and his barons savoured it and so did that swindler John Cabot, when he first sailed to North America in 1497. The first book in English on salmon, published in 1481,
The Gentleman’s Recreation, The Boke of St. Alban’s
—though possibly a compilation of earlier books on angling—is credited to Dame Juliana Berners, prioress of the Sopwell Nunnery. She went after the fish required for her Friday table with a rod cut from ash and line made from the hair of the horse’s tail. Then, in 1653, there came the essential book for fishermen,
The Compleat Angler, or the Contemplative Man’s Recreation: Being a Discourse of Fish & Fishing Not Unworthy of the Perusal of Most Anglers,
by Izaak Walton:
    The salmon is accounted the King of fresh-water fish, and is ever bred in rivers relating to the sea, yet so high or far from it as admits no tincture of salt, or brackishness; he is said to breed or cast his spawn in most rivers, in the month of August: some say that then they dig a hole or grave in a safe place in the gravel, and there place their eggs or spawn, after the melter has done his natural office, and then hide it most cunningly, and cover it over with gravel and stones; and then leave it to their Creator’s protection, who by a gentle heat, which he infuses into that cold element, makes it brood and beget life in the spawn, and to become Samlets in the Spring next following.
    Thrusting Izzy’s book aside, I begin to dream about silvery sea-bright salmon rolling in the ripples of the Spey River. Casting with my usual panache, I catch plenty before we’ve even climbed to 33,000 feet, some 32,994 feet too high for London. Following two lap-of-luxury nights at the Ritz, tainted for me only because my wife insisted it would be bad form for me to practice casting in the lobby, we are driven to Euston station by a couple who are old friends: “Remember,” he said, “we’re expecting you for dinner the night of your return.”
    “Should I order a standing roast beef from Harrod’s?” she asks.
    “Nonsense,” I say. “I’ll be bringing fresh salmon.”
    Then we board the