Dispatches from the Sporting Life Read Free Page B

overnight train to the Highlands and the fabled Spey, the fastest-flowing river in Europe, thick with salmon, according to legend. Once established on my narrow bunk, I turn to
Orkney & Shetland,
by Eric Linklater, wherein I read of a dizzying succession of Norse conquerors:
    But Sigurd, when he got his Earldom…made an alliance with Thorstein the Red, son of Olaf the White … and that famous woman Aud the Deep-Minded who … was the daughter of Katil Flatnose …
    On arrival in Aviemore, we’re met by a tourist-office flack who drives us over winding country lanes, peasants lurking in the fields of ferns alongside, to Tulchan Lodge, a veritable stone mini-castle, complete with turret, that immediately evokes myboyhood home. The butler who tippled. The saucy second-floor maid. My nanny, a treasure. On the other hand, that delightful lodge, rising in the Tulchan and Cromdale hills above the Spey River, is set in a rolling wooded parkland of no less than twenty-three thousand acres, admittedly a tad larger than my boyhood backyard. Tulchan was built in 1906, an Edwardian fishing and hunting lodge, the private property of one George McCordquodale, Esq., and did not become an
albergo
until 1976. Handsomely appointed, with oak-panelled drawing and billiards rooms, the lodge can accommodate no more than twenty-four guests in its twelve double bedrooms. A room will set you back $200 a night, but that includes breakfast, afternoon tea, and a four-course dinner, and the fare is first-rate. There are additional charges, however, for deerstalking, shooting grouse, or fishing. A rod, along with the services of a gillie, costs $170 a day. The lodge commands Tulchan Water, eight miles long, with four beats, considered to be the most productive on the Spey, but before we have even unpacked I am told:
    This season the fishing had been the worst in twenty-five years, with only 17 salmon taken in July, whereas the usual catch was 165 or more.
Water temperature in July was in the seventies, intolerable for salmon.
The wind is up.
The water is too low.
    Yes, yes, but I do not put much stock in these gloomy reports, because Mordecai the Deep-Minded,son of Moses the Bald, has been salmon fishing before on some of the best rivers of Quebec and New Brunswick (the Cascapédia, the Restigouche, the Miramichi) and is familiar with the perverse tradition peculiar to salmon camps everywhere. The head guide, greeting newcomers, always complains that the water is too high or too low, and you should have been here last week when horny thirty-pound salmon had to be restrained from leaping into the arms of anglers, never mind taking a fly.
    In the drawing room, Joseph, the menacingly obsequious wine steward (a Pole who had put in thirteen years as a butler), seems to have wandered in off the set of an old-time Hammer horror film; he stoops to kiss my wife’s hand and then asks if we fancy wine with our lunch.
    “A bottle of Puligny-Montrachet.”
    “An excellent choice,” Joseph oozes, dentures gleaming.
    Late in the afternoon a middle-aged American couple arrives, Joseph greeting the lady with a ritual kiss of the hand. “Would you care for wine with your dinner?” he asks.
    “People are so nice in this neck of the woods,” the lady says.
    “Red or white?” her husband asks her.
    “It’s all the same, isn’t it, dear?”
    Husband, consulting the price list, chooses a bottle of Frascati.
    “An excellent choice,” Joseph responds, beaming.Greeted at breakfast by a rowdy group of grouse shooters out of Yorkshire, drinking Champagne, dressed in elegant tweed jackets and plus fours. “You’re not going after salmon this late in the season?”
    “I’m afraid so.”
    “You’re Canadian, did you say?”
    “Yes.”
    “Oh.”
    There are no keys for our bedroom doors, but the Fly and Tackle Room is securely locked. Seemingly, the guests can trust each other, but the Tulchan management knows that when it comes to fishing flies, anglers are a