The Fish Ladder Read Free

could remember where it was. Mr Gunn’s nephew, Dairmid Gunn, was the one most likely to know, but he was away just now and no one knew how to contact him. I set the idea of the well to one side.
    Gunn had written another book called Highland River and I was able to track down a 1975 paperback. It arrived a few days before Evie and I flew to Britain for the holidays. I didn’t have time to read it before we left, but I opened a page at random:
     
    ‘And what will you do with yoursel f ?’
    ‘Oh, I’ll knock about and fish and that . . . Though actually I do have one small idea – I intend to walk a certain river to its source. It’s a thing I have wanted to do for a long time. That’s all really.’
    ‘Not a pilgrimage?’
    ‘Hardly!’
    ‘You mean that it is – slightly?’
     
    I stared at the words one small idea , and felt their weight as they passed beyond my retina, a stone disappearing into a pool, aware already that something had happened, was happening, alive to the new disturbance. I intend to walk a certain river to its source . . . It’s a thing I have wanted to do for a long time .
    So had I, though I had forgotten all about it. I remembered a geography lesson, my hair tied in plaits, my front teeth crossed. The water table , ladybirds beetling over the scarred varnish of my desk: they had got into everything that summer. Flicking their ruby bodies to the safety of the inkwell so I could liberate them at break-time, hiding them from the naughty boy who tugged out their lacy wings, so he could race them and they wouldn’t fly away. Understanding that I had drifted, the words porous and igneous before me in looping chalk, but it was too late to ask what it all meant. I had missed hearing the part about where the water started, and the diagram in the textbook offered nothing. If I got a detention the ladybirds might die.
     
    I closed the book, ran my hand across the cover, its aged paper smooth as chamois. I read the description on the back:
     
    The Highland river with its dark brown pools and sudden rushing shallows is a magical playground for little Kenn and his fellows. Here he battles for salmon with home-made hooks . . . With no conscious aim beyond satisfying the hunting instinct, Kenn’s journey up the river becomes a thrilling exploration into its source and the source of himself.
     
    I turned it over and studied the picture on the front: a photograph of a brown river, descending purposefully over flat slabs of rock, a few farm buildings in the foreground, some bluish hills beyond. The river was a real river. It was called the Dunbeath Water.
    I slipped the book inside a suitcase.
    When Evie and I arrived in the UK, we went first to our family home in Cheshire. Rupert had stayed in Barcelona to work on his book, and he would come out in a few weeks to visit us. I looked up the Dunbeath Water on a road map. It was very far away. And it really didn’t look like much. About fifteen miles long, hunched in the top right-hand corner of Scotland, it was just a little way short of John O’Groats. There was no spring or loch marked on the map, no source or well – it simply vanished, a thin blue squiggle into a dazzling white page. It was in the middle of what appeared to be the emptiest part of the British Isles. I tried to find a better map, an Ordnance Survey map. But this seemed always to be missing whenever I was in a bookshop. And then I realised that to follow this river from the sea to the source I would have to make a return trip of around fifteen hundred miles, for a journey on foot of perhaps thirty. I decided that we would start closer to home.
     
     
    Notes on Swimming Pool

 
     
     
     
     
     

Humber
    If you look at it on the map Spurn Point appears as a bent hairpin, slightly to the right of Hull, curving out into the North Sea and then back on itself. What it is, is a spit of land, of sand, of shingle, that separates the wide mouth of the Humber from the formidable