dawn raid on the canal of futility

Dawn. Unbelievably cold. Foot stomping cold. My hands too numb to write neatly. And silence except every once in a while the beating whistle of wings as duck arrow back and forth across the lightening sky. The sun comes up through the valley behind me like a bead through the v sight of a rifle. At first everything on the plain is in shadow. Everything except the flat north eastern flank of Mount Cook, lit up like a beacon, the first point of land on the whole island to catch the sun. The day seeps downhill from the summit of Mount Cook. 

Now the sun is over the mountains behind my shoulder. I have thrown open the camper curtains to try to catch some heat. The whole plain is lit and each tuft of grass partially shades its neighbour and the plain glows a weak, cool yellow. The sheep are up and grazing and they are the same weak yellow as the grass. They are visible only by the shadows they cast. 

I can feel a little warmth on my head now, though my breath is still visible. And still the plain is silent. No birds - or only the occasional chatter or call. No cicadas - yet. Then, through the quiet the long, drawn-out roar of a truck miles away. The noise carries across all this flat space and fills it.

I've walked to the river above the stand of dead willows. A pair of black swan flies past, the one behind making a noise like a melancholic squeaky toy. Two sparrows are chattering - falling and rising in a manic flutter of flight from one dead, bleached willow branch to the next. A bee drones past now, head down, chin on the tank, full throttle - going somewhere it knows all about. Then another spinning in circles, an illuminated manuscript of flight. The cicadas are starting up - warming the oil. Again a truck on the valley road a mile or so away, the drone on and on, growing louder, thunderous, then finally fading. 

Mount Cook and its snowy neighbours are breathing clouds now and the slow ascent of the day has begun. How long will it remain breathless? There is a narrow window between too cold and too windy and I want to be on the canal of monsters when that window opens.

There's nothing rising here, though there are a few insects on the water. It is 1012. 

It is 1039 now and I've reached the canal. Upstream of me over the next one hundred yards of river are about six fish over four or five pounds. I stand next to no chance with any one of them and expect - though hope against - a skunking. I'm at the corner where an enormous trout, dark as a graveyard yew tree nudged its nose up under a hopper Vicky cast at it - maybe a week ago now. By the look of the pressed grass the Aussie we met as we left has been up here since. I should have pointed him more emphatically downstream.

The wind is up a bit and Mount Cook has now vanished beneath its own breath. The river continues to slurp its way downhill, the laziest, most mellifluous noise wherever the ceaseless flow meets a willow, or softer still where it licks along an undercut bank.

The dark fish isn't there. I start up beyond its lie walking on my knees through head high grass, flicking casts upstream trying to feel my way into the blind spots before I get to see into them. Hopeless. I spook a fish within yards of starting. It rushes upstream like an otter, a tracer of bubbles where it rushes over a weed-bed. A few yards beyond and I spook another. It bolts upriver too while I bury my head in the grass and chew my knuckles. I sit up and take deep breaths. Both come down a few minutes later - in that way that big trout do - to see what disturbed them. As they pass they catch sight of me, one after the other, their tails drilling into treble time and away, across the shallows in a bulge of water and round the bend where I started my knee-crawl twenty minutes ago.

Two fish move upstream of me, neither more than once, a delicate swirl and sip not repeated. I cover both spots carefully, ten or more casts at each, fanning the fly left and right, but with no real idea where the fish are. I could have spooked them both first cast. I crawl on and finally see the first, but not before it sees me. It explodes upstream out of a mushroom cloud of silt and drags the second with it. Their combined panic pushes them all the way to the willow at the top where the wake they have pulled behind them finally subsides. It's like stepping on bloody land mines. I feel sure these two will have spooked the run. And by my reckoning there are only two more to spook anyway. It is as futile as it was last time. I kneel-crawl on, for the sake of it more than anything and because last time one fish, the last one, was in a slot above the willow and might therefore be undisturbed. 

But I've gone only a few yards when a fish moves beside me, so tight to the bank that it can't see me and I can't see it. I hear it and see the fanning semi-circle of a ripple trickle across the flat water. I edge back two rod-lengths downstream, take a breath and throw out a cast, tight to the bank and with no precise idea where the fish is. I feel my cast is off-target anyway and almost bound to spook the trout. I'm resigned to another boil of silt and vapour trail upstream. I can't see the fly. But I hear a slurp. A distinctive lip smacking ice-lolly slurp, followed half a second later by a bouncing ripple. Half a second after this I lift and ... I'm in! I can't believe it. I've hooked a trout in the canal of futility. It plays hard. Drags me all the way to the tail where I started an hour ago, fighting all the way to get its head into the weeds. A bright, solid hen pulling like a dog on a lead. I grab a grip'n'grin - my camera propped against my rucksack laid on the bank - the picture you see above - and now the fish is back, fanning the sand at my feet with her tail, waiting to bolt when I finally move again. The wind is up now, as if it been waiting for me, politely waiting at the door, feeling it ought to come in now but couldn't, not till I'd had my chance. I feel I ought to go now, that I have had enough from this beautiful river.  The whopper above the willow ... I'll get him next year. And if I don't get the chance I'll cast a fly at him in my mind's eye anyway: there'll be no drag then, no wind either and the fat old croc will swim over and nail it to the sky.