He writes himself of his fishing on Loch Awe; and later, on Loch Etive, as the guest of our charming friend Alec Stevenson, whose cheery voice would ask of his keeper after breakfast: “Is it fishin’ or shutin’ the day, Duncan?” But there is no mention of a happy six weeks in Sutherlandshire where we were chiefly fed by the guests “killing” of the daily trout, proudly displayed at even upon a large tray in the hall.
I think it was here that Joe had trudged for three hours up a mountain with his fly-rod set up, to find—when he reached the tarn at the top—that his top joint had fallen off on the road; as he was alone only the midges heard his remarks, for he had not even his fourteen-year old son with him—the happy companion of his later angling days. It was into just such a tarn, that that boy fell off the boat one day, when landing a trout, and was advised by his father to run about in the natural state on the moor while his clothes dried on a sun-baked rock.
A lovely place is Inchnadamph on blue Loch Assynt; the great mountain that guards the valley towards Lochinver can be golden in the long, northern twilight, when the water that has been as a sapphire before the sunset, becomes purple in the gloaming; but oh! the midges! Useless to tie our heads in bags and grease our faces: they penetrated everywhere and “bit like dogs.” They almost deterred Joe from his evening hour on the water because of the landing afterwards, when the pony would not stand for him to step into the cart.
But nothing really deterred Joe from fly-fishing—neither heat nor cold nor rain nor wind; he only regarded the weather at those times from the point of view of its influence on the sport. Even when it was too bad for fishing he couldn’t keep away from the water. But he could never keep away from water—he said it was the life of a landscape as the blood is the life of the human body. In our early days, when we were too poor for Highland trips, visits to friends on the Thames afforded him his best access to it; and, though he was not perhaps a perfect oarsman, as may be proved by a “stroke’s” petition that he would not “go so deep,” to which he replied: “Ah, I never leave a stone unturned!”—he loved the “noble river.” Though for perfect satisfaction he chose more swiftly running waters.
I came across some passages in one of Stopford Brooke’s letters which strangely call to mind Joe’s passion for a free stream.
“There is no companion like a quick stream,” writes the older man; “full, but not too full, capable of shallows and water-breaks, with deep pools when it likes and with a thousand shadows acquainted with all the tales of the hills....”
And once more: “Running water surely is the dearest and best-bred thing in the world. And a great workman and a great artist.... Nor is there any Singer, any Poet, any Companion so near and dear as it is when it shapes itself into a mountain stream in a quiet country.”
Often have I seen Joe beside such streams, and though it so chanced that the last happy holiday we had together was spent beside lakes rather than rivers, the sense of moving water remains associated in my mind with him through all the earlier days of our life.
It was in Ireland—his motherland, though he had never seen it till then—that we passed those last unforgetable weeks of autumn.