8. The Still Point
Moving water has its own magnetism. It always drew me back; I must have visited the river at least twice a week, in every season, in every weather. Some of the creatures I saw there I would never see anywhere else. A solitary female goosander may have had a bizarre annual excursion to my rooftop, but other than that I would only see them on the river: either swimming, or resting on a boulder midstream, or flying directly above the water. I don’t recall ever having seen one on the riverbank. Not only did the river have its own distinct set of resident species, but it also had its own summer and winter visitors. It had its own array of passage migrants too, such as the goldeneye, or the osprey — just occasionally, tantalizingly glimpsed as they passed through — which had neither their breeding grounds nor their wintering grounds here, but used the river as a highway between the two. I never knew quite what to expect when I went to the river.
What happened beneath the surface was a mystery to me. I knew there were salmon and trout here, though this was no longer the fishing river it once had been. And I knew there were pike here too, because I could sometimes make out a monster lurking at the edge of a deep pool by the bridge. But I had no idea what other coarse fish there were, or what the fish that rose for floating insects and left fading ripples in their wake were, or what the huge shoals of tiny fry that scattered from the shallows in the summer when I waded in to bathe were. And I had no one who could fill this gap in my knowledge. I was no fisherman; my only experience of fishing was a short spell on a commercial fishing boat in the Baltic, and what I had learned there was not going to help me here. I could see the attraction of spending long days at the river’s edge, away from it all, my attention fully focused, but I didn’t feel I needed to justify this with a rod and line.
The river here was totally different in character from the reedy, winding, slow-moving rivers of the lowlands. The steep banks were heavily wooded. Where the river bent, beaches and islands of discs of pale grey shale gathered and built on the inside of the bend, and here alders tried to get a foothold in the shifting stones. Where the river narrowed, and in its shallower reaches, the water raced and tumbled over the boulders in miniature rapids. There might be quieter stretches too, where the clear water ran slow and deep beneath the overhanging trees, and all seemed calm and placid, but this could change dramatically. A sudden spate could see the water levels rise five or ten feet overnight. And occasionally the river would burst its banks, and the flood pools in the riverside fields would fill with dabbling mallards escaping the chaos of the river. After a storm or a sudden thaw I would go down to the footbridge and watch the roiling waters below, the colour of a pale lemon tea yesterday but a frothy cappuccino today, seething and churning down the valley, carrying everything with them. This bridge was suspended high above the water, and it needed to be, for the force of the storm water could wrench full-grown trees from the banks and send them sailing seaward, at least until the waters abated and they snagged somewhere downriver.
I’m not sure quite what it is with river birds and bobbing. The grey wagtails — grey on their backs only, their breasts being a beautiful citrus yellow — would be wagging their tails relentlessly as they scampered along the shale beaches; and the sandpipers would race low above the surface of the water, their wings stiff and hooded like a miniature umbrella, making their piercing triple calls, and then would alight on a midstream rock and begin to teeter, bouncing as if their knees were spring-loaded, as if they were trying to keep time with the dipper bobbing on a rock near by. Perhaps living in this watery light, this world in constant motion, made them this way. Maybe by matching their movements to the roll of the waters they were camouflaging themselves, making themselves invisible to predators above, or prey below. To my eyes, their restlessness — especially that of the wagtails and sandpipers, whose backs were the precise colour of shale — rendered them far more visible than if they remained still for a moment. But to a hawk soaring above, maybe a still point in a shifting world would be more likely to draw its hunter’s eye.
The sandpipers were migrants, and many of the wagtails would move to lower ground in the hard weather too, but the dippers were always there — the totem bird of these fast-moving waters. If you were first to see one isolated from its environment you wouldn’t think it a bird of the water at all; they are stumpy birds, reminiscent of an outsize robin, though a rich chestnut and mahogany, and with a white bib instead of an orange one. But in situ they could not look more at home, as they bob on the rocks by the rapids and dive repeatedly into the water to feed from the riverbed. I once took advantage of being with a friend who had a watch to time a dipper that was busily feeding. In half an hour it dived just over a hundred times, more than three times a minute. Not only was it catching invertebrate prey, such as caddis-fly larvae, but it was also regularly hopping out of the water with small fish in its beak, which it would then beat on its rock before swallowing whole. They had the river divided up between them and where territories met there would be constant skirmishes. I listened out for when they began to sing each year, and without fail they would begin just before New Year’s Day. It would have been optimistic to think of it as an early sign of spring, but it lifted the heart nonetheless.
They were among the very first birds to nest, building in February and sitting before the end of March. I could see the reasons why the ravens nested early, even the long-tailed tits, but with the dippers I had no clue, and I could only assume it was something to do with the inscrutable life cycles of their underwater prey. At least they built dome nests, like the tits, that would help protect eggs and young from frosts. The dippers liked their nests to be directly over the water; their favourite sites, occupied year after year, were under the bridges, or rather culverts, where streams met the river, but there were not quite enough of these to go round. One winter I was able to watch from the footbridge as the resident pair collected moss and began to build their nest at the very tip of an overhanging beech bough that stretched far out across the river. They completed the nest and had begun to line it, but I could see that they had made an error of judgement: the nest was only about five feet or so above the water’s surface, and the thaw in the mountains had not yet come. A few days later when I returned, the nest was underwater, and when the waters fell, the nest had been washed away. They were determined, though; as soon as the flood waters had abated, they started over in exactly the same place.
The stream came racing down the bank and into the river over ten or fifteen yards of bare rock, not quite steeply enough to be a waterfall. Wading into the culvert was like entering a tunnel, or a cave. It was a concrete pipe about three yards across and ten yards long, perfectly round save for a ledge halfway up both sides that stretched for its full length. Midway along this ledge were the dipper nests. There were four or five on each side, the newly built one a still-green mossy football, the older ones faded brown and progressively more and more disintegrated. On the remains of one of the old nests the wagtails had built a home of their own. As I reached the new nest I slipped my fingers in through the entrance hole to feel if laying had begun, and as I did so something dark and massive came hurtling through the tunnel towards me. In the confined space its head seemed as broad as a shovel, its whiskers like the bristles of a broom, and its tail as thick as my arm. Its back rippled and rolled, as if a wave ran through it. It splashed through the water by me, just a foot away, then slithered down the rocks to disappear into the river. A dog otter, far bigger than any of those I had seen in Scotland. I don’t know what induced this animal to run towards me rather than away from me; if it had turned and slipped upstream I would probably never have seen it, much as I will undoubtedly have missed other otters that have seen or heard or scented me first. I can only assume that we had surprised each other equally, at exactly the same moment, and it had to get past me to reach the ultimate safety of the deep water that lay beyond me.