Season in Strathglass by John; Fowler Page A

are dropped back into the water.
    Midges can be a torment in late summer. ‘I've seen guests with paper bags over their heads and holes cut for their eyes. I've seen guests get out of the car and run to the edge of the loch and push out like mad for the middle. It's usually better out there. But if the wind drops, they'll find you.’ He's not affected as much as some but, at the worst, he'll pull a net over his head. He reckons that children are less susceptible than adults – or so it seems with Katy. Loch or river fishing can be equally affected. On the River Farrar, he calculates on losing about four days’ fishing a season to midges.
    Dennis says that some clients like to be left to fish a river on their own and he'll leave them for an hour or so, returning now and again to check progress. Others prefer his company – his advice and his chat. He's a great talker, is Dennis.
    He says that once in late September a stag came down the hill in Glen Strathfarrar looking for hinds.
    â€˜I love your Highlands,’ said his woman client, an American. ‘I've seen a stag and now I can hear a piper.’
    â€˜My God,’ said Dennis, ‘it's my mobile.’ (It had a pipe tune as ring-tone.) He grabbed it from his vest pocket, it shot out of his grasp and splashed into the pool and, silenced, no doubt lies there still.

43
    Every spring six pals come to Tomich from all quarters for a week's fishing on the Hill Lochs. It's the only time they meet.
    Forbes, at 80, is the oldest, broad in the shoulder, stocky, slightly stooped, with a quizzical eye. A doctor from Manchester, he has fished in the Highlands for more than half a century. His son played with Dennis at Knockfin when they were boys.
    Mark, 40-ish, is the youngest – a detective sergeant in the Met who lectures at Hendon Police College. Like all of them, he came to the sport early. An uncle in Dingwall took him out in a boat, handed him a rod and hey! – he had a bite. In time, he guessed that the fish was already on the line when his uncle put the rod in his hands but he never asked: ‘Let me live with my illusion.’
    Mike, an engineer, is the heavyweight of the party. The boat settles when he steps aboard. The legs in his breeches are like young tree trunks. He lives in Carlisle where his father was a haaf-netter – wading out into the Solway Firth with a net draped from a yoke on his shoulders like an aquatic Angel of the North. His face is framed by a short grizzly beard.
    David's grandfather had a boat on Loch Leven in Fife. David lives in Manchester and travels the world as a consultant in ‘enterprise architecture’ (I don't know what that means but it sounds impressive). A man for the great outdoors, when young he was a climbing instructor at Glenmore Lodge outdoor centre at Aviemore. He's about to become an alpha-Munroist, having set out to climb every major peak in the Highlands not just once but once in each season. He's on the last lap: ‘Eight in summer and seven in winter still to do.’
    Howard, a pathologist in Edinburgh, has known this area since boyhood. (He caught his first fish, a perch, in the city's Duddingston Loch.) He spent school holidays with his family in a cottage in Cannich.
    Richard, the newcomer to the party, is in business in Suffolk selling kitchens and bathrooms. A chance meeting six years ago led to his adoption by the group.
    The catalyst for some of them was Kyle, the man who organises fishing parties on the lochs. ‘I wandered into Tomich, was introduced to Kyle and the rest is history,’ says Howard. Kyle's eccentricities are legendary. Mike came to Tomich after a planned fishing trip to Ireland fell through. He wrote for information and Kyle's reply was ‘so off the wall that I thought, that sounds like my sort of thing’. Mark agrees. Twenty years ago he received a sheaf of glossy bumf about the area, amongst which was a scrap of paper torn from a