Season in Strathglass by John; Fowler Page B

notebook bearing a badly typed message – the letter e was missing and a heavy hand on the keys had punched holes in the paper. It was signed by Kyle and the significant phrase was ‘I liv· and br·ath· fishing’. Mark was hooked.

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    Outside the Tomich Hotel, Kyle is going round ‘The Six’ with a clipboard, assigning them boats – they'll split into pairs and he and Dennis and another gillie will accompany them. Kyle is a solidly built man, foursquare in his black reefer jacket. Greying locks curl under his cap. Kyle manages the fishing for his cousin Donald the circumnavigator.
    There are tales about Kyle, a harum-scarum in his youth with a penchant for fast cars. He once sold Maseratis in the Highlands. It's said he mollified the police in France who flagged him down for breaking the speed limit by giving them a spin in his sporty car. This day, he's driving a borrowed all-terrain vehicle and offers a lift up the track to the lochs while the others take an easier route through the forest. He climbs aboard stiffly, grumbling in a rather posh accent (public school, I suppose) about his bad knees and we jolt away. Twice gates barring the way have to be opened. My job.
    We park on a grassy patch about a quarter of a mile from the boathouse on Loch a'Ghreidlein, where the others join us. The blue sky is lightlybarred with wispy white clouds which cast shifting shadows on brown moorland and dark forest. Blue mountains to the north are splashed with snow. It's cold. Dennis says it was minus two at Drumnadrochit last night.
    Out of car boots comes the kit, the rubber boots, the overtrousers, the jackets, the satchels, the whippy rods and fine lines. These reflect individual peccadilloes – wet flies and dry flies are meticulously arranged in Richard's multi-pocket vest, one side wet, the other dry. ‘He's a bit obsessional,’ Dennis mutters. There's much fiddling with reels and rods raised like lances in the air.
    I follow Dennis and his two clients to the boathouse while the others head for the next lochan in the chain, Loch na Beinne Moire. The boathouse, just a wooden hut with a table and a few chairs in it for lunching, is a room with a view. A big window looks north towards faraway mountains. A small cairn nearby is dedicated to ‘a lover of the countryside’.
    â€˜I once had a man who sat beside that cairn all morning with a bottle of malt whisky,’ says Dennis. ‘Kyle went up to him and asks, “Are you not fishing, sir? Have you fallen out, or what?”’ Not a bit of it. On his first casts of the day the man had caught two big fish, one after the other. ‘It was sheer luck of course,’ says Dennis. ‘Fish were feeding on the surface and he just flicked out his first cast and got a five-pounder, which he put back. He changed the fly and on the very next cast he got another just as big. So he retreated with the bottle and sat there just looking at the hills and swigging.’
    â€˜His partner in the boat couldn't have been too pleased,’ Mark observes.
    â€˜His partner got nothing,’ says Dennis.
    Mark says he likes to get a couple of nice fish in the boat before he can relax.
    What's a nice fish? ‘Plate size,’ says Dennis. ‘In this small loch anything over three pounds is a very good fish.’
    As Dennis clambers into the rowboat moored to the jetty, he spots a small insect rippling the water.
    â€˜A sedge,’ says Mark, scooping it up in the hollow of his palm, whereit lies like a small, scrolled-up brown leaf, whereupon Richard produces a lookalike from his pockets and we compare the living insect and the artefact. The similarity is striking.
    Dennis says, ‘The sedge is the biggest fly we have up here. They normally hatch in June and when they start hatching the fish feed on them exclusively. There's maybe a five-week period when the fish feed on them and nothing else, so that's all we go out with