“He should then always set up a spare cast of flies, so that if he meets with an accident or requires to change, he can do so at once with little or no delay, as when the fish are rising well, delays of any kind are in-tolerable; and to have at such times to be hunting your
book through for a fly or two, which should be ready to hand, is sure to be productive of three great and alliterative losses—loss of time, loss of tackle, and loss of temper.”
Francis Francis 1867
I said I didn’t want any of his sweet mangoes, thank you very much. Politely, I thought. Little man from Nelspruit. Rings the bell at the gate, off out of sight down my driveway. Comes around all the time. We communicate on the intercom. He usually sells avos and citrus, fresh from Nelspruit he says. Citrus with no pips, he assures me. I wasn’t having any of it. “No thanks” I said again firmly.
Turns out it was the Viking, pulling one on me. Who would have thought a Viking could turn Indian so convincingly that I wouldn’t let him in. But I shouldn’t be surprised. He is a man of many talents that. Just last week-end I witnessed him dancing. In the mountains. Alone.
I stood there beside the pool which had failed to produce even a single Brown and watched his moves. I was more than curious. It wasn’t a pretty thing. There was a lot of stomping, and were it not such confident stomping I would have reckoned on a snake encounter. But this was brave; aggressive even. I was out of ideas.
Despite the Viking’s many talents, both he and I did poorly on the Mooi, just as Conrad and I had done a week or so prior. It looked great: good flows, almost crystal clear, temperatures almost perfect. The weather had been good on both outings. That is to say, sunny with drifting cloud and a gusty enough wind to ripple the surface and make a hopper crash on the water surface a believable thing. But the Viking and I crashed hoppers, and a whole lot else, with very limited success. It was the same with Conrad. He got a few on the dry, but there was no consistency or plenitude to it. Just the odd fish here and there, and the sweet “sure thing” spots failed to produce, much to our contempt and befuddlement. A week earlier, Conrad and I had leaned on one elbow as we lay in the grass and had lovely cold beer. An hour earlier the Viking and I lay on one elbow and had coffee, and spilled sugar on a rock to see what the ants would do. The ants carried the grains of sugar away about as fast as Conrad and I had drunk beer. We reckoned it as more sugar than a mountain ant sees in a year, and that they were cheering and whooping. The Trout, though, were a lot slower on both days, no one was cheering and whooping, and we were out of theories. It was somehow easier to theorise about the ants and their grains of sugar than it was about what was up with the Trout.
When the Viking rang my bell, proffering mangoes, I hadn’t seen him in a week. When Conrad arrived at my place to go fishing, I hadn’t fished with him in 39 years. Conrad fishes calmly and with a measured control and high levels of discipline. I would imagine he carries a spare tippet rig of dropper and point fly, ready to go in the unlikely event of a tangle. That hasn’t changed in 39 years. Tiny dries, light tackle, and an appreciation of the aesthetic of the day and perhaps more now than when we were students, the sense of occasion and place. Conrad had persuaded his parents, with much incessant nagging, he tells me, to take him to Kamberg to fish when he was a schoolboy. So this is where he cut his teeth. Now, on the occasion of his mother’s memorial, he was back in the country, and we were back at Kamberg. We chatted about our late fathers who were schoolboy friends at high school in the 1950’s. We compared our childlike love of flyfishing, and we filled one another in about our kids and communities on opposite sides of the globe. It was special. This sort of thing warrants the second beer, and adds weight to the eight inch Trout one of you might have landed earlier. The Viking’s eight inch Trout, like the one that ate a hopper at day’s end, always have added weight. He, like Conrad, gets it.
And when the Viking admitted, a little bashfully, that the stomping and destruction of bushes off there up the valley, was a little mountain tantrum, brought on by successive tangles and birds nest’s caused by a strong downstream wind, I said I got it. I had a fair share of tangles on both days, and I’ve done a bit of mountain dancing in my time too.
