As Ray and I ascended the Rooidraai stream crossing, I pointed out to him on the vehicle dashboard that he had nothing to worry about. It was warming up: The thermometer had just shifted from 0 to 1 degree C.
The antelope beside the road on the way in had been so silvered in frost that they barely contrasted with the mist and silver frost.
Up at the dam, we climbed out of the cab into crisp morning air so clear that one’s watering eyes scarce could take it in. The berg glistened with the bright morning light which had just cut through a lifting mist to adorn its snowy fleece. The dam surface received little furtive breaths of a southerly breeze which delivered its puffs of arctic air in a way which signalled that they had not surrendered to the sun just yet. The snow had come in on a strong front blown up from the South a few days prior. The same front had dropped a little rain which had stripped the dust from the sky and darkened the soil and the straw-coloured veld with its black wetness. Wetness slaking ash on the freshly burnt grass. Grass that in places emitted a smouldering fog that could have been remnants from the fire, could have been vaporising frost melt. Now the mountains stood out through a baby blue sky with a starkness that seemed to intensify their gaze over the rolling hills below. We were small in that landscape. The two us, just alighted from the vehicle into this morning spectacle of intense contrast, cutting cold, and the trembles of the morning’s anticipations like those in the legs of a just-born antelope.
We tied on flies with a sense of urgency born of the knowledge that our hands might soon be too cold to do it as well as we now could.
While the day gradually turned hazy as the rain’s fresh wash succumbed to the effects of the dry air and relentless breeze, the water was a constant. Water so clean that the submerged stones on the shoreline seemed illuminated, and the depths into which we stared and cast our flies beckoned with a heart breaking purity. The other constant was the cold. A week earlier I had fished a dam fringed with ice in the morning, but sun-soaked enough by mid morning that we wee shedding layers. Not today. Today Ray and I kept beanies on, and in fact Ray retreated to the car to add a layer after an hour or two. That southerly breeze which puffed, puffed an “I’m not done yet” message from the newly departed weather system. It veered a little eastwards for a time, and it slowed to a point where we believed the sun might win out, but then it swung south again and dashed any chance of warmly comfort.
I had put a woolly bugger out when we first arrived. A bugger chasing a small egg pattern. The fish often patrol the shale near where we park, so that seemed appropriate. It fooled the first fish, but being a fly one strips, it goes with a lot of casting. I figured that the casting over the clear water in the bright morning light was not a recipe for success. So I switched to something I would need to cast a lot less: a midge emerger with a tiny spider behind it. The spider had the tiniest of beads, so that it never did sink the emerger. The emerger had a little yellow post which I could see, and a parachute whorl of CDC which floated it beautifully. I liked the way it rode the waves, and I could see it even at the end of a long throw.
Ray and I both kept low. Knee pains had us sitting at times, and we both stood up creaking at times to let the blood flow, but mostly only when the sun was behind us or some structure between us and the water.
Our hands clung to the warmth of a small cup of campstove coffee as we looked out over the water, ever hopeful of a flat wavelet, a boil, or a splash which might suggest the fish had woken from their cold slumber. By day’s end the night’s cold layer crept in over the one which had held the landscape captive all day long, to achieve a frosty severity which saw us shelter on the leeward side of the vehicle for a quick dram of warming Irish Whisky.
That night as my wind-chafed face glowed in the warmth of the hearth back home, I got to thinking about the fishing. Like so many winter days, we had had to put in long, creeping hours for the odd pull here and there. Ray’s fishing had been slow of late, but I pointed out to him that winter fly-fishing had a lot more to do with stoic hours than cleverness. My catches hadn’t been different to his, but more than that they had been hit and miss affairs. Just the sudden pull of a Trout here, and one four hours later over there, with no formula to explain them. Today was no different. I lost a jumper on the first cast, but had to wait hours before the chance came again. The rest of my chances turned out to be little stock fish: that was the just the dice roll I got.
Ray’s dice roll got him his own jumper many hours later: a fish charged with hard cold-water energy, which tugged and thrashed and leapt for the sky.
For the rest of it, it was about water sparkling with low angled winter sunlight. About lapping wavelets cold on the shoreline stones. About a full faced brightness from which a hat brim’s protection was forgone for a warm beanie. As the hours passed the light had turned brassy with the yellow of smoke and dust in the big dome sky around us. The mountains had disappeared in the haze. And on the way back the silhoutte of cascading ridge lines each appeared in a subtly different shade of dusky blue, separated with help from a low angled sun, shining beams down each valley as if to cleave them apart. The antelope we saw at the roadside stood fearless of our approach, as if the dangers of the night cold far surpassed any threat we might have represented. We certainly didn’t put any fear into the Trout population. But what we did do was to imbibe the winter. A winter hitherto mild and at risk of blending in with a cool dry spring before we realised it had passed. With the day done I cast my blessings on Ray’s countdown to the opening of the spring river season. He is now free to cite the “days to go” number each time I make contact with him.
Our day captured winter.
Quintessential winter.
