The Cormorant (7 page)

And that left a week for fishing, a week before Ann would be back with Harry. I had to go into Caernarfon to do all the Christmas shopping, and I took Archie on every trip. There were presents to buy, food and drink. I left the cormorant in the van while I went from shop to shop, wanting Ann to be pleased when she came back, impressed that I had made such an effort to prepare for Christmas instead of tinkering at the typewriter or playing with the wretched bird. I found a special gift for her, a slender gold necklace with a dangling butterfly which would flutter prettily at her throat. And a sackful of presents for Harry, things which clanked and whistled and chimed, things to occupy his mischievous fingers and distract them from the ornaments on the mantelpiece. I queued in the off-licence, wrote a disconcertingly big cheque, staggered out with my burden of Christmas spirit. Meat and vegetables, fruit and dates and nuts: more cardboard boxes to squeeze into the van. Each time I returned, Archie battered at the windscreen. It tried to spring from the van but I forced it back. As usual, people stopped to stare, aghast at the big bird beating the windows of the little car. I smiled at the spectators and answered their questions politely: no, it wasn’t a goose; yes, it was quite tame but don’t go too close; it was a cormorant, but no, sir, I didn’t have a licence . . . until the shopping was done for the day. Then I changed into the green wellingtons, put on my waterproof jacket, took out the length of rope and attached it to Archie’s ankle. The leather collar was in place around the bird’s throat. Keeping the cormorant close to my feet, I led it over the swing bridge, along the sea front away from the castle, and dropped down to the stony beach. A few people paused in their walking to watch me and the bird. I let the bird have more slack on the rope, went to the water’s edge. The tide was coming in over the sand flats, creeping into the channels of the estuary, licking with its creamy tongue at all the dry clumps of weed, the salt-encrusted rocks. It was midday, mid-December, with more of a bite in the air, a taste of frost. It would be colder soon, the sky was bruised. The cormorant stepped gingerly through the high-water line of seaweed, bottles, whitened spars, and came to the sea. The line was secure, the collar too. Archie floated out, miraculously transformed from the clumsy goose to a purposeful, menacing submarine. I paid out the rope and the bird began to fish.

‘Go on, Archie. Get busy . . .’

The cormorant dived. For half a minute, there was nothing but the secret trembling of the rope in my hands. Somewhere in the brown water, decked in silver bubbles, with a stream of mercury pouring from the horny bill, the bird jinked and swerved in pursuit of fish. Using wings and feet as power, flying through the water, Archie was hunting. Before the shriek of the jets had ever shaken the sky over the Straits, before the churning of sand by the propellers of fishing boats, long before the first arrows sped around the battlements of the castle, Archie had been twisting through the tides of the estuary. The dabs fled, as they always fled, raising up the puffs of sand. Eels wriggled in the hope of reaching the safety of deeper water, they flashed a little grey metal and made for the shadows. In the air, the black-headed gulls circled petulantly and wondered at the world of the rumbling depths. Oyster-catchers whistled among the boulders of the shore. A pair of crows went overhead to the further land, to search the pools for the crusts of a cuttlefish. The jackdaws ate chips and crumbs in the castle courtyard. Archie was lost to the open air of the Menai Straits, connected to my hands by the twitching rope. I waited and watched the sea for the reappearance of the cormorant.

And when the narrow, black head surfaced, it was gripping the slimy sides of a dab. I saw its flatness, the size of a child’s hand. Archie was fighting the fish, wrestling it, manoeuvring it, to bring it round to face the entrance of the throat. I drew in the line, very slowly. Archie continued to juggle the dab, while I took in the line and the bird was pulled towards the beach. Quicker and quicker, and the cormorant approached the shallow water. I went in to the top of my boots, winding the rope around my arm until I could reach forward and seize the bird firmly by the neck. Still Archie was preoccupied with the dab; it seemed oblivious to the rope around its ankle, even to the grip of my hand. The collar constricted its throat just enough to prevent the fish from sliding down. I dumped Archie on the beach and snatched the dab from between its jaws. By the time the bemused bird had found its bearings, peering round at me and again at the water, the fish was in the pocket of my jacket.

‘Good lad, Archie, you daft bird! Go on, try again. There are lots more out there . . .’

Casting a glance at the movement of my jacket pocket, the bird turned back towards the sea and paddled away. I paid out the rope with one hand and felt for the writhing fish with the other. From behind me, on the sea wall, there came a little dry applause, some spectator impressed by my feat. I did not look round, being busy with the tangles of line in the rocks and about my boots, but I managed to take the dab from my pocket and wave it in the air above my head. The clapping became brisker, slowed down and stopped. The fish went into the bag which I had brought with me. By the time I turned to the sea wall, there was no-one there watching, only a few children cycling by.

‘Well done, Archie, you clever bugger!’

I was thrilled. The bird disappeared under the water.

Time and again, over the course of the afternoon, the cormorant surfaced with a fish. And I towed it into the shore. In a couple of hours, the bag was nearly full, with sixteen or seventeen dabs; it wriggled with the mucous exertions of the dying fish. By four o’clock, Archie was exhausted. I carried the bird under one arm and held the bag of fish with my other hand. With the wet rope coiled around my shoulder, I walked back to the van. Archie sat in the crook of my arm, panting. Nobody watched as the collar was removed. From the bag I took the four eels which Archie had caught and fed them to the bird, knocking their heads on the bumper of the van first of all, to make it simpler for the tired cormorant. They rapidly vanished. The light was fading under the beetling sides of the castle.

‘Great work, Archie. You can keep us in flatties for the rest of your career. It’s a deal, OK, eat as many eels as you can catch, hand over the dabs to me, and we’ll forget about your board and lodging . .

We went again to the river mouth at Caernarfon. It was better than ratting in the Nantlle quarries. In any case, I did not want to return there. In a few days, Ann would be home with Harry and perhaps I would not be able to get away fishing. So I thought it best to make the most of this new hobby, hunting with the cormorant. It was gloriously plebeian. As a schoolboy, I had often dreamed of possessing a falcon, learning the ancient laws and traditions of falconry. Now I was reaping pocketfuls of flatfish from the mudbanks of the Menai Straits, seizing them from the beak of the cormorant, alive with bone and gristle. They made a delicious soup, rather coarse and grey, but marvellous with pepper and brown bread. The van stank of fish. My hands were raw from the cold, the salt water and the inevitable contact with Archie’s beak. In the cottage kitchen, there hung the clinging steam of fish broth. And I loved it all, the rusticity of it. I drove the bird from the mountain village to the coast, and I smiled when I thought how I had changed in the few months since leaving the Midlands. What would my old headmaster say if I were to meet him, by some absurd coincidence, in the harbour car park in Caernarfon? I was used to wearing a jacket and tie for school: here I was, parking a smelly van on the quayside, stepping out in tattered jeans and Wellington boots, in such an ancient pullover that big holes had appeared under both arms in spite of Ann’s repeated attention, in a waterproof spotted with fish scales and containing in one pocket the corpse of a forgotten flatfish; to crown the effect of such scruffy clothing, on opening up the back of the van, a dangerous, black villain of a bird would spring out, a cross between a raven and a pelican but most closely resembling a vampire bat (redolent of fish). And the hunt for food: taking the bird with its leash and collar, filling a bag with fresh fish, while other people stood stupidly in a supermarket queue. My beard had improved, I thought: instead of being closely razored under my chin and on my cheeks, I had left it to crawl over my throat and disappear below my ears. The fingernails, which were once so immaculately filed and cleaned, were now neglected. With a frown, I remembered that I had hardly added to my notes for the book during the past week, something I should return to when the business of Christmas and the New Year was over. Meanwhile, I was enjoying the raffish company of the cormorant.

Leaving the boxes of shopping in the van, once more I walked the bird from the castle, over the bridge and down to the beach. It was high tide. There was a choppy sea driving into the Straits, tossing its white crests a hundred yards from the shore and spitting spray when the waves ran against the wooden piles of the jetty. The wind forced the seas along, threw the taste of salt into my beard. I licked my lips and fastened my jacket. It was a raw afternoon. The beach was deserted and the sea wall was empty of pedestrians and cyclists. Nevertheless, Archie braced itself in the breeze, allowing its wings to fall partly open and flutter. The bird seemed as eager as ever to get into the water, so I checked the knot around its ankle and fitted the collar. My hands were a little blue already. I nudged the cormorant away with my boot, unwinding all the rope until it lay around my feet in the grey boulders. Then I jammed my hands deep into pockets, my shoulders hunched against the cold. To me, the sea looked utterly uninviting: it was whipped to a brown cream, it was angry, unhealthy, the white spume scratched from the surface and spent in the bitterness of the afternoon. But Archie set off. The line uncoiled itself. The cormorant looked lower in the water than usual, lost sometimes in the chop and spray. Splendid . . . the specialist hunter unperturbed by the conditions, a pitiless mercenary sent into the field. There was something so icily efficient about the bird, cutting through the waves on a day when the gulls and the crows had sought the shelter of the castle walls. It went down, disappeared from sight. The rope paid out.

‘Good boy, Archie. Do your stuff . .

I turned away from the water, to have my back to the wind. There was nobody walking, it was too cold. The wind tugged at my trouser legs and blew up the hair on the back of my head.

‘Bloody hell . .

I was thinking of the cosy cottage living-room, the log fire, the scent of the Christmas tree and the wood smoke. There would not be much fishing today, however much Archie was enjoying it. Just a few dabs, enough to thicken up yesterday’s soup, and some eels for the hunter. I turned to the sea again, squinting into the wind. I could not see the bird.

‘Come on, come on, it’s freezing out here . .

But I knew it would be murky below the surface, a maelstrom of mud and sand, an underwater haboob. At any moment, Archie would reappear, after an unsuccessful chase. Maybe today there would be no dabs. I would at least have exercised the bird, it would have to eat cat food when we got home. No sign of Archie. The rope was slack about my feet. I reluctantly withdrew my hands from my pockets and bent to pick it up. As I did so, the line began to show above the surface of the water, well downstream, towards the jetty at the mouth of the river. The current had taken the cormorant nearer to the castle. I wound in the line, turning it around my wrist. It grew taut. The rope went away to my right and entered the water quite close to the slimy pillars of the jetty. I pulled tighter. It would not budge.

Quickly striding along the shore towards the bridge over the estuary, I coiled in the line, winding it around my forearm. I broke into a run when I saw the rope disappear into the coffee-coloured sea where it swirled in the legs of the pier. I leaned on the rope, my whole weight on the slender line, until it sang in the cutting wind and the droplets of sea flew from it. The bird was caught somewhere in the currents, with the rope around its ankle, the rope snagged among the weed and slime and barnacles of the wooden columns.

‘Archie, Archie, you bugger . . . where the hell are you?’

Uncoiling the line again, I ran up to the sea wall, vaulting onto the promenade, and sprinted to the jetty. There was an iron gate whose sign forbade entrance to the pier, except to authorised persons. I sprang over and went to the end, trailing the slack line behind me. Then I was directly over the spot where the rope slid into the water. I wound it in and leaned out, fifteen feet above the sea, with the line taut in both my hands. I strained to see. The tide came forcing up the river mouth, throwing back the feeble currents of the river itself. Around the wooden pillars, where they sank beneath the surface, the eddies coiled and hissed like serpents. Bubbles of brown foam were sucked into the whirlpools. Again I leaned on the rope and pulled it upwards with all my strength, until I thought it gave an inch. The water writhed. If the cormorant was there, it was fighting for breath, seeing its own spark extinguished in every silver bubble which burst from its beak.

I threw off my waterproof jacket, snatching the clasp knife from its pocket. Having tied the rope to the railings of the pier, I began to clamber over the barrier, to negotiate a descent through the slimy pillars. Outwards I leaned, looking down between my legs for every footing. There were big iron bolts to grip and to stand on, icy cold to the touch, laden with grease. The wind raced through the stanchions, by my face the rope quivered. Step by step, I made the precarious descent to the surface of the water, stood there with my arms wrapped around the wet wood, breathing heavily. There was no time to spare. Bracing myself against the cold, I stepped down further, the green boots feeling for the next foothold in the racing water. Down and down, with the water now at my knees, at my thighs, while I groped for another step, tugging at my waist and sinking bitter teeth into my stomach . . . the currents around my chest . . . the breath squeezed out of me . . . I gasped and clung to the jetty, there was nowhere further for me to go . . .