Telling Stories A Tale of two rivers by Savs

OF

TWO RIVERS

Bramble boy fishes with the attentiveness of a coked-up heron. If you are able to stand motionless for long enough to catch a fleeting glimpse of him working a run, down on one knee with his arm extended, it brings to mind the well practised routines of the Tai Chi master. His every movement is frugal, crisp and explicit.

His forearm and wrist rotate slightly, the supple tip of the long rod flexes and then straightens, his pair of flies are delivered with effortless precision and are tucked into the edge of a seam. With his lips pursed and eyes unblinking he follows them with the rod tip before repeating the action. It’s like watching a robotic assembly line; not exactly exciting but sort of pleasing in a difficult to describe way.

Every so often his elbow almost imperceptibly tightens and every so often this movement is inhibited by the resistance of a fish that he first effortlessly turns towards slack water and then in no time at all eases into his net. He releases it gently and without drama, inspects his flies, meditatively checks his ludicrously

I would have stood longer to watch, and I may have even learned something, was every spark of my mental capacity not focussed on remaining upright on a riverbottom the texture of polished and lubricated granite. The precariousness of my position was compounded by my singular lack of natural grace and the fact that we had the night before quaffed, in the way that friends who see each other infrequently are wont to quaff, several more beers each than would be considered strictly gentlemanly.

That Bramble Boy seemed to be entirely unaffected by all of this and was out-fishing me by some margin did nothing to improve my already curmudgeonly demeanour. In an effort to be helpful he moved across to where I was perched perilously on the only dry rock for miles and said something about steadying my hands and keeping the sighter parallel to the water surface throughout the drift. I almost got it right too, but I stepped back into the water, began a series of windmilling arm motions and lost whatever composure I had managed to muster.

It’s no small feat, this wading of green bottomed rivers while trying to operate with any level of precision a rod the length of a telegraph pole lined with monofilament as thin as an underwear model’s sheer negligee and which terminates in two flies with the combined mass of a small planet . Nevertheless, after a while my mojo, such as it is, kicked in and I caught a fish. A short time later I caught another and not too long after that I caught a few more. I began to relax and to register the environment around me. The Natal scaly is in its own way a remarkable species and is not worthy of its unfortunate name. It is robust, significantly stronger than it looks and with its burnished colour, sporadic black dots and upright dorsal fin it made an instant impression on me. Sure, it lacks the rakish belligerence of a rainbow trout or the wiles of the brown but it’s probably the gentlest taker of an imitation that I have targeted and that alone will keep me casting at them. They’re not the brightest fish around either and with their propensity to try to fight you in mid-water are a little like that one cousin of yours; dim-witted, but somehow endearing. Look, they’re not permit, but they’re good enough for the likes of me.

What pleased me most about our day was the environment in which the scaly is found. The rivers are at roughly half the altitude of my home waters and are wider and slower than I’m used to. I’m guessing that this river is older or perhaps simply less erratic than those that I know more intimately as it has cut deeper valleys and has had millennia to wear down its bedrock smooth and cold. In the Drakensberg one gets the sense that the mountains have risen up to leave streams within fissures in their faces whereas here the opposite seems to be true with the river cutting deeply into the land. Geology is not my strength.

The valleys are indeed deep but not enough to be steeped walled canyons and their more gentle slopes are lined in the most part with dense natural vegetation. Human habitation is light and while there is the inevitable car tyre and plastic bottle to be seen you don’t get the sense that the river is polluted. Well, it is, but not so much in the almost post-apocalyptic contemporary sense of the term.

On the long walk down the valley towards our vehicle I was honestly amazed and more than happy to see the spoor of several species of wild animal in the gravel and mud on the banks. Duiker prints I recognised immediately but there were several other species of buck that I can only guess at and my day was made complete by the sighting of the tracks of a mother water mongoose with two of her pups in tow. The mother was all business and her tracks described a direct path along the river while those of her pups led to and from any miniature point of interest along their journey and left a double helix pattern in the sand like the shape of strands of DNA. I could see the evidence of her scolding and shushing them along in her wake and this image pleased me beyond words.

We returned late and bundled Bramble Boy off to the airport for his late night flight home. As I sat down to inspect my bruises and to catch up with the news of the day my deep contentment was replaced with abject horror. Images of the effects of a 1’600’000 litre caustic soda and vegetable oil spill on a river that runs within scant kilometres of my home flashed across my screen.

An accident had occurred at the Willowton Group facility in Pietermaritzburg and by the time that anyone had the time to rub their eyes several tens of kilometres of river, the sister to the one on which we had spent our day, were rendered devoid of all life. Six thousand kilograms of dead fish were removed by volunteers and contractors the following day and by sundown people who live by and off the river were reduced to drinking from plastic bottles.

I would tell you how this really makes me feel but after three weeks I’m still not sure that I’ve settled on the vocabulary to describe it. Superficially, I suppose that I vacillate between anger and sadness.

Mostly though, I just see in the riverbank sands of my mind the tracks of a determined mother and her carefree pups - and I hang my head in shame.