Free A Book of Death and Fish by Ian Stephen

boundaries, to throw a line out. Maybe he wasn’t much older than me but he looked it, the fair hair already well over the ears. Once I took that in, I knew he couldn’t be at Dollar.
    It turned out he lived just up the road from me, the next village out towards the hills. He showed me a trick. The track passed over a high steel bridge, down from Tillicoultry. We’d find a boulder that took the two ofus to roll it. Then we’d lift it by getting our weight under it and lever it over the edge. Like a depth-charge.
    The splash would come all the way back to us. It would cross all that height very fast. The power of it came close to scaring you. Maybe one day we’d see a huge salmon there, stunned by us after straying up the Devon, from the Forth.
    Torcuil’s father was a Merchant Navy skipper. He didn’t really like us following the railway line out, even if the trains were slow and scarce. But that’s all navigation was, these days, he said, following rhum lines.
    When you left port you followed electronic railway tracks on the water. Only thing was, you had to keep an eye out for some bastard coming the other way along the same line. These would take you out a few hundred miles. Then you steered along your course-line. That’s when the sextant and the chronometer came in. You took a sun sight or a star sight to determine where exactly you were in relation to that theoretical line. Within a certain margin, of course.
    I’d been nudged away from Torcuil’s collection of LZ and Jethro Tull. His olman was from Dundonnell way and still spoke like it. He was pretty shocked to find I didn’t have Gaelic. Torcuil had been on the move quite a bit, only going back to the northwest for holidays. He had an excuse. But someone growing up in Stornoway? That was demoralising. But did I ever go sea fishing? Aye and what gear did we use?
    â€˜Only the
dorgh
.’
    That wasn’t bad for someone who didn’t have Gaelic. And what was our
dorgh
like?
    So I described the paternoster of bent galvanised wire. A lead weight cast in the middle, swivel above it. You’d feel the bottom and pull up half a fathom so your baits would be out of reach of the crab. Somehow the bite was transmitted, amplified by this gear so you’d feel the nudge at the line on your finger. Even at twenty fathoms.
    â€˜Like sonar,’ he said. ‘And where did you fish?’
    â€˜The Dubh Sgeir.’
    His eyebrows were a bit scary. It’s amazing how many men in authority have eyebrows like that. Deputy headmasters. Just greying. Under them,everything would be neat. Torcuil’s father had a white, open-necked shirt. The V-neck looked new. I saw the Pringle label and knew that my own father might have checked it. It was mostly women seated along the line. He was the supervisor. He didn’t bother with the beret any more. People called him Yul Bryner, of course.
    Torcuil’s olman reached for a book.
Indicus Nauticus.
It didn’t go out of date like charts and almanacs. He showed me the page with about fifty rocks of the same name. Some variations in the spelling, he said. I wouldn’t know the Lat and Long, but did the southern approaches to Loch Erisort sound about right?
    It did.
    And on the soft ground, between the hard patches, it would be mussel bait for adagan. And lugworm for leopag. I nodded. And what did we consider leopag on Lewis?
    That was any flatfish, I said, the way my mother said dabs for all small flatties. My father said leopag to mean flounder, plaice, lemons or dabs.
    Next he tested me on peat. I found I could go through this grammar for him, not realising where the knowledge had come from. Our own cul-de-sac in Stornoway or the sorties to Griomsiadair. The fad was just under the cep. You cut the outer one thick because it was fibrous. They did not dry so completely but were good for finishing off the cruach. Regular, even peats from the top row went to build the