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disused duck's nest. Warblers flitted among the branches. I struggled
across to the far side, where woody nightshade hung over a derelict mill
stream. Yellow stamens protruded from the dark flowers like stings. In
the stream, brown trout with red and black stipples rose to kiss the sur-
face. I watched them for a while, then pushed back through the withies
to the other side of the bar, where we stared at the water sliding slickly
over the lip of the rocks, before exploding into feathers of spray.
Above the weir the water looked stretched, its polished surface
scarred by turbulence. More trout hung beneath it, resting their tails
on the rebounding water above the rocks, eyeing the caddis flies that
struggled to break free from the surface, rising and snatching them
with a white flash of the mouth. The dents they made on the surface
smeared over the sill.
Hearing the water crepitate along the gravel bar, watching the
autumn leaves slide down towards the weir and the white water
crashing over it, I thought of the reindeer carving that I loved in the
British Museum. A stag and hind are struggling south across a rushing
river, following the autumn herds migrating to their winter pastures.
The stag has propped his chin on the hind's rump as he paddles, nos-
trils flared, antlers thrown back, eyes popping with effort and arousal.
You can almost hear the reindeer snorting and panting, see the water
lapping round their chins, dragging down their long winter coats. All
this is rendered in a piece of mammoth ivory the size of a carrot,
carved with a chip of flint 13,000 years ago.
We negotiated the weir in a fashion that I would struggle to describe
as graceful: backwards, in a tangle of limbs and paddles. The judges
who reside in my head held up their zeros.
Then we swung the boat round, and drifted through a wide, shallow
stretch. Far ahead of us, someone poled across the river from Slovenia
to Croatia in a punt, moving into then out of the narrow band of sun-
light. We passed her house. Overhanging the water was an apple tree.
I could see the red and green apples, turning slowly in the eddies along
the bank, occasionally flaring in the light half a mile downstream. I
scooped a few out of the river and we ate them as we lay in the boat.
After a few more weirs, which we crossed with a little more dignity,
we drifted into a deep, narrow chasm, between limestone bluffs. I
stared down into the water. Though it was some three fathoms deep
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