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rapid that they were impossible to follow. On the bank a cormorant
dried its wings.
The water was warm and murky, the colour of weak tea. The sand
had settled into a pattern of scooped ripples, each of which had
trapped a pool of dark humus: the ridges formed pale crescents as
regular as wallpaper. The stream soon became navigable again, but
now it was flowing towards me. I pushed on up, tasting, paddling,
peering over the side. Orange-legged shore crabs backed into the sand
as the shadow of the boat passed over them. Fat cockles lay a little
agape, the shells edged with a pink frill of flesh. Cockle. The word
rolled about in my head: round, hinged, opening and closing like the
creature it described.
A curlew crossed the tidal desert ahead of me, casting its sad loop-
ing call across the water. Lost in the flats, I no longer had a sense of
scale. Rounding a bend in the stream, I was amazed to see two people
standing on a sandbank. As I approached they opened their wings and
flapped away. Sheep moved along the distant edge of the saltmarsh in
single file.
The bayous coalesced into a wide, shallow pan. Wading across it, I
felt something flutter over my feet. I turned and saw a brown dia-
mond fluking away. It stopped just a few yards from me and buried
itself. I marked the spot in my mind, swiftly unstrapped the spear,
removed the corks and left the boat to drift, then stalked across to
where the fish had settled. It could not have moved: I would have seen
puffs of mud hanging in the water. But it had vanished. I probed a
couple of likely-looking mounds, but the spear just sank into the sand.
The flounder had disappeared like a ghost passing through a wall. I
cast around, imagining that I must have lost the mark, but I found no
trace of it.
I anchored the boat, removed my life vest and cagoule and drew
from the dry bag an item seldom seen on a kayak, a white business
shirt. I had realized, a few days before, that most of the birds that feed
on fish - gulls, gannets, shearwaters, guillemots, herons, ospreys -
have white bellies, enabling them to disappear against the sky. I
stalked up the channel with the spear over my shoulder, moving my
big feet as quietly as I could. I must have cut an odd figure.
I soon disturbed a latish - too small to spear - and watched as it
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