Dispatches from the Sporting Life Read Online Free Page B

reprinted many times since, “the ruin of a medieval house stood on a grassy mound beside a small shallow bay. Great gales eroded the mound, and revealed stone walls. The proprietor, John Bruce of Sumburgh, began to excavate, and excavation was continued, at intervals, until quite recently. Oldest of the buildings uncovered was the remains of a Stone Age hut….”
    It is possible, at Jarlshof, to walk through Bronze Age shelter and smithy, circa 2000 B.C. , into an overlapping Iron Age village, its shelters connected by winding stone-walled passages, right into a broch. A broch, I should point out, is a prehistoric structure peculiar to Shetland and Orkney and the adjacentScottish mainland. It is a round stone tower, a considerable engineering feat, with small chambers for human habitation inside.
    Jarlshof, once but two days’ fair sail from Norway, was settled by the Norse (charmingly described as “recent occupiers” on a plaque I saw in Lerwick) in the ninth century, their rule lasting until 1471, when Scotland annexed the islands.
    My gillie, actually a young baker, arrives shortly before noon, having been up most of the night baking scones, which, in my experience of the islands, serve better as projectiles than pastries. A cheerful lad, he has a wool cap pierced by innumerable badges, testimony to his prowess as a trout fisherman. He’s a champ, actually, winner of many a competition on Orkney and on Shetland. We set out through lashing wind and rain for Loch Benston, a half-hour drive. En route we pass a couple of bays where salmon is farmed. These tame salmon, he tells me, are a menace. Idiot fish. Breaking free of their restraining pens by the thousands from time to time, without the redeeming memory of a river that spawned them, they have no notion of which way to swim. The fear is that infiltrating a school of wild salmon, the farm fish could contaminate the wild ones. Something else. “The pellets they’re fed,” the gillie tells me, “contain a pink dye; otherwise the flesh of the farmed salmon would be a sickly white and not fit for market.”
    Sooner or later, salar, the leaper, will have to bedeclared an endangered species. With the benefit of sonar, commercial fishermen have solved the mystery of where the salmon gather in the winter, under the Arctic ice, and now net them by the thousands of tons, heedless of the fact that if the fish don’t return in sufficient numbers to the rivers that spawned them there will soon be hardly any left. Another threat to the Atlantic salmon is that wrongheaded environmentalists, demonstrating in Europe, have seen to it that there is no more hunting of the cutesy-poo seal cubs on the Newfoundland ice. Consequently, the seal herd, its appetite for salmon prodigious, has increased beyond reason, and fewer and fewer of the fish return to spawn in Canada’s once-rich network of maritime rivers.
    I find casting into the wind of Loch Benston all but impossible, my leader knotting again and again, my fly shooting back to nick me in the face more than once. After an embarrassing two hours of shivering out there on the loch (during which time—ho, ho, ho—my champion gillie also fails to get a trout to rise), I say I’ve had quite enough and suggest we row to shore.
    “Och,” the gillie says, “it’s a dour loch, but bonny.”
    Once dried out back in the Shetland hotel, I hire a car and my wife and I drive to the Booth, the island’s oldest pub, established in 1698 in St. Magnus Bay and by the look of it not renovated once since then. Following my third large single malt, I tell Florence that if our friends call from London tonight to say I was out.
    “What if you don’t catch anything tomorrow?”
    “There’s still Orkney.”
    We agree to cut our stay in Shetland by a day and leave for Orkney the next morning.
    Out over the North Sea again, I turn once again to the spellbinding
Orkneyinga Saga,
totally absorbed in the hijinks of Oddi the Little, Thorkel