By Nicholas Shakespeare . Nature 7 January 2018
For fishermen, even the smallest grayling lifted flashing from the water stands as a true image, a true sentence, the scrap, as it were, of a greater truth.
I didn’t fall in love with fishing until I was 30. One September afternoon in Scotland, an old schoolfriend, Nick, rigged up a rod and walked me to a sluice gate near Golspie. Salmon can be kind to learners. On my third cast I hooked one. The tug on the line had the firmness of a handshake, and was a reminder of the hand in my favourite childhood legend, finning up from the riverbed to catch a sword. The passing of Arthur was the first thing I read that caused me to burst into tears.
That five-pound handshake at the sluice gate welcomed me to a world I had previously wandered through with eyes half-closed. I began at last to understand Nick – someone I’d known since I was 12, but had not fathomed until the moment of my own induction. When he plopped his line into the unknown he was trading in mystery, or what psychologists might call a water-based religion. For Nick, I realised, the world was cast afresh each day he fished; each cast a personal prayer.
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