The Last Scottish Salmon – a Short Story

“Don’t it always seem to go

That you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone”

Joni Mitchell

Against the odds she’d almost made it home. Two thousand miles of Atlantic peril lay behind her. 

She worked her way northwards, guided by the familiar coastal current. Rounding the final headland, the long remembered tang of her natal river grew ever stronger, it drew her on. Once again her luck held, she sensed the rising spate and it saved her. 

There was no need to loiter here in the estuary, amongst the shadowy shapes that so confused her. She sensed the despair that rippled from them, the misery reverberated all the way to the rocky shore of this once pristine sea loch.

The scent of fresh water drove her on and away from the jeopardy of the lice that fell in a constant drizzle from the deadly cages. If it hadn’t been for last night’s storm, she’d have rested here and fallen as their final victim.

She was past, unharmed, and now surging towards the fast flowing current of fresh water as it mingled with the salt and summoned her ever onward. 

Then, for the first time in two years, she was confined, gone was the freedom of the ocean. Into rushing white water, a stony riverbed lay inches below her belly and rocky outcrops jutted left and right. With a thrust and flick of her tail she was through and into the swirling waters of the Bridge Pool. 

Here, just as countless generations had done before, she could lie and finally rest, gently weaving into the current, holding station. After a three month odyssey she was finally home.

The ravages of her upstream spawning journey were still to come; for now she was ten pounds of mirror bright perfection. Every fin unblemished, her flanks a shimmering silver, sparingly marked with jet black spots, her back an unbroken sheen of iridescent dark slate blue.

If the salmon is truly the king of fish, then she was the undoubtedly its regal queen.

She didn’t know it, but tragically she was alone.

For the last thirty years this ritual had always been the prelude to his holiday, a stop made even before he had set sight on the hotel. He parked his car and walked back to the ancient stone bridge with its single span arching the tumult below.   

He knew there would be nothing there, but pointlessly he donned his polaroids, leaned over the parapet and scanned the pool below. He wasn’t looking for a fish. Those hopes had long since faded.

After all these years he still found the Bridge Pool hypnotic, with its dark waters funnelling into a narrow glide before dissipating into a dizzying array of eddies and foam flecked vortexes. 

The pool he was looking into was now only filled with memories, fish caught, fish lost, friends made and now friends gone. He loved this place, but today this highland river only brought him an aching sadness for what it had become, instead of joy for what it once had been.

A momentary flash of silver. He straightened, stunned, could it be? However unlikely, he knew what he had seen.

She had rested too long, the flow was easing, the river falling, she had to make her run now. 

Unseen to the watcher above, she eased smoothly out of the pool and back into the main flow. She ran through a succession of flats, runs, riffles and pools, and quickly reached the one real barrier that lay between her and the sanctuary of the loch that now lay less than a mile upstream. 

Even lying at the tail of the plunge pool, she could feel the oxygenated water effervescent against her flanks. The falls weren’t high, but above them lay a narrow gorge constricting and accelerating the flow, sending it hurtling over the brink, crashing into the pool below in a flurry of foaming spray.

She leapt into the maelstrom. She was still at the peak of her powers and she forged her way upwards through the torrent, but not quite high enough. She came to a juddering halt, the weight of water was too much, and it threw her back into the plunging water at the base of the falls.

In quick succession she failed twice more to make the ascent, and now she was tiring. Some instinct told her to take respite, and she fell back into the quieter water at the tail of the pool and waited…

The night was clear, the moon was high, adding a yellow hue to the phosphorus of the falls. She sensed the turbulence of the pool had quietened, the spate was falling, this was her chance.

Once again she hurled herself at the racing water, now less violent, and this time there was no stopping, only a slowing which she fought, convulsing her whole body, force of will driving her forward. 

It was enough, the cascading water fell behind her, the current was still strong, resisting her, but she pushed through, and after another two hundred yards she was able to find a pocket of slack water behind a mid-stream boulder. Exhausted, she rested once more.

Nobody had been there to witness her struggle, no tourists to capture her on their iPhones, no fisherman casting a fly to attract her. Without the lure of the leaping salmon, they too had long since abandoned this river.

The end came much quicker than we thought, one tipping point too far had been passed.

It had been three years since the Pitlochry fish counter had registered what was to be its last passing fish.

The guilty men had at long last started to repair the damage to our rivers, but the maths of marine survival were now remorselessly stacked against the migrating fish, and there could be no way back.

The cruel truth was that society hadn’t cared, not really. For every David Attenborough, there had been a hundred wannabee environment trashing Elon Musks.

For some time the wild Atlantic salmon hadn’t even been clinging onto the proverbial ledge of existence; it had fallen off and was now freefalling into the abyss of extinction.

Few of Scotland’s smolts survived their first Greenlandic winter. Warming waters made the plankton less nutritious, and the krill had been forced northwards in search of colder water. Young salmon had to travel further to eat less, a deadly equation.

The spring’s migrating flow of fish reduced to a trickle, that trickle became individual scattered drops as the fish swam eastwards, only to encounter trawlers with ever bigger nets, predators and starvation. Finally, the surviving few faced the palisade of west coast salmon cages laying down their poisonous drifting curtain of lice. It was all too much.

The Tay, the Tweed, the Tummel. The salmon all gone, in their place only desolation. No more tweed clad ghillies, only crumbling groynes, rotting boats, and dilapidated fishing huts.

The Towey, the Teifi, the Taf. All now barren. Devoid of salmon, these great Welsh rivers had lost their soul, they were like valley towns without a pit.

The Tyne, The Tees, The Test. Only, empty swirling pools. No more memories to be made.

The Toome, the Tarf and the Teelin. No more riverside craic, no more angling joy, anticipation or friendships to be forged.

Ten days and five miles lay between me and that impossible flash of silver. I was here on a sort of pilgrimage to relive the old days, to deceive myself. I was going to fish this once great salmon loch as if fish still lay in front of me. After all, in the days of relative plenty, I had often happily fished this place and not caught anything. Being here with just the possibility of a fish had been enough.

This July day was perfect, high cloud, a steady strong westerly wind providing the perfect dark rolling wave. It was enough to fool myself…

I just wanted to cast my beloved Z-Axis one last time, to feel the familiar rhythm of the cast, the slow retrieve, the playing of the gold muddler through the breaking wave crests.

I worked my way down vacant salmon shores and drifted across empty sea trout bays.

I was content, living within my delusion, concentrating, pointlessly fishing hard and well.

I’d saved the best till last, an exposed drift off the distant White House, impossibly remote and dramatic in its setting. The house set against a background of jagged highland peaks and white water streams. A wild place, a fitting place to end.

Even though I knew it was futile, I made sure I was exactly on the drift, not too shallow or too deep. I squared the boat to the wind and shipped the oars. This would be the last drift, the last time this rod would flex and these flies be retrieved.

She rolled ever so slowly at the Teal Blue and Silver, arching over the fly, the first time in a decade I’d been so close. My reactions, honed over a lifetime, were still as sharp as ever, but not as in the past to set the hook, I twitched the fly sideways out of harm’s way. This was not a fish to be caught, seeing her was enough. The waves closed over her dorsal and then her tail, and she was gone.

I knew we had met before, but I wouldn’t tell anybody; this last rarest of encounters would be mine alone, a moment too intimate to be shared.

It was the Autumn Equinox and it was her time. She nosed her way up the tumbling spawning burn that bordered the grounds of the White House. She needn’t go far, she sensed the oxygenation in the water and by nature’s instinct flicked her tail, scattering small stones, leaving a small depression in the smooth gravel.

Her redd, the nest for her eggs, was ready. The miracle of an Atlantic migration and the gruelling upstream struggle had all been for this moment.

With a spasm she filled her redd with thousands of perfect pink round eggs. Spent, she drifted off her redd, falling downstream, waiting for a fellow traveller to attend to his duty and spill milt over the exposed eggs.

But it wasn’t to be, for the first time since the ice sheets had melted, a spawning salmon was alone in this burn.

She survived only a matter of hours before her emaciated body was washed back into the loch to provide a feast for the gulls and Arctic Terns. Her unfertilised eggs soon tumbled after her, to be gorged on by the brown trout feeding in the shallows.

Her destiny was fulfilled – she had been the last Scottish salmon.

But she wasn’t the last salmon to spawn in this burn.

Once more the earth breathed clean air, the seas cooled and the rivers ran pure. Nature had rid itself of the plague of mankind and the planet recovered. Seven hundred and thirty years had passed since the last truly Scottish salmon had perished in the burn by the White House.

Now there was a new run of bright Atlantic salmon. No longer of Celtic descent, but miraculous survivors from Finnmark’s Arctic north. Like the Vikings before them, they raided south and took possession of Scotland’s rivers.

They found a much changed landscape. The river valley had been reclaimed by the Scots Pine and Rowan of the Caledonian Forest, it now echoed to the distinct calls of Crossbills and Capercaillie.

The beavers’ dams had made the river’s flow more languid. Only the falls remained the same,  their gneiss and granite impervious to the passage of time.

But the falls had new watchers. Where fisherman and tourists had once stood transfixed, now brown bears stood guard. A pack of grey wolves kept their distance; once the bears had eaten their fill it would be their turn to devour the scraps left scattered across the rocks.

For millennia this had been the way, the balance of nature had been restored, all was well once more.