An Irish Christmas Feast by John B. Keane

bitter recriminations, sharper and more piercing than driving hail. He was very nearly at the end of his tether.
    â€˜Yes!’ he asked of the beaming face which now stood at the head of the ever-lengthening queue. There was no request for stamps nor was there a parcel to be posted. Dolly Hallon just stood there, her pale face transformed by the most angelic and pleasing of smiles. She uttered not a single word but her gratitude beamed from her radiant countenance.
    Fred Spellacy felt as though he had been included in the communion of saints. His cares vanished. His heart soared. Then, impassively, she winked at him. Fred Spellacy produced a handkerchief and loudly blew his nose.

The Miracle of Ballybradawn
    The village of Ballybradawn sits comfortably and compactly atop a twenty-foot-high plateau overlooking the Bradawn River. The Bradawn rises in the hills of North Cork but enters the Atlantic in North Kerry. The village with its one thousand souls lies half-way between sea and source.
    In the early spring the salmon run upwards from the sea to the spawning beds, silent and silvery, shimmering and shapely. It is a most hazardous journey. Survivors are few. Man is the major enemy.
    Our tale begins in the year of our Lord 1953, a climacteric span which saw the demise of Stalin, the flight of the Shah, the inauguration of Eisenhower and the conquest of Everest.
    Not to be outdone, Ballybradawn was to witness its own breathtaking phenomenon shortly before Christmas of the year in question.
    The spring and summer of the said year had been extremely disappointing seasons for local and visiting anglers. For some reason best known to themselves the dense schools of celebrated salmo salar, princes of the Atlantic, had failed to appear as had been their wont for generations. They had arrived all right but in pitifully small numbers. There was intense speculation as to what calamity might have befallen the missing fish and there was widespread belief that full compensation might be expected early during the following spring because that was the way with nature. She was known to be bountiful in the wake of insufficiency.
    Indeed there were whispers from the middle of December onwards that spring fish had been sighted in the estuary. Experienced drift-net fishermen, not given to fishy tales, would bear witness to the fact that the fulsome visitors were present in considerable strength in the wide expanse where the Bradawn joined the sea.
    Doubting Thomases might insist that these were spent fish on their way downwards from the spawning beds but proof to the contrary had been incontrovertible. When a spring fish plopped back into the water after a jump from its natural domain it did so with a resounding smack followed by a noisy splash which could be heard for long distances. The spent fish, on the other hand, subsided in a minor eddy on his return from a despairing leap. The resultant sound was nearly always indistinguishable from the natural noises of the river.
    There were other signs to indicate the presence of spring fish. The seal population had quadrupled in the estuary and its salty precincts and, emboldened by the prospect of a fresh salmon diet, had made unprecedented incursions beyond the tidal reaches of the Bradawn where the terrified salmon sought refuge in the shallows beneath gravel banks and overhanging foliage. Here, alas, were otters who would have no misgivings about sinking sharp teeth into the living, succulent flesh of the unwary refugees from the estuary.
    Further on would be poachers armed with gaffs, illegal nets, clowns’ caps, cages, triple-hooked stroke-hauls, poisons, explosives and many other deadly devices and ruses, all aimed at terminating prematurely the brief life of salmo salar.
    For most fish it was a one-way journey fraught with peril from beginning to end. Conservators would say that it was nothing short of a miracle that any salmon at all managed to spawn and that the species itself had