Once by Andrew McNeillie Page B

but something integral to the whole, a form of biding time and being bound by it. Here life could seem all in-waiting, the known world too well-known, the horizon beyond reach, a prison, and time spent killing time, in the hours between tides, between dawn and dusk, when the best fish move, and life bestirs most.
    I remember enough discoveries, enough arduous climbs and clamberings to fill a book with episodes. But would you want to climb through them, through a tangle of sentences, as up into the branches of a hawthorn you might struggle, torn and pricked, spiked hard suddenly in the top of your head, cut down your cheek, your knuckles raw, your limbs scratched and grazed as doggedly you ascend to worm a hand into a magpie’s thorny, domed house, to retrieve an egg – sometimes a bluish egg, sometimes an olive one.
    Now somehow slip it into your mouth and keep it floating safely there, safe from every jolt and slip, safe from filling your mouth with an explosion of egg and yolk and shell, the dry birdlime taste already there to spice it. Rather a dull egg for so much trouble. But I took the trouble, as if I knew I was stashing away meaning for my future self, but knowing nothing of the sort and never a second thought, the process of selving being predetermined.
    You wouldn’t want to follow, but follow me just this last step down under the high wooden bridge. Lower yourself carefully through the rails and pick your way down the slipway where Colwyn stream enters the Glen proper, to reach the grey wagtail’s nest in a hole in the walled bank, a teaspoon tied to a stick to help you fish out your little speckly-marble egg, with its squiggle hair-line, not unlike the devil’s signature on the egg of a yellow-hammer, but an obvious forgery.
    The stream is loud and the light in the trees above and in the saplings, in the stone itself, seems to close round you. The stream is louder than usual. The wagtail calls from downstream, wagging and wagging. You can see it trying to distract you but you can only intermittently hear its clear note ring out against the rush of the stream. The water seems louder than usual today, and it is because there’s been sudden subsidence since you came this way last year. Now there’s a great rectangular hole in the slipway, perhaps twelve feet in length – and how many feet deep? – into which the stream plunges and accelerates, cold and seething, cut water, bravura. It amazes you to see such turbulence and distracts you as the wagtail failed to do, as a sixth sense tells you here is a place to come back to at once and to lay a line for a trout.
    So one thing follows another, and off you go, and before the day’s much older you are back with a few worms and a little number 12 hook on a length of nylon and a stone for anchor, and cord line to join your tackle to a secure place, carefully concealed in the ivy. The anchor twists and turns in the force of water, then finds a hold, and your bait hangs in the stream. There it swims to await your return, perhaps before evening has fallen, perhaps quite early next morning. Pull the line in to find a little trout on your hook, beautifully spotted and green-backed, luscent, and cream-bellied. Just stare at it there, as your mind takes its indelible snapshot impression, ever bright to see again, the speckled fish. And don’t now forget the wagtail’s nest, fish meanwhile for your pretty speckled egg as well.
    Everything was inward and immediate, and called forth ingenuities. How did I know how close to hatching an egg might be, if I hadn’t found the nest before the clutch was complete? By experience and guesswork, by the week of the month, by the parent bird’s reluctance to desert, by holding it up to the light, weighing it in the palm, or, if the ditch nearby had water enough to support it, or if there was still-water anywhere near, by testing to see would the egg float, or sink. If it floated the embryo