A Faun's Afternoon
'I go to see the shadow you became'

'The trouble with our times is that the future is not what it used to be.'
Paul Valéry

Fishing near Carterhaugh
Yesterday salmon fishing on the River Ettrick. Weather was fabulous. Beautiful autumn colours all the way down the Tweed valley from Peebles to Selkirk, with morning mist hanging over the river and in dense pockets in the hills. We caught 4 fish and J-F was delighted to get 3 in less than 45 minutes. 'It's easy, this salmon fishing!', he said after the third was netted, photographed and returned to continue its journey upstream to spawn.

I can never visit the Ettrick valley without getting the song *'Tam Lin' by Fairport Convention stuck in my head. This is where the story was enacted, and indeed the whole region is steeped in folk-lore and is closely associated with Thomas the Rhymer whose own story is similar to that of Tam Lin. I didn't realise when we were there that it was almost Halloween!

'O I forbid you, maidens a',
That wear gowd on your hair,
To come or gae by Carterhaugh,
For young Tam Lin is there.'

Carterhaugh is a tract of woods where the Ettrick and Yarrow rivers meet, and I was fishing there in the late afternoon just as darkness was falling. Tam Lin must have worked some magic because with my very last cast of the day I hooked and landed a six-pound sea trout.

*Tam Lin was the guardian of Carterhaugh Wood. He exacted the maidenhead of any maiden who went there, but his true love, Janet, rescued him from his bondage to the Queen of Faery. At Halloween Janet dragged him off his horse and held on to him while he was transformed in her arms into various wild beasts. At last he was his own self once more, and free of the Queen's spell.

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Brooktrout

The Brooktrout, superb as a matador,
Sways invisible there
In water empty as air.

The Brooktrout leaps, gorgeous as a jaguar,
But dropping back into swift glass
Resumes clear nothingness.

The numb-cold current's brain-wave is lightning -
No good shouting: 'Look!'
It vanished as it struck.

You can catch Brooktrout, a goggling gewgaw -
But never the flash God made
Drawing the river's blade.
Ted Hughes