The narrator relates encounters with a mean-tempered angler who has an unaccountable detestation of fish.
The great secret of angling - which soon becomes obvious to anyone who tries it - is that it is not in the least about catching fish; rather it is about furthering a sleek and synthetic technology devoted wholly to stealing - or even blatently wasting - quiet hours contemplating some dark, reportedly rich body of water or the froth, roll and gurgle of an icy watercourse while for once unburdened by common cares. My father revealed this to me when I was twelve. "Gee, I hope we catch lots this time," I said to him in the car to Spanner Bay.
"Who cares!" he exclaimed. "The important thing is I don't have to watch Police Squad on TV with your mother tonight!"
He wasn't joking. We sped up. He glanced at the trail of dust in the rear-view mirror as we left the bitumen and headed onto unmade roads.
One wonders then at what - other than fish - might have been the motive, the reason, the plunder and the curry, of a certain fisherman, almost famous out among the billabongs just as much as along the winding coastlines, who was without a question a cantankerous object with a reel? What had moved him to take up this most extravagantly time-wasting of sports? From what was he escaping?
Undoubtedly, the foulest tides flowed within. He had a dark demeanor and a cursed disposition. Was he on a mad vendetta? Was he unrepentently obnoxious? Was he snapping at a snapper? Was he barking at a dog fish?
The first time I met him he was shaking his fist at the river. "Come on, you cold-blooded bastards!" he cried, his lower jaw seeming to tremble with emotion. Among anglers, of course, this calls for consoling words and perhaps a tale or two about the one that got away. I tried to offer him some good advice. "I use," I said, "a little dough ball, with just a hint of vegemite. Cast it with an orange floater. Gets 'em every time!"
Instead of accepting this with appropriate humility he snarled and turned away.
I explained further the distinction - as it had once been explained to me - of the burly rod, the flax pole and the new green tackle that had just arrived from overseas. And then of course there's the "wog rod" that only new Australians use.
"You're distracting all the fish," he spat, his cold beady eyes refusing to give me a glance.
"Sorry, mate," I said, apologetic, and stood there feeling the frozen ambience that surrounded him, the aura of hostility that seemed to exude from his presence. I had never met such an unwholesome fisherman. Generally, the angling fraternity is populated with contemplative souls - soft-spoken auto-parts salesmen, forty-year old boy scouts, celibate Roman Catholics, burnt-out middle-aged financiers, harmless nature-lovers, mild-mannered accountants communing with the Great Outdoors, dutiful dads, kind-hearted uncles, oppressed husbands, civic-minded TV repairmen, maths teachers in shorts and long brown socks, all paragons of patience and the helpful word. It is a fraternity ruled by a quiet, rustic civility founded in fishing as a timeless parable for the uncertainties of life. This character, however, was a miscreant, a misfit, an anomoly in an otherwise pacific recreation.
In the morning, back in the fray, I tried to engage him in the habits of the tommy rough. He was having none of it.
"Good just rolled up in some flour and sprinkled on a grill," I finished.
"Putrid!" he said.
"Then what about the hardyhead?" I asked. "Or a school of ling lost within the shallows? Once at Sterling River we..."
He shut his box and moved a metre as if to say, "Piss off!"
"I had a redfin too," I said, undeterred at first.
At this instant his rod reeled and he tussled with the chandra perch, a handsome fish for such a cloudy abode. Ducks landed on the bank as if to watch. He sliced its head off from the gills and threw it in the bucket. "Vermin!" he said at last, catching my eye for the very first time.
He had a face like a dusty morowong, pocked with freckles, almost a greenish brown.
"Nice in a sweet and sour," I suggested.
He muttered an obscenity and said that all fish made him puke.
What did he do with them then? Boil them down into fertilizer for his azaleas? He took a bucketful that morning and another bucket the next. When he landed a six pounder I tried again to be a little jolly and asked him if he had a strange technique he might like to share? He hocked a glob of thick saliva on the ground and just ignored me.
When the evening ripples came and the surface-feeders took a lure he emerged in solid gumboots two foot from the shore, hauling in a dozen ahead of better men.
"There must be a secret to it, hey?" I said again.
"Rats with fins!" he said, as bitter as crab roe.
"Rich in e-folic acids and a bundle of others, though," said I, trying to be scientific.
"Stinks!" he said, smelling a yellowbelly slowing dying in the dusk. Even insects avoided him, I noticed.
He turned and dropped the line back into the drink. The only thing he offered was that he longed for the old days when fishing with sticks of TNT was legal.
The next day I saw him in among the esturaries blaspheming the blackfish, gritting his teeth and lowering his voice to a menacing whisper, ready to explode. What terrible event had reduced him to such loathing? What murky swell had overcome his better nature? I decided to ignore him but he was there every day, more dedicated than the average man, silent and statuesque, a fixture on the riverside, enduring all weather, as though he would never rest until he had rid the waterways of fish of every kind. One could not help but marvel at his grim determination. The next dawn he was back. And the next. All through summer, reeling in the biggins and flogging them to death on the corner of his esky.
Then, the next Easter he was there again, berating rainbow fish where the river slides and saunters into an untidy backwash of the sea.
On my Spring vacation he was still there, as unhappy as ever, being rude to a group of Christians in a campervan.
One fortnight in December I had the real misfortune of tangling in his lines and felt intimidation from his cold serated knife.
"You catchin' many?" I asked, making small-talk.
He grunted in a tone of menace. He cut my line loose but needed me to hold the back-loop away from the gnarl. I remember thinking that it was probably the nearest he had come to another human being in years. If so, he didn't care for the experience. He told me to never cast into the wind again and to find my own lonely river bend, somewhere, he said, for "half-wit amatuers who don't know how to throw a line..."
Someone in town suggested he had a wife named Melinda who had poisoned herself after an unsuccessful attempt at poisoning him. It was just a rumor. Over beers at the local, though, a bloke named "Mullet Man" Fitzgerald described how our friend had treated an inspector with contempt, dropping his strides and wiping his backside with a copy of the regulations.
"Beneath the legal limit," he explained. "They can take your tackle. They can analyse your bait. They can come into your home and check out your refrigerator!"
Someone else heard us chatting.
"You mean that nasty-tempered son-of-a-bitch who fishes out near Gillo's Bend?" he asked, to make sure of the identification.
"Yeah. That's him," I said.
"He's a man on a mission," said the drinker. "Someone reckoned he's a former public servant. A headkicker."
That made some sense, I thought, but the question still remained, what had driven him to take out his angst on all the poor fish of the world? What - other than losing a leg to a whale - could give a man such an unrelenting Captain Ahab syndrome in this day and age?
The next guy at the bar knew him too.
"Oh, him! I saw him thrashing a spotted cod to death with an plumber's mallet one day," he related. "One of the most disturbing things I've ever seen in thirty years of fishing!"
He related further that a few years before the piscatorial establishment had taken up a petition to ban the "fish-hating bastard" from the better spots both for his irritable disposition and for the fact that he was taking all the sport from other anglers. The petitioners claimed that he was catching more than his fair share and, worse, then throwing his catch away in an act of wanton waste. The Ranger sympathized but said there was nothing in the by-laws that said an angler had to eat the fish he caught.
The next day an inclement wind stirred from the south. I ambled down to see if anything was biting. An older man in a yellow mac was standing chatting to him on the farther bank. So! I thought, he has at least one friend in the world! But later the man in the mac walked by and, tossing his head back in the scant direction, said "What's his problem?" as he stacked his tackle in the car blatently offended and giving it away for the day.
The next summer Tony, Mick and me arranged a nimble getaway on the long weekend and saw him cursing eels in the reedy soups of Lake Wobbledong. It seemed like wherever one went fishing, there he was. He always wore a brown parker and a beeny. His gaze was fixed, as cold as a lizard. In the carpark I was telling Mick of our encounters when his Ford rolled in seeming to almost aim at a clutch of gulls talking business in a circle. "There he is now," I said nodding. He saw us watching and extended us his finger.
"Maybe he lost a fortune?" Mick surmised.
"Or the love of his life?" suggested Tony.
There had to be something that had made him so bitter. He had the look of a man who championed the invention of the spear gun or the Hawaiian sling; a man on a personal crusade against skippers, jumpers, rollers, whisktails, pearly rock trout, mollawongs, spotted ticklers, the elusive sandybacks... in fact, sporting waterlife in general. There were stickers on his car suggesting he felt much the same about birds as well.
"Perhaps he's dangerous?" said Mick. After we had set up and the red-bellied ginglers had started tugging Mick - always attracted to danger - ventured over to risk a brief hello.
Within a short time he returned.
"Well, I've been insulted by the best of 'em," he said. His ugly mug, he'd been told, was scaring off the gudgeon.
Queen's Birthday Monday we were angling from the jetty further down the coast at blue, blue Penelope Bay. There he was again, this time in a full altercation with a group of bearded divers disputing possession of a hoop net. A feisty young man in a swelter was being restrained by his mates.
The next day he was out early dangling white bait at the native gurglers. "Any nibbles?" asked I, extending him one last chance. Perhaps, I thought optimistically, he had mellowed over time, or perhaps the previous day's drama might have persuaded him of some basic manners.
"Who wants to know?" said he, as spiteful and churlish as ever.
Pissing in the wind.
I set up my net and concentrated on half-hitching all the sinkers. He was unquestionably the meanest-mouthed fisherman south of Cape Surrender. A squall, a storm, ill whips of winds, lashed around in his sorry soul, his temperament an unholy tangle of lines and hooks and spikey scales. Even when he was bashing the daylights out of a blue mullet he never seemed content.
I stood watching him from a distance one day - a mild Sunday in a damp October. He cast in his line and took up his position. He was emotionless and stolid. Somehow he turned the whole notion of angling into an act of blind malevolence perpetrated upon an undeserving Creation. I felt like warning all the fish to stay away. His figure shed a sinister penumbra upon a pleasant pass-time. For a while I even lost my appetite for fishing and took up lawn-bowls instead.
Then, in 1992 - the summer that Tony almost caught the forty-pounder from the sand-bar - he didn't book his site at the van park and was never seen again. We didn't see him casting from the hollow trunks in the backwater that Easter and when the bream were biting in September once again he stayed away. We even drove to Watchbox Creek - a little spot he regarded as his own - and found the fishing undisturbed. There was an abundance of frogs and a platypus or two, something that would have irritated him immensely. I once saw him fire a beer can at a mother heron who had dared to dawdle too near to his tackle. I saw him throw a sharp-edged nugget of quartz at a curious goanna that has strayed into his camp-site. I saw him hissing at a brown snake that turned around and slid away rather than negotiate his presence. He was, I imagined, some callous, demiurgic function within the natural order, like a wounded bull-shark with a hook stuck in his eye - all the rest of nature could reasonably hope to do was stay out of his way.
Then he wasn't at Christmas Point the summer after that and back at Spanner Bay they said they hadn't seen him, God be praised! The next weekend he wasn't at his favorite stomping ground, nor the weekend after that. And when Mick and Tony wanted to try their hand at striped blurters down at Cavern's Inlet he wasn't monopolizing the shorefront like he used to do, catching all the big ones and throwing them into the Keep Australia Beautiful bins near the curly pines. It was as if the gristle in the pearl-shell was washed away. Someone said his name was Kevin, a pharmacist who was self-prescribing anti-psychotics and had finally been admitted to a home.
Now, years later, I cannot help but wonder. I have established all my reasons. I have seen them land the whoppers and I've thrown the tots and tiddlers back to live another day. Ultimately, angling is about the mystery of that fishy dreamtime. Silence. Dragonflies against the dusky pastels. And wasting as much time as you can.
"Can you imagine this before the white man came here?" said Mick, breaking meditation. He pointed to the hills, silhuoetted by the turning sun. My imagination extracted every man-made thing. But even then the sense of him persisted. A blemish. A discoloration in the fabric of things. A leathery reptile hissing at duck eggs. Even in ancient times our missing friend might have been part of the equation.
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