Shooting and fishing: 'Little things tugged and tickled at the fly'

TO MY horror I discovered I had bought a day's fishing on the Don in Aberdeenshire. Or rather I bid £300 for it at last summer's Sandpiper Challenge auction which raised money to equip and train rural doctors and nurses in emergency first aid (amazingly, first aid isn't part of their training).

This means I can no longer be snotty about people who drink too much and bid thousands of pounds at charity auctions to have their photo taken with the Duchess of York, or some similarly tempting treat.

Needless to say this was one of the cheaper, not to say cheapest, lots on offer and considered so hopeless that the donor had felt obliged to throw in champagne, smoked salmon and dinner.

As there was just half a mile of fishing, one and a half pools and the owner didn't fish anyway, the prospects were not promising.

This was up in the hills in Strathdon where the river is positively beatific, the width of an unforced cast and where at this time of year there is the chance of salmon, sea trout and brown trout and if you are unlucky, eels.

I once caught a 3lb brown trout at Brux further down the Don as a holidaying youth in the days when it was owned by the retired local doctor who had started life as a girl and then became, or was declared, a man and married his housekeeper. We drank tea out of Willow pattern cups and discussed (you don't forget these things) mastitis in cows.

When we arrived at Strathdon for the afternoon our hosts appeared with two bottles of champagne and the promised smoked salmon sandwiches and raspberries and we sat in an open wildflower meadow beside the river. The sun came out.

A youth with a box full of ferrets stopped to discuss rabbits, like a figure in an 18th-century landscape. The dogs went digging. The river was middling to low, peaty but clear. There had been rain the previous day.

Our host showed me where he had seen a fish of some description jump at lunchtime, at the end of a fast bit of stream under the far bank below a stunted bush; just where a fish ought to be.

I put on a small Silver Butcher fly, red, blue and silver, which covers all eventualities, and shuffled downriver. Little things tugged and tickled at the fly.

At the far end of the beat the river split around an island dropping steeply through tight rapids.

There was a plop upstream, what might have been the sound of a fish. Crumpet the cocker spaniel came past paddling furiously sideways trying to get ashore; her eyes wide open with terror.

She made it. I caught a brown trout. If I had been 12 I'd have kept it. Back at the house we had more champagne, chicken lasagne and Eton Mess and I forgot I had spent 300.

This article was first published in The Scotsman, 23 July, 2011