OUTSIDE ARUNDEL, north of Geraldine, by the caissons of an old highway bridge, I am staring into the steel-blue waters of the Rangitata River, using cupped hands to shade my eyes against the glare and the dust-blasting nor’westerly wind. The swift current, coursing over bone-white boulders, belies the water’s depth and blurs the riverbed. Yet here, hard against the rounded stones and nosing upstream, is where they should be—if they are here at all. I strain my eyes, as if forcing them into a feat of X-ray vision so they might discern the torpedo-shaped quicksilver
bodies quivering in the current. But nothing moves at odds with the river’s flux, and the effort and the wind make my eyes water repeatedly.

It is late December, and word has crackled along the Canterbury river telegraph—whispered, hinted and winked at. The rumour has brought us here, raising hopes, sparking excitement. Since long before daybreak we have stood, a line of a dozen or so men and women in waders, hip-deep in the river, swinging fishing rods with the vehemence of tennis players serving at match point, lobbing lures across the current.

The salmon are running again! As if by magic, they have materialised from the ocean and congregated at certain river mouths, as they have done every summer for over a century. From there, propelled by the urgency of hormones towards the inevitability of death, they have surged upstream in waves. They have raced across gravel shallows, rasping their fat silver bellies into open wounds. They have leaped up staircase rapids, then lain doggo in deep pools, resting before making another upstream dash.

Theirs is a one-way journey on a final tank of fuel, a race against time and fatigue. Their stomachs are already defunct and beginning to shrink, so the offerings we cast across their path hold no allure for them. Only if the flashing, twirling piece of metal or vivid-yellow finger-long fly passes in front of their very snouts, might they snap at it, out of pure aggression, not hunger.

Not today, however. Nor yesterday, nor the day before. If the fish have passed this way, they have passed safely. One by one, muttering about fishing being “a waste of time” and threatening to “stay in bed in future,” the anglers reel in their lines and return to their cars, camper vans and caravans. They walk with the stooped gait of the defeated, heading home empty-handed for the umpteenth time. For a while I am alone in the slate-coloured landscape, in wind that could rip the doors off a car, wondering why, against all reason, odds and comfort, my mind is already short-circuiting the rest of the day and racing ahead to tomorrow, the next daybreak, when I will again take my place in the line of anglers, hoping for the miracle of salmon—the king of fish.

My long-time riverside companion, a retired and itinerant Frenchman, Marc Hertault, is the reason for this madness. Monsieur Hertault lives the life of many men’s dreams. Every day for six months he fly-fishes on New Zealand rivers between Taupo and Gore. For the other six months he does the same thing in North America.

A courteous gentleman who wears weathered clothes that look like discards from the Foreign Legion, M. Hertault is one of the happiest people I know. He lives in spartan simplicity and has turned fly-fishing into both a scientific pursuit and a spiritual quest. Above all, he is a walking anthology of stories about the incredible horsepower of les saumons, as he calls them. Many times, as we have lunched on a riverbank or bobbed in a dinghy on Lake Taupo, he has recounted how, having hooked a large salmon, he has had to run—RUN!—several hundred metres downriver, holding his hyperbolically bent rod high above his head, hotfooting it over boulders and driftwood. Not an easy feat for a septuagenarian wearing chest waders.

His tales come mainly from Quebec, British Columbia and Alaska. “Ah, les saumons du Canada!” he exclaims, theatrically sucking in a mouthful of air. “Strong! Mean!
Unstoppable!”

Then he launches into a passionate speech about the greatest, noblest game fish on earth. I rarely get a word in, and when I do he says dismissively, “You have not yet lived, jeune homme. Les saumons du Canada ... ” And on it goes. But I have fashioned a ploy to get my own back. You see, for all his expertise, M. Hertault is unaware that there are salmon in New Zealand.