Salar’s struggles

hen the author Henry Williamson penned his classic in 1935, he wrote of an individual fish negotiating the hazards and vicissitudes of its migration from the Atlantic, through the estuary of a North Devon river and up its course to the spawning redds beneath “the moor of the wild red deer”. Although Williamson never explicitly tells us which estuary Salar navigates, it is evident to those who know the area that the “water of the Two Rivers” is, in fact, the estuary of the Taw and Torridge. From here, Salar makes his perilous journey past porpoises, seals, netsmen and poachers up beyond the tidal reaches and into the River Mole and finally the Bray. The story is both harrowing and visceral as well as being quite beautiful in its highly accomplished observations of nature. Williamson was a first-rate naturalist who was doubly gifted in that he was able to write from the point of view of a fish, an otter or even a lamprey without straying into a Disney-like world of anthropomorphism.