JACKIE The Fishing Dog

When I was a boy in Fish Hoek, just outside Cape Town, all the fish were caught by tanned old men who used rowing boats to take their nets out in a huge half circle off the beach.  One of their number would perch high on the hillside, waiting to spot a shoal coming into the bay, whilst the rest lounged on the beach, smoking and chatting in the shade of their craft. Wrinkled and grizzled, their faces reflected the rich mix of races resulting from the centuries when the Cape of Storms occupied a prime position as the staging post between the Spice Islands and Europe. A shrill whistle would be the signal for the action to begin and would bring the kids from all around to watch. The heavy boats would be launched and rowed through the breakers, paying out rope and net as they closed in on the fish, guided like kelpies at sheep trials by the whistles from the man on the hill.

Watching from the beach, we would see them turn and know that the fun was to begin. Surfing in on the waves, the man at the stern still frantically paying out the nets, they would beach the boats, leap into the water and begin to haul on the lines. Some of the older and bolder kids would attach themselves to the end of a rope to give the straining men a hand. The rest of us would be trying to spot the size of the catch as the nets swept in. Silver would start to show as they got closer, the mass of mackerel and mullet struggling and jumping in an effort to escape their fate. If the catch was really big, you could try and grab escaping fish as the school was hauled up onto the beach. But you had to be quick and there had to be a lot of fish if you wanted to avoid the horny hand of an irate fisherman.

But then came the day of the mammoth catch. Years later the old boys would recall, with ever increasing inaccuracy, how many fish were hauled in that day. They said that there had never been a day like it before, or since. Certainly for those of us on the beach it was a marvellous time.

We could tell from the air of excitement and the exclamations of the men on the ropes that something special was happening. As the nets came closer we began to understand the growing stir. There were fish everywhere. We could see nothing but silver. Some were trying to escape from the encircling trap, swimming in a panic towards the beach. The kids starting diving on the fish, trying to catch them, grabbing their shirts and using them as makeshift traps. Then the adults joined in, as the word spread throughout the village. The numbers of fish were growing all the time. I was in with the best of them. I caught a couple and took them up to the beach before pounding back into the boiling waves. As I did so, the nets burst. Fish streamed past me as I stood, up to my waist in the waves, desperately trying to grab them.

The fishermen still keeping at their work in the midst of the pandemonium slackened off on the one end of the line and frantically hauled on the other until the damaged net was on the shore. This spilled even more fish into the shallows. There were so many fish and people about by now that I just sat on the shore watching the show. My dog Jackie was with me. I thought for years that he was a husky - I had been reading a lot of Jack London when I got him - and I suppose if miniature huskies are ever bred, they  might look like him with his shaggy pelt and his tail curled over flat on his back. It had not always done this. He got it caught in a slamming door one day and broke it badly. We all howled in sympathy as he ran, whimpering, to my mother for comfort.

He had been guarding my towel until I had grabbed it to carry my catch and now he was off to join in the melee. His first trophy was a mackerel which had been killed in the crush and which was floating limply at the waters edge. He brought it to me, pausing only for a quick pat before dashing back to the sea. I watched him bounding about, snapping at the elusive prey and suddenly he had one! A fat mullet, slower than the rest. Grinning from ear to ear, Jackie trotted up the beach and laid it at my feet and watched it flip and flop in the sand.

I never forgot that day and neither did he. Show him any patch of water bigger than a bird bath and he would wade it for hours, searching fruitlessly for another prize. Occasionally in the rock pools a frightened tiddler would dash from one hiding place to another. Jackie would make a grab, but he never landed another one.

I feel like Jackie sometimes, when I am down. I feel that I am searching for something I once had. I am not sure whether I am looking in the right place or whether it is just a memory that I am hoping will return. Maybe I am like all old men.