There is a moment in Cast of a Lifetime when the author, Andrew McLaren Jenkins, and his travelling companion, David Kilpatrick, meet an itinerant Irishman on a train in Canada.
This is back in 1960, before the days of organised gap years and cheap travel, when two fresh-faced Scots were a passing novelty. The Irishman asks what on earth they are doing wandering about northern Canada? Fishing, they reply. But as Jenkins conc
edes, fishing was just the excuse for travelling, which the Irishman completely understands.
"You're right," he says. "You've got to have a purpose."
Jenkins's purpose in life, apart from becoming a heart surgeon at Edinburgh Royal Infirmary with a passing interest in varicose veins, has not been to land the biggest or most fish, although that would be nice, but to search out likely fishing rivers from east Africa to Russia, via Iceland, Alaska, Labrador and yea, even unto Caithness and Lewis. The fishing itself may, and frequently does, turn out to be indifferent, although it gets better as he gets older and wiser. How he gets to his chosen destination, whom he meets and what he sees are, in the end, at least as important as the fish.
He catches his first trout on worms in the Borrodale burn as a child on holiday at Arisaig and loses his first sea trout at the age of 11. Thirty-eight years later, he takes his non-fishing wife and children back to the same spot, tells them the story of the great fish of his childhood, hands his wife the rod, and fate or the gods of the river deliver her a 2lb sea trout.
In later life, while everyone else is being irritated by Russian bureaucracy on helicopter trips to the Kola Peninsula, Jenkins finds the bureaucratic experience "interesting and entertaining". In Alaska he is crouching in the shallows trying to unhook a rainbow when he is stalked by a bear. He takes off across the river dragging his rod and spools of line and by the time he escapes to the other side finds he has another fish on the hook. In Alaska, again, his fishing companion, another medic, Jimmy Thomson, is photographed playing two fish at the same time, a rainbow and an Arctic char, on two rods, one in each hand.
As Jenkins has published the book himself, the photographs are far more numerous than a commercial publisher would ever allow which, for those of us who like pictures with our words, is a huge bonus. So we can actually see the gobsmacked expression on David Kilpatrick's face as he poses, exhausted, with a Sami guide and a 21lb salmon, on the Norwegian-Finnish border in 1959. The following year, they take off on a whim for Canada, find themselves stuck in a high-security US air base, catch a 12lb Arctic char and go on a seal hunt in pack ice with a one-legged Inuit who had blown his foot off trying to shoot a seal using his foot as a rifle rest.
In Scotland Jenkins fishes the Spey, but reserves his real love for the haunting desolation of Lewis and Caithness. He does a good line in understatement: "Early spring fishing in Caithness can be a trial of endurance…" To be read beside a blazing log fire.
Cast of a Lifetime, by Andrew McLaren Jenkins, £19. E-mail sandyjenkins37@tiscali.co.uk
