Perhaps the worst thing about losing a big fish is the emotional slump it involves: the sudden move from a tense and total engagement in the struggle to a sort of weak, un-sinewed and half-incredulous emptiness. Anyway, whenever I fished the Wenning in the weeks after this tragedy, I fished up the river impatiently, eager to reach the corner of the beck where I had hooked the monster in order to see if I could hook him again and this time hold on to him. There was never a sign of him and I am still wondering whether he weighed a whole two pounds. I find losing big fish a little easier to manage when there's already a brace or more in my bag. Two summers ago I hooked something huge in Mile House Dub on the Wharfe. I played him until he was beginning to tire, until his runs were becoming shorter and less strong, until I could see the blurred and enormous form of him whenever he turned, but then, when I was beginning to think that he would be mine, the hook very gently removed itself from his jaw and left me feeling disappointed rather than heartbroken, because I could tell myself that there were already three good trout in my bag and there was every prospect of more. I should, of course, have preferred to catch him and I do remember that an element of my disappointment was unsatisfied curiosity, because I should never be able to establish whether he had in fact been as big as I had suspected while playing him, whether he had weighed a whole four pounds. In looking back over this loss, the beautiful three-pounder that I caught later the same afternoon may perhaps cast some sort of soothing glow over my recollection.

But at the time it was those three earlier trout that helped me to come to terms with the loss of an exceptional trout. Something similar happened at Driffield many years ago when at the end of a sunny and successful afternoon I hooked and lost what was almost certainly a very large trout indeed. He wrapped my nylon round a submerged post and that, of course, was that. There followed perhaps a few seconds of uncomprehending anguish, but then I sat on the edge of the beck and took from my bag the four trout that I had already caught, a brace of two-pounders among them; I laid these trout in the grass, gazed at them and was very soon able to tell myself that it would be ungrateful and greedy, when the day had given me four such lovely trout, to feel that it had been ruined by the loss of a fifth one, however big he might have been.