PATRICK O’BRIAN
Collected Short Stories
Fourth Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain
by HarperCollinsPublishers 1994
Copyright © Patrick O’Brian 1950, 1953, 1956, 1974, 1994
‘The Return’, ‘The Happy Despatch’ and ‘The Dawn Flighting’ first appeared in The Last Pool (1950); ‘Not Liking to Pass the Road Again’, ‘The Slope of the High Mountain’, ‘The Little Death’, ‘The Passeur’, ‘The Tunnel at the Frontier’ and ‘The Path’ in The Walker (1953); ‘Billabillian’, ‘The Soul’, ‘Lying in the Sun’ and ‘The Walker’ in Lying in the Sun (1956); and ‘The Rendezvous’, ‘The Stag at Bay’, ‘Samphire’, ‘The Clockmender’, ‘The Chian Wine’, The Virtuous Peleg’, ‘A Passage of the Frontier’, ‘The Voluntary Patient’, ‘The Long Day Running’, ‘On the Bog’, ‘The Lemon’, ‘The Last Pool,’ ‘The Handmaiden’ and ‘On the Wolfsberg’ in The Chian Wine (1974).
Patrick O’Brian asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
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Source ISBN: 9780006476511
Ebook Edition © APRIL 2012 ISBN: 9780007466399 Version: 2017-02-07
Contents
Not Liking to Pass the Road Again
The Slope of the High Mountain
ALL DAY the fly had been hatching, and where the stream broadened into a deep pool between two falls the surface was continually broken by the rising of fish, broken with rings spreading perpetually, crossing and counter-crossing. It was a perfect day for the hatch, mild, gentle and full of life. Under the willows on the far side of the pool ephemerids drifted in their thousands, and the trout jostled one another in the shade of the willows, drunk with excitement and greed. Great heavy-headed cannibals with harsh, jutting under-jaws came from their stony fastnesses beneath the fall to rise at the fly; tender young trout rose beside them and took no harm.
All