Then a glow began to appear in the sky. Dyer watched the nearly full moon climb free of the trees. Moonlight on the water, flash of phosphorescence on the line. The currents made shadows on the surface like the lattice in the confessional box in Nossa Senhora da Candelária. On these banks, he felt that he could tell Leandro how much he loved him, how he would protect him to the death

A small tug. Leandro had something. He reeled it in, too quickly, but still on the line, the rod tip bent and quivering, and Leandro shouting: ‘I’ve got one!’ – and then Dyer noticed a bow wave on the water. The moonlit surface dimpled with the flight of small frightened fish. There was a jarring pull and the rod straightened and the line went slack.

Dejected, Leandro reeled it in over the stones, a small severed parr trailing its spinal cord.

Dyer switched off his torch. ‘A salmon – or a chub, or maybe a wild brown trout …’ he said of whatever parasitic creature had lunged from the dark depths to bite the parr in half. ‘The favourite food of a big trout is a little one.’

But he knew what his son was feeling, and tried to console Leandro by telling of his own despondency after he lost a two-pound trout in the barn pool upstream. How he had brought it in and up over a rock face – ‘I can take you to that bank right now, thirty-five years on’ – and how the line snapped, and he watched the trout slide and judder back down the rock and into the river.

Leandro was not to be consoled.

In silence, they returned to the inn. The lights of the rooms swam weightless through the trees. From the copse above the front lawn came a hoot.

Dyer stopped. He cupped his hand and hooted back. He was never able to imitate a hare in distress, like his father, but once upon a time he could pass muster as an owl.

Soon afterwards, to Leandro’s unlooked-for delight, they heard an answering hoot from deep within the wood. Dyer repeated his call. The other responded, closer now.

Dyer walked, hooting, up the lawn until, with a sudden flutter of leaves, there appeared a large and furious-looking barn owl on a branch twenty yards off, quickly followed by the arrival of another two owls and a chick, all solemnly gazing down on this territorial impostor. At this point Dyer lost his puff and Leandro started giggling.

Not until late on Sunday afternoon did Leandro catch a fish.

He stood in the Hodder beneath the inn, trying for the spring salmon or slob trout that they had heard jumping there the night before.