High On The Drug Of The Tug

Sportsmen and women will argue about the finest quarry forever but for Marcus Janssen there is no contest — it has to be the salmon

- Marcus Janssen

The ultimate quarry? It is — and always has been — one of the great dinner table discussions through the ages. As it is etched into stone caves in the Drakensberg Mountains of South Africa, Sulawesi in Indonesia and in Lascaux in France, so the reverence we hunters have for our quarry is etched into our DNA.

To the San — the oldest inhabitants of southern Africa and arguably the greatest hunters — it was the eland that was most prized and venerated. And I can understand why. Besides being the largest species of antelope on earth and, speaking from personal experience, one of the tastiest, the eland possesses many of the qualities that any true hunter holds dear.

They are deceptively agile and athletic but, perhaps most importantly, they are incredibly elusive. Close encounters with eland are extremely rare, for they see and hear you long before you see them — unless, like the San, you possess great bushcraft and the hunter’s guile to get within bow and arrow range. It is this elusiveness and mystique that separates the great quarry species from the larder fillers.

I have been lucky enough to pit my skills against a wide variety of species over the years, from button quail to Cape buffalo, sticklebacks to sailfish. This isn’t a brag; it is merely context for what follows. There is only one species that rightly deserves pride of place above the mantelpiece in the great gallery of game animals — the Atlantic salmon.

I’m pretty sure that if the San had ever fished the Spey, the caves of the southern Drakensberg would be filled with depictions of salmon rather than eland.