My father had taken up fishing as a hobby. I guess he thought it was a way of getting away from work and family responsibilities, but it was not long before my mother was getting him to take me along as well. This was about when I was 3 or 4.

My father had a bamboo rod, a wooden reel, a linen line, a length of gut, a lead weight and a hook with a worm on it. He told me he was hoping to catch a brown trout. He was a beginner; once he had mastered this he would move on to the proper thing, fly-fishing.

My dad cast his line into the water, with the still-wriggling worm on the hook. I expected that the hungry trout would be gobbling down the worm in no time. We waited. We must have waited for all of 30 seconds before I got bored. I wandered along the bank, then I tried skipping from stone to stone on the water’s edge. I slipped and fell. I ran back to my dad completely soaked. The fishing was curtailed for the day and we drove home to be welcomed by the wrath of my mother.

I am not aware that my dad ever went fishing again. As for the rod and the reel and the hooks and the sinker, he kept those at the back of his wardrobe. They took on almost mystical significance for me. There would be times when I would creep into their room, open his wardrobe and pull out this rod and put it all together.

I saw other men fishing, some in waders standing in the middle of the River Cree (the Penkiln, which rises in the Galloway hills, is a tributary of the far-larger Cree), casting their lines again and again. I was told they were fishing for salmon. I learnt how the salmon was a huge glorious fish and that, although born in rivers, it spent most of its life out at sea and, after some years, it comes back to the river it was born in to get married and have babies.

I had never seen any of these men standing in the River Cree catch a salmon but I had seen one at the fishmonger. It was a splendid-looking giant. I was told that only rich people ate salmon. That it was the king of fish. This was decades before farmed salmon brought its price tumbling down.

By the time I went to school at the age of 5, I learnt that some of the big boys in Primary Four (8 years old) went fishing on their own. I wanted to be like the big boys. Our neighbours had a stand of bamboo canes growing in their garden, so I climbed through the fence and got one. I tied a length of string to the end, got a pin from my mum’s mending basket, bent it and tied it to the end of the string.

Next I dug up some worms, put them in a jam jar and headed for the nearest bit of water. This was the millrace for the Cree Mills mohair factory. I fell in. I came home soaked through. My mother was not pleased.

So that was it for me and fishing until I was given a proper cane rod for my eighth birthday in 1961. But between the ages of 5 and 8, the mystery of the Penkiln Burn grew in my imagination.

One time when out wandering on my own, I found myself standing on the Queen Mary’s bridge, which crosses the Burn. Just up from the bridge, the water tumbles through a narrow gap and steeply down over some rocks. The level of the water drops about 30ft in about the same distance. There are three or four small pools between the top and bottom. While standing there watching the power and force of the water, a large salmon leapt out of the water attempting to make it to the next pool up. It failed and fell back. A few seconds later he again tried and failed.

This carried on minute after minute. I knew that this beast I was watching was attempting to return home, way up to the headwater of the Penkiln Burn where the Burn would be no more than a shallow brook. He had left the Penkiln heading for the sea, as a smolt, no more than a few inches long, and here he was returning, a fully-grown monarch of the waters.

I kept watching and just as I was about to give up on him and the rain started, he took one great leap, his whole body pushing against the air and all the forces of gravity that were trying to drag him back down, and he made it to the next pool.

I finally got my own fishing rod in April the following year. The new leaves were out; lambs could be heard bleating in fields. I walked on up the small track that ran parallel to the Burn and found a huge boulder that I clambered on to. From this vantage point I looked downstream at a large pool of calm water. This would do.

I sat there without getting my rod ready for some time, unable to do anything but drink in the wonder of it all. Both banks were blanketed in bluebells. I got the jar of worms from my pocket, hooked up a big juicy one and started my first day of fishing.

How long I was there, I do not remember. What I do recall is how the day ended. It was like this. I felt the line running through my finger; I struck. Started to turn the reel. The line went tight and then I could feel it. Something alive and pulling was at the other end. It felt strong, it twisted and turned. Maybe I’d hooked one of those salmon or a large sea trout, big enough to feed the whole family. I kept trying to wind the reel, to bring whatever this monster was, but he kept pulling the other way.

After what seemed like ages, I began to get the better of this unseen Leviathan. When I finally lifted that first catch clear of the water, I was shocked and dismayed to see that it wasn’t a salmon or large sea trout but what I guessed to be an eel. It was no more than 15in in length. As I tried to grab the serpent, the rod slipped from my grasp and fell into the water. The eel wriggled free of my grasp, but he was still hooked to the line. I caught hold of the line in my left hand, picked up a stone the size of a tennis ball in the right hand; pulling on the line, I dragged the eel up the side of the boulder until he was on top, still wriggling but unable to shake free of the large hook I could see coming out the side of his jaw.

With the stone in my right hand, I bludgeoned his head. But he kept writhing. Another blow and this time the head was smashed to bits. Still he was not giving in, so I rained down blow after blow until his blood covered the stone and splattered my face. My hands were covered in his slime, but he was dead.

I stood on top of the boulder, took my jersey, shirt and vest off, rubbed the slime on my bare chest and roared my little eight-year-old boy voice at the world. But the world said nothing back. So I roared again. This time I did hear the world answer back. What I could hear were the bleating of lambs, the rustle of the leaves, the gurgle of the Burn and the silent tinkle of the massed multitudes of bluebells. I listened and I listened until the bloodlust and killing frenzy drained from me.

After that, I pulled my rod from the water. Got dressed. Put the jar of worms in one pocket and the battered and defeated eel in the other and headed for home.

Edited extract from Caught by the River — A Collection of Words on Water, compiled and edited by Jeff Barrett, Robin Turner and Andrew Walsh. Published by Cassell Illustrated, £17.99 (www.octopusbooks.co.uk )