Grayling, the fourth game fish.
A bad day's fishing beats a good day's writing

Philip is a slow learner! He gets himself into more trouble and has to be rescued again:

The morning finds me in unfamiliar territory. Well beyond my old club beats, where the river is widened by the collected tributes of smaller streams. The water is less clear and the rocks and stones have been replaced by silt covered mounds and dense slimy weeds growing on industrial debris.

[More:]

The detritus of modern man is much in evidence, carried along by the current until it is out of sight of the polluter, yet never absent as the contributions constantly flutter and plop in from bank, bridge and drain conduit. The change in water quality does not discomfort me. I am troubled though as I pass away from our shared domain. We lovers had walked, hands held, along the fresh, sparkling streams, through the fields with mushroom and bramble, with the steep valley sides above us. These sluggish waters and marshy, willowed margins are not ours.
Two ducks paddle across the stream ahead of me and a sliver of white emulsion drifts down the water and towards me. I slip to one side to avoid it and have a little chuckle to myself as the filth disperses down-stream. I know that they know I am here. I used to curse the ducks: Funny, waddling, noisy, frightened creatures that charged into the water, calling loudly and raucously at your approach. Every nervous trout, and every not so nervous trout, would have dashed for cover and hid under logs and stones at the onset of the commotion above them. I would stand and wait, and wait, and wait until the ducks were long gone and the trout had recovered. But then, after fishing that pool, I would wade cautiously up stream and there, around a curve, they all were again; waiting to wreak havoc on the next river pool and extend my fishing day by yet another ten minutes.
This water has no starwort weed but blades of reed, standing firm and bending stiffly with the slow pressure of the current. There is not the dancing, sparkling, rippling, twinkle of the fast water weed; looking as if it is hanging on to the stones by its fingertips, but the stately dance of a crowd of gentlefolk, swaying in unison, sedately and proudly, with their deep mud boots planted solidly on the riverbed and their heads high in the air. A wicked thought enters me: what would be the sensation of the thrust of these through me. How different would it be from the sensuous tingle of the starwort?
A clump to my right extends well into the river from the long, bank-edge, reedy forest. I shift my drift into its path and wait for the moment when they touch me. Searing pain assaults me: an awful, shocking agony of cuts and scrapes. I feel as if the blades have sliced through every part of my being and those parts struggle to re-unite. My cry of agony sends shock waves of distress to the other Waterborne and I hear their sympathies echo back to me. Is this it? Have I foolishly sent myself to oblivion because I sought more pleasure where pleasure abounds.
“Help me,” I sob, struggling to hold my shattered parts together as I am mercifully released. Help arrives: A ponderous, ancient presence drifts close by. I feel the old waterborne spirit open herself to me and wrap comforting folds around me, healing me and binding my shards back to a wholeness. I lose consciousness; or is it healing sleep?
I wake as the old spirit releases me. We are in the same place and she hovers near by.
The pain has gone and is replaced by a thin quivering inside me; a sense of instability.
A resonant voice reassures me and I know that I am safe. The healing will be complete very soon.
“Why did the reeds hurt me?”
“They have come from the soil and aspire to the skies. They do not belong fully to the water.”
This element is as unpredictable as any other.