Under the Sea Wind (12 page)

Almost in the same moment half a dozen other squid darted into the mackerel school, but the rush of the first attacker had sent the young fish scattering in all directions. Now the pursuit began, the squid darting among the milling fish, the mackerel dashing and banking and twisting and turning—eluding only by the utmost skill and effort the bottle shapes of the squids that loomed up at terrific speed in the water, tentacles outstretched and grasping.

After the first mad melee Scomber had dashed into the shadow of the wharf and, racing up along the sea wall, had taken shelter under the weeds that grew there. Many other mackerel had done likewise or had darted out into the open water of the cove, scattering widely. Finding that the mackerel had dispersed, the squid dropped to the bottom of the harbor, where their body pigments underwent a subtle change, causing them to match the color of the underlying sand. Soon even the sharpest-eyed fish could not have detected an enemy anywhere about.

The mackerel began to forget their fears and to wander back singly and in little groups to the wharfs where they had been lying, waiting for the turn of the tide. As one by one they swam over the place where a squid lay in motionless invisibility, what had appeared a water-mounded ridge of sand suddenly whirled up from the bottom and seized them.

By these tactics the squid harassed the mackerel all the morning, and only those that remained hidden in the seaweeds of the stone wall were safe from the threat of sudden death.

At the full of the tide the waters of the cove seethed with movement as droves of sand eels or launce raced shoreward. The launce were pursued by a small band of whiting—slender but muscular fish about as long as a man's forearm—with flashing silver underparts and teeth sharp as lancets. The whiting had fallen upon the launce as they emerged from the sand of a shoal two miles to seaward of the cove, to feed on the copepods that the tide was bringing in from farther at sea. The launce fled in terror, not seaward against the tide where they might have found safety by scattering, but with the tide into the cove and into shoaling waters.

As the launce fled, the whiting harried them, driving back and forth across the thousands of slim, finger-long fish. Scomber, lying a foot under water with fins aquiver, felt with suddenly taut nerves the thin staccato vibrations of the racing launce and the heavier roll of the pursuing whiting. The waters about him filled with hurrying shadows. Scomber darted into the shadow of the wharf and hid in the weeds of one of the pilings. Once he would have feared the launce. Now he was as large as they, but the waters were filled with warnings of a hunt and of danger.

As the launce drove deeper into the cove the water began to thin away beneath them, but in their overmastering terror of the whiting they failed to heed the warnings of shoaling water and stranded by hundreds and thousands. The gulls that had followed in expectantly from outside the inlet, sensing what was happening in the seething water below, mewed and squealed and laughed their excitement when they saw the sandy flats beneath them turn to silver. Black-headed laughing gulls and gray-mantled herring gulls came down with flapping wings, plunging shoulder-deep into the water and seizing the launce, screaming threats to the newcomers that dropped down to the feast, although there was an abundance for all.

As the launce piled up inches deep on the shelving beach, the whiting, whirling after in reckless pursuit, drove up on the beach by the dozen, and as the water had now turned to the ebb there was no means of escape. When the tide withdrew the beach was silvered for half a mile with the bodies of the launce, and among them were scattered the larger forms of their pursuers. The squid had followed into the shallow water, attracted by the slaughter, and many of them had stranded while feeding on the hapless launce. Now gulls and fish crows gathered from miles around and, with the crabs and beach fleas, ate of the fish. During that night, wind and tide combined to sweep the beach clean.

The next morning a small bird in bold black and white and ruddy plumage alighted on one of the rocks of the harbor inlet and sat, dozing and dreaming, through fully a quarter of the tide rise before it could rouse itself to pick off and eat some of the small black snails that clung to the rock. The bird was exhausted from fighting the west winds that had threatened to blow it out to sea as it came down the coast from far to the north. It was a ruddy turnstone—one of the first of the great fall flights.

And now as July gave way to August the warm air moving in on the west wind met the cool sea air, and the harbor lay under a dense, dripping fog. From the point a mile down the coast the reedy voice of the foghorn cut through the mist day and night, and bells rang on all the reefs and shoals. For seven days no throb of boat engines came down through the water to the fish in the harbor, for nothing moved over the sea except the gulls, who knew their way in the fog, and the herons, who came to perch on the wharf pilings, guided by the scent of fish in the bait compartments of the boats.

Then the fog passed, and days of blue sky and bluer water followed swiftly one upon another. On these days the flocks of shore birds hurried over the harbor like gusts of autumn leaves, and like wind-blown leaves their passing betokened the end of summer.

But if knowledge of approaching fall came early to the creatures of shore and marsh, it was slow to awaken in the water world of the cove. When it came it was brought by the southwest wind. Toward the end of August an onshore blow brought rain out of a sky that was grayer than the leaden surface of the harbor. For two days and nights the southwest storm continued, with slanting sheets of water piercing the surface film of the sea with an endless barrage of drops. The rain beat down the incoming and the outgoing tides, so that they rose and lapsed in a waveless surge of water. The flood tides brimmed to the top of the sea wall and swamped many of the fishing boats, so that they wallowed to the bottom, attracting the fishes who nosed curiously at the strange shapes. All the fish lay deeper under water, and the terns huddled, drenched and disconsolate, on the rocks of the harbor inlet, for with the rain pelting down into the gray opacity of the water they could not see to fish. Unlike the terns, the gulls feasted, for the high storm tides had brought into the harbor much food in the form of injured sea animals and refuse.

After the first day of storm many weeds with narrow, toothed leaves and air vessels like clusters of berries began to appear in the cove, and on the following day the water was filled with floating sargassum weed, which the wind had blown in from the Gulf Stream. Among the fronds of the weed were small and brightly colored fishes that had been carried by the Stream from far to the southward, beginning their long journey as larvae in tropical waters. They had been sheltered by the gulfweed, during the many days and nights of the northward journey, and when the wind blew the weed out of the blue river of warm tropical water the fish accompanied it to the coastal shallows. There most of them would remain, until the coming of unaccustomed cold should abruptly end their lives.

After the storm the waters of the flood tides came in laden with the moon jelly, Aurelia. It was a fateful journey for the beautiful white jellyfish. For a season the ocean had carried them, raised from the algae-grown rocks and shells of the shore line, where they had begun life as small, plantlike things clinging to stones throughout the winter. In the spring there had budded off from these small creatures a series of flattened discs. These had been quickly transformed into tiny swimming bells, and these to the adult stages. They had lived at the surface when the sun shone and the wind held its breath, often gathering in winding columns miles in length at the meeting places of two currents, where their forms were seen by the gulls, the terns, and the gannets, shimmering in opalescent splendor.

After a time the jellyfish had matured their eggs and then they carried the young in the folds and margins of the tissues that hung like empty sleeves from the under side of the disc. Perhaps the spawning effort had left them weakened, for with bloated tissues and air-inflated egg sacs many of them capsized and floated helplessly in the seas of the late summer. These were set upon by swarms of small crustaceans with hungry jaws and further weakened or destroyed.

Now the southwest storm, kneading the waters deeply, had found the moon jellies. Rough waters seized them and hurried them shoreward. In the jostling and tumbling many tentacles were lost and delicate tissues torn. Every flood tide brought more of the pale discs of the jellyfish into the harbor and cast them up on the rocks of the shore line. Here their battered bodies became once more a part of the sea, but not until the larvae held within their arms had been liberated into the shallow waters. Thus the cycle came to the full, for even as the substance of the moon jellies was reclaimed for other uses by the sea, the young larvae were settling down for the winter on the stones and shells, so that in the spring a new swarm of tiny bells might rise and float away.

10
Seaways

NOW THE HOURS OF
darkness were as many as the hours of daylight; the sun passed through the constellation of the scales; and September's moon waned to a thin ghost of itself. And as the tides poured through the inlet race into the harbor, creaming with white ripplings over the rocks, and lapsed again to the sea from which they came, they carried away day after day more of the small fish of the harbor. So there came a night when the flood tide stirred in the young mackerel Scomber a strange uneasiness, and on that night the ebb tide, running to the sea, drew him with it. With him went many of the young mackerel who had spent the late summer in the harbor, a school of several hundred cleanly molded young fish each longer than a man's hand. Now they had left behind the pleasant life of the harbor; until death should claim them their world would be open sea.

In the inlet race the mackerel yielded to the eddies and were carried in a swift rush of water past the rocks of the harbor mouth. The water was sharply salt and clean and cold; in its scramble over rocks and shoals it had burst so many rents and tatters in its surface film that it was heavily charged with oxygen. Through this water the mackerel darted in exhilaration, aquiver from their snouts to their last tail finlets—ready and eager for the new life that awaited them. In the inlet the mackerel passed the dark forms of sea bass ranged in the tide, waiting to snap up small crustaceans and sandworms that the water plucked from the rocks or washed out of the holes in the bottom of the channel. The mackerel fled the dark shapes, streaking in swift silver flashes beyond the surging channel where the bass lay, heads into the tide.

Outside the harbor the tide moved with a steadier but heavier pulse, carrying the mackerel out into deeper water. Here the sea came in over shallowing ledges that raised its floor in giant steps from the open basin beyond. Now and again the mackerel felt the drag of current beneath them as they moved above a sandy shoal or weed-grown rocky reef, but ever the undertones of water moving over sand or shells or rock grew more remote as the bottom fell away beneath them, and most of the rhythms and the sound vibrations that came to the hurrying fish were of water and water alone.

The young mackerel moved in a school almost as one fish. None was leader, yet each had a keen awareness of the presence and the movements of all the others, and as those on the margins of the school swung to right or left, or quickened or slackened their pace, so likewise did all the fish of the school.

Now and again the mackerel veered away in sudden alarm from the black shapes of fishing boats that crossed their path, and more than once they darted in momentary panic through the meshes of nets set athwart the tides, being yet too small to become entangled in the twine. Sometimes dark forms lunged at them out of the black water; and once a large squid loomed up and gave them chase, the fish and mollusk darting in and out among a frightened shoal of two-year-old herring, or Sperling, on which the squid had been feeding.

Some three miles to seaward of the harbor the mackerel sensed the water shallowing again beneath them as they approached a small island. The island belonged to the sea birds. In season the terns nested on its sands, and the herring gulls brought forth their young under the bushes of beach plum and bayberry and on the flat rocks overlooking the sea. Running out into the sea from the island was a long underwater reef— called by the fishermen The Ripplings—and over it the water was broken into white surges and frothy eddies. As the mackerel passed, scores of pollock were leaping in play in the tide rip, and their bodies gleamed white as the wave froth in the thin light of the risen moon.

When the island and its reef had been left a mile behind, the mackerel school was thrown into sudden panic by the appearance among them of a herd of some half-dozen porpoises which had risen to the surface to blow. The porpoises had been feeding on an underlying sandy shoal, where they were rooting out the launce who had buried themselves there. When the porpoises found themselves among schooling mackerel they slashed at the little fish with their narrow, grinning jaws, killing a few mackerel in sport. But when the school fled in swift alarm through the sea they did not follow, for they had already gorged on the launce to the point of sluggishness.

At early dawn light, the young mackerel, now many miles at sea, came for the first time upon older fish of their own kind. A school of adult mackerel was moving swiftly at the surface of the sea, over which they swept with a heavy rippling. Their snouts were breaking water and their eyes, eager and staring, looked out with water-dimmed sight into the world of air and sky. The two schools—the old fish and the young—merged for a moment of milling confusion as their paths crossed and then continued their separate ways in the sea.

The gulls had come early from their resting places on coastal islands and now they patrolled the sea, their eyes missing nothing that happened in the upper layers and seeing farther down into the water as the sun rose and the shimmer of the level rays faded from the surface. The gulls saw the school of young mackerel swimming a foot under water. Across half a dozen wave hills to the eastward they saw two dark fins, like sickle blades, cutting the water. Because of their elevation the gulls could see that the fins were part of a large fish who drifted just under water, with only the long back fin and the upper blade of the tail fin protruding. The swordfish, who measured eleven feet from the tip of his sword to his tail, often lay idly just beneath the surface, perhaps testing the thrust of the surface ripples with his dorsal fin and so directing his course into the wind. In this way he was certain to meet the shoals of plankton, often accompanied by predatory fish, that drifted with the moving surface water before the wind.