Under the Sea Wind (15 page)

Scomber lay very still, his gill covers moving rapidly. Then the currents moving along the rocky wall brought him the taint of conger as the big eel worked its way around the cliff, prying into all the crevices that might shelter a small fish. The scent of his enemy sent Scomber whirling out once more into open water, climbing for the surface. The eel saw the glinting streak of his passage. It turned and gathered speed for the chase, but already it had lost some twenty feet. The conger usually avoided the open water, being a creature of rock ledges and dark, undersea caverns. It hesitated and slackened speed. At this moment its small, deep-set eyes beheld a score of gray fish darting toward it. The eel turned instinctively to race for shelter in its own rock crevice, now left far behind. The school of dogfish bore down upon it. Always ravenous and ever ready to taste blood, the small sharks set upon the eel and in a twinkling had slashed its thick body in a hundred places.

For two days bands of dogfish swarmed in these waters, preying on mackerel, herring, pollock, menhaden, cod, haddock, and every other fish they encountered. On the second day the school to which Scomber belonged, harassed beyond endurance, traveled far to the south and west, above many undersea hills and valleys, and so left behind the shark-infested waters.

That night the mackerel moved through water that was filled with swimming starlets of light. The lights were luminous spots on the bodies of inch-long shrimps, each of which had a pair of light organs under the eyes and twin rows down the sides of their jointed abdomens or tails. When the shrimp flexed their tails in swimming, they could bring the hinder lights to bear on the water beyond and below them and so perhaps were better able to see the small copepods, split-footed shrimps, swimming snails, and one-celled plants and animals which they hunted. Most of the shrimps clutched in their arms, or foremost, bristle-set appendages, a matted pack of the food animals they had already caught by seizing them out of the current set up by the movements of their tails. Following the little darting lights of the shrimps, the mackerel easily found and captured as many of them as they could eat.

At dawn the little sea lamps went out as the first light diluted the water blackness. As they swam toward the sunrise, the mackerel soon found themselves in water that teemed with an enormous shoal of pteropods, or winged snails. As long as the early light lay in level rays across the water, the swarms of pteropods were a hazy, bluish cloud that dimmed the mackerels' vision; but when the sun had been an hour in the sky and its rays came slanting into the sea, the water was filled with a dazzling sparkle and glitter, for the bodies of the pteropods were as transparent and as exquisitely fashioned as the finest glass.

Over miles of sea that morning the mackerel swam through the pteropod shoals, and often they met whales driving open-mouthed through the swarms of mollusks. The mackerel, whom the whales did not seek, fled from the huge, dark forms of the whales; while the winged snails, who were being captured in millions, knew nothing of the monsters who hunted them. Eternally occupied with the quest for food, they browsed peacefully in the sea, unaware of the terrible hunter until the great jaws closed over them and the water rushed away in a torrent through the plates of whalebone.

Swimming down through the school of pteropods, Scomber saw the gleam of a very large fish moving in the water beneath him and felt the heavy roll of displaced water from its wake. But the fish passed from sight as quickly as it had come, and once more Scomber was aware only of feeding mackerel and of the small and glass-clear forms of swimming snails. Then suddenly he felt the great disturbance that troubled the water a few fathoms below him and sensed that mackerel were racing upward from somewhere near the lower fringes of the school. A dozen large tuna had attacked the school of feeding mackerel, having first dropped below the smaller fish to force them to the surface.

As the tuna drove through the milling fish, panic and confusion spread. There was no escape before or behind, nor to right or left. There was none below, where the tuna were. Along with most of his fellows, Scomber climbed up and up. The water was paling as it thinned away above them. Scomber could feel the thudding water vibration of an enormous fish climbing behind him, faster than a small mackerel could climb. He felt the five-hundred-pound tuna graze his flank as it seized the fish swimming beside him. Then he was at the surface, and the tuna were still pursuing. He leaped into the air, fell back, leaped again and again. In the air, birds stabbed at him with their beaks, for the spurting spray was a sign of feeding tuna that brought the gulls hurrying to the spot, to mingle their croaks and screams with the sound of splashing water and of fish bodies falling into the sea.

Now Scomber's leaps were shorter and more labored, and he was falling back with the heaviness of exhaustion. Twice he had barely escaped the jaws of a tuna and many times he had seen one of his companions seized by the attacking fish.

Unseen by mackerel or tuna, a high, black fin was moving over the water from the east. A hundred yards to southeast of the first fin, two other blades, each as high as a tall man, skimmed rapidly over the sea. Three orcas, or killer whales, were approaching, drawn by the scent of blood.

Then for a space Scomber found the water filled with even more terrifying forms and lashed to a greater confusion as the twenty-foot whales attacked the largest of the tunas, falling upon it like a pack of wolves. Scomber fled from the place where the great fish was plunging and rolling in a vain attempt to escape its enemies. And suddenly he was in water where there were no more tunas to pursue and harry small mackerel, for all of the big fish except the one that was attacked had sped away at sight of the orcas. As he swam down into deeper water, the sea grew calm and still and green again, and now once more he was in the midst of feeding mackerel and saw about him the crystal bodies of swimming snails.

12
Seine Haul

THAT NIGHT THE SEA
burned with unusual phosphorescence. Many fish were near the surface, feeding. The chill of November quickened their movements, and as their schools rolled through the water they disturbed the millions of luminous plankton animals, causing them to glow with a fierce luster. So the darkness of the moonless night was broken in many places by flickering patches of light that came and went, flared to brilliance, and died away. Wandering with half a hundred other yearlings, Scomber saw before him, in darkness pinpricked with silver light, a diffuse glare made by an enormous school of large mackerel, feeding on shrimps, who were pursuing copepods. Thousands of mackerel were drifting slowly with the tide. The whole area covered by the mackerel gleamed mistily, for at every movement of the fish they collided with the myriads of light-producing animals that filled the water.

The yearlings drew closer to the large fish and soon mingled with them. This was a larger school than Scomber had ever known before. All about him were fish—layer upon layer in the water above—layer upon layer below; fish to right and left—fish before him and behind him.

Ordinarily the “tacks,” or eight-to-ten-inch mackerel of the year, would have schooled separately, the division of small fish from large being accomplished by the slower swimming speed of the younger fish. But now that even the larger mackerel—the heavy fish six or eight years old—were moving no faster than the great, sprawling cloud of plankton on which they were preying, the tacks easily kept pace with them, and large and small mackerel schooled together.

The movements of the many fish in the water, the sight of the large mackerel darting, wheeling, turning in darkness, their bodies gleaming with a borrowed light, filled the yearlings with tension and excitement. But so engrossed were the mackerel in feeding that none of them, large or small, was at first aware of the passage through the sea overhead of a luminous streak, like the wake of a giant fish swimming at the surface. The birds resting on the sea heard the night silence broken by a dull throbbing; some of them that slept more deeply than the others got up from the water only just in time to avoid being struck by the cruising vessel. But neither the startled cry of a fulmar nor the sharp flap of a shearwater's wing could send a message of warning to the fish below.

“Mackerel!” called the lookout at the masthead.

The throb of the engine died away to a scarcely audible heartbeat of sound. A dozen men leaned over the rail of the mackerel seiner, peering into darkness. The seiner carried no light. To do so might frighten the fish. Everywhere was blackness—a thick and velvet blackness in which sky was indistinguishable from water.

But wait! Was there a flicker of light—a pale ghost of flame playing over the water there off the port bow? If there had been such a light it faded away into darkness again and the sea lay in black anonymity—a blank negation of life. But there it came again, and, like a nascent flame in a breeze, or a match cupped in the hands, it kindled to a brilliant glow; it spread into the surrounding darkness; it moved, a gleaming, amorphous cloud, through the water.

“Mackerel,” echoed the captain after he had watched the light for several minutes. “Listen!”

At first there was no sound but the soft slap of water against the boat. A sea bird, flying out of darkness into darkness, struck the mast, fell to the deck with a frightened cry, and fluttered off.

Silence again.

Then came a faint but unmistakable patter like a squall of rain on the sea—the sound of mackerel, the sound of a big school of mackerel feeding at the surface.

The captain gave the order to attempt a set. He himself ascended to the masthead to direct the operations. The crew fell into their places: ten into the seine boat attached to a boom on the starboard side of the vessel; two into the dory that was towed behind the seine boat. The throb of the engine swelled. The vessel began to move in a wide circle, swinging around the glowing patch of sea. That was to quiet the fish; to round them up in a smaller circle. Three times the seiner circled the school. The second circle was smaller than the first and the third was smaller than the second. The glow in the water was brighter now and the patch of light more concentrated.

After the third circling of the school, the fisherman in the stern of the seine boat passed to the fisherman in the dory one end of the 1200-foot net that lay piled in the bottom of the seine boat. The seine was dry, having caught no fish that night. The dory cast off and the men at the oars backed water. Again the vessel began to move, towing the seine boat. Now, as the space between the seine boat and dory lengthened, the net slid steadily over the side of the larger boat. A line buoyed by cork floats stretched across the water between them. From the cork line the net hung down in a vertical curtain of webbing a hundred feet deep, held down in the water by leads in the lower border. The line marked out by corks grew from an arc to a semicircle; from a semicircle it swung to the full circle to round up the mackerel in a space four hundred feet across.

The mackerel were nervous and uneasy. Those on the outside of the school were aware of a heavy movement, as of some large sea creature in the water near them. They felt the wash of its passage through the sea—the heavy wake of displaced water. Some of them saw above them a moving, silver shape, long and oval. Beside it moved two smaller forms, one before the other. The shapes might have been those of a she-whale with two calves following at her side. Fearing the strange monsters, the mackerel feeding at the edge of the school turned in toward the center. So, all around the great body of feeding fish, mackerel were wheeling about and plunging in through the school where they could not see the great, luminous shapes and where the wake of the passage of monstrous bodies was lost in the lesser vibrations of thousands of swimming mackerel.

As once more the sea monsters began to circle their prey, only one of the small forms followed the large shape. The other drifted overhead, splashing in the water as with long fins or flippers. Now as the seine boat traced its lesser streak of flame in the water beside the wider gleaming path of the vessel, the netting spilled into the water in its wake. The netting kindled a confused glitter of showering sparks as it slid into the water and hung like a thin, swaying curtain that glimmered palely, for the plankton animals were already gathering on it. The fish were afraid of the netting wall. As the arc enclosed by the twine swung wide and then little by little closed in a great circle, the mackerel at first drew even more compactly together, each part of the school shrinking away from the netting.

Somewhere near the center of the school, Scomber was confusedly aware of the increasing press of fish about him and of the blinding glare of their bodies, clothed in sea light. For him the net did not exist, for he had not seen its plankton-spangled meshes nor brushed its twine with snout or flanks. Uneasiness filled the water and passed with electric swiftness from fish to fish. All about the circle they began to bunt against the net and to veer off and dash back through the school, spreading panic.

One of the fishermen in the seine boat had been only two years at sea. Not long enough to forget, if he ever would, the wonder, the unslakable curiosity he had brought to his job—curiosity about what lay under the surface. He sometimes thought about fish as he looked at them on deck or being iced down in the hold. What had the eyes of the mackerel seen? Things he'd never see; places he'd never go. He seldom put it into words, but it seemed to him incongruous that a creature that had made a go of life in the sea, that had run the gauntlet of all the relentless enemies that he knew roved through that dimness his eyes could not penetrate, should at last come to death on the deck of a mackerel seiner, slimy with fish gurry and slippery with scales. But after all, he was a fisherman and seldom had time to think such thoughts.

Tonight, as he fed the seine into the water and watched the scintillating light as it sank, he thought of the thousands of fish that were milling about down there. He could not see them; even those in the upper water looked only like streaks of light curveting in darkness—fireworks lost in a black, inverted sky, he thought a little dizzily. His mind's eye saw the mackerel running up to the net, bunting it with their snouts, backing off. They would be big mackerel, he thought, for the fiery streaks in the water gave a hint of their size. By the way the phosphorescent light, like a mass of molten metal, was becoming concentrated in the water, he knew that the bumping into the net and the backing off in alarm must be going on all around the circle, for now the ends of the net were closed. The seine boat had overlapped the dory and the two ends of netting had been brought together.