Under the Sea Wind (3 page)

Pressing close to the backwash, Silverbar saw two shining air bubbles pushing away the sand grains and she knew that a crab was beneath. Even as she watched the bubbles her bright eyes saw that a wave was taking form in the tumbling confusion of the surf. She gauged the speed of the mound of water as it ran, toppling, up the beach. Above the deeper undertones of moving water she heard the lighter hiss that came as the crest began to spill. Almost in the same instant the feathered antennae of the crab appeared above the sand. Running under the very crest of the green water hill, Silverbar probed vigorously in the wet sand with opened bill and drew out the crab. Before the water could so much as wet her legs she turned and fled up the beach.

While the sun still came in level rays across the water, others of the sanderling flock joined Blackfoot and Silverbar and the beach was soon dotted with small shore birds.

A tern came flying along the surf line, his black-capped head bent and his eyes alert for the movement of fish in the water. He watched the sanderlings closely, for sometimes a small beach bird could be frightened into giving up its catch. When the tern saw Blackfoot run swiftly into the path of a wave and seize a crab he slanted down menacingly, screaming threats in a shrill, grating voice.

Tee-ar-r-r! Tee-ar-r-r!
rattled the tern.

The swoop of the white-winged bird, which was twice as large as the sanderling, took Blackfoot by surprise, for his senses had been occupied with eluding the onrush of water and preventing the escape of the large crab held in his bill. He sprang into the air with a sharp
Keet! Keet!
and circled out over the surf. The tern whirled after him in pursuit, crying loudly.

In his ability to bank and pivot in the air Blackfoot was fully the equal of the tern. The two birds, darting and twisting and turning, coming up sharply together and falling away again into the wave troughs, passed out beyond the breakers and the sound of their voices was lost to the sanderling flock on the beach.

As he rose steeply into the air in pursuit of Blackfoot, the tern caught sight of a glint of silver in the water below. He bent his head to mark the new prey more certainly and saw the green water spangled with silver streaks as the sun struck the flanks of a school of feeding silversides. Instantly the tern tipped his body steeply into a plane perpendicular to the water. He fell like a stone, although his body could not have weighed more than a few ounces, struck the water with a splash and a shower of spray, and in a matter of seconds emerged with a fish curling in his bill. By this time Blackfoot, forgotten by the tern in the excitement engendered by the bright flashes in the water, had reached the shore and dropped down among the feeding sanderlings, where he was running and probing busily as before.

After the tide turned, the water pressed stronger from the sea. The waves came in with a deeper swell and a heavier crash, warning the sanderlings that feeding on the ocean beach was no longer safe. The flock wheeled out over the sea, with a flashing of the white wing bars that distinguished them from other sandpipers. They flew low over the crests of the waves as they traveled up the beach. So they came to the point of land called Ship's Shoal, where the sea had broken through the barrier island to the sound years before.

At the point the inlet beach lay level as a floor from the sea on the south side to the sound on the north. The wide sand flat was a favorite resting place for sandpipers, plovers, and other shore birds; and it was loved, too, by the terns, the skimmers, and the gulls, who make their living from the sea, but gather to rest on shores and sandspits.

That morning the inlet beach was thronged with birds, resting and waiting for the tide turn that they might feed again, fueling small bodies for the northward journey. It was the month of May, and the great spring migration of the shore birds was at its height. Weeks before, the waterfowl had left the sounds. Two spring tides and two neap tides had passed since the last skein of snow geese had drifted to the north, like wisps of cloud in the sky. The mergansers had gone in February, looking for the first breaking up of the ice in the northern lakes, and soon after them the canvasbacks had left the wild celery beds of the estuary and followed the retreating winter to the north. So, too, the brant, eaters of the eel grass that carpeted the shallows of the sound, the swift blue-winged teal, and the whistling swans, filling the skies with their soft trumpetings.

Then the bell notes of the plovers had begun to ring among the sand hills and the liquid whistle of the curlew throbbed in the salt marshes. Shadowy forms moved through the night skies and pipings so soft as barely to be audible drifted down to fishing villages sleeping below, as the birds of shore and marsh poured northward along ancestral air lanes, seeking their nesting places.

Now while the shore birds slept on the inlet beach the sands belonged to other hunters. After the last bird had settled to rest, a ghost crab came out of his burrow in the loose white sand above the high-water mark. He sped along the beach, running swiftly on the tips of his eight legs. He paused at a mass of sea wrack left by the night tide not a dozen paces from the spot where Silverbar stood on the edge of the sanderling flock. The crab was a creamy tan, matching the sand so closely that he was all but invisible when he stood still. Only his eyes, like two black shoe buttons on stalks, showed color. Silverbar saw the crab crouch behind the litter of sea-oats stubble, leaves of beach grass, and pieces of sea lettuce. He was waiting for a sand hopper or beach flea to show itself by an unwary movement. As the ghost crabs knew, the beach fleas hid in the seaweeds when the tide was out, browsing on them and picking up bits of decaying refuse.

Before the tide had risen another hand's breadth, a beach flea crept out from under a green frond of sea lettuce and leaped with an agile flexing of its legs across a stem of sea oats, as large to it as a fallen pine. The ghost crab sprang like a pouncing cat and seized the flea in his large crushing claw, or chela, and devoured it. During the next hour he caught and ate many of the beach hoppers, stealing on silent feet from one vantage point to another as he stalked his prey.

After an hour the wind changed and blew in across the inlet channel, obliquely from the sea. One by one the birds shifted their position so that they faced the wind. Above the surf at the point they saw a flock of several hundred terns fishing. A shoal of small silvery fish was passing seaward around the point, and the air was filled with the white wing flashes of diving terns.

At intervals the birds on the beach at Ship's Shoal heard the flight music of hurrying flocks of black-bellied plovers, high in the sky; and twice they saw long lines of dowitchers passing northward.

At noon white wings sailed over the sand dunes and a snowy egret swung down long black legs. The bird alighted at the margin of a pond that lay, half encircled by marsh, between the eastern end of the dunes and the inlet beach. The pond was called Mullet Pond, a name given to it years before when it had been larger and mullet had sometimes come into it from the sea. Every day the small white heron came to fish the pond, seeking the killifish and other minnows that darted in its shallows. Sometimes, too, he found the young of larger fishes, for the highest tides of each month cut through the beach on the ocean side and brought in fish from the sea.

The pond slept in noonday quiet. Against the green of the marsh grass the heron was a snow-white figure on slim black stilts, tense and motionless. Not a ripple nor the shadow of a ripple passed beneath his sharp eyes. Then eight pale minnows swam single file above the muddy bottom, and eight black shadows moved beneath them.

With a snakelike contortion of its neck, the heron jabbed violently, but missed the leader of the solemn little parade of fish. The minnows scattered in sudden panic as the clear water was churned to muddy chaos by the feet of the heron, who darted one way and another, skipping and flapping his wings in excitement. In spite of his efforts, he captured only one of the minnows.

The heron had been fishing for an hour and the sanderlings, sandpipers, and plovers had been sleeping for three hours when a boat's bottom grated on the sound beach near the point. Two men jumped out into the water and made ready to drag a haul seine through the shallows on the rising tide. The heron lifted his head and listened. Through the fringe of sea oats on the sound side of the pond he saw a man walking down the beach toward the inlet. Alarmed, he thrust his feet hard against the mud and with a flapping of wings took off over the dunes toward the heron rookery in the cedar thickets a mile away. Some of the shore birds ran twittering across the beach toward the sea. Already the terns were milling about overhead in a noisy cloud, like hundreds of scraps of paper flung to the wind. The sanderlings took flight and crossed the point, wheeling and turning almost as one bird, and passed down the ocean beach about a mile.

The ghost crab, still at his hunting of beach fleas, was alarmed by the turmoil of birds overhead, by the many racing shadows that sped over the sand. By now he was far from his own burrow. When he saw the fisherman walking across the beach he dashed into the surf, preferring this refuge to flight. But a large channel bass was lurking near by, and in a twinkling the crab was seized and eaten. Later in the same day, the bass was attacked by sharks and what was left of it was cast up by the tide onto the sand. There the beach fleas, scavengers of the shore, swarmed over it and devoured it.

Twilight found the sanderlings resting again at the point of land called Ship's Shoal, listening to the soft roar of wings in the air about them as the curlews came in from the salt marshes to roost for the night on the inlet beach. Silverbar crouched close to some of the older sanderlings because of the strange sounds and the movements of so many large birds. There must have been thousands of curlews. For an hour after dark they were arriving, in long V formations and dense flocks. Every year the big brown birds with the sickle-shaped bills stopped on their northward migration to feed on the fiddler crabs of the mud flats and marshes.

A stone's throw away several crabs, no larger than a man's thumbnail, moved across the beach, but the sound of their feet was like the sound of sand grains disturbed by the wind, and so not even Silverbar, who was resting near the edge of the sanderling flock, heard them passing. They waded into the shallows and let the cool water bathe their bodies. This had been a day of distress and terror for the fiddlers, with all the marshes filled with curlews. Many times each hour the shadow of a bird soaring down to alight in the marsh or the sight of one of the curlews walking down along the water's edge had sent the small crabs scattering like a herd of stampeding cattle. Then the hundreds of feet on the sand had made a sound like the rattling of stiff sheets of paper. As many as could had darted into burrows—their own burrows—any burrows they could reach. But the long, oblique tunnels in the sand had been poor sanctuary, for the curving bills of the curlews could probe them deeply.

Now with the grateful twilight the fiddler herds had moved down to the water line to search for food among the sand windrows left by the receding tide. With their little spoon claws the crabs felt busily among the sand grains, sorting out the microscopic cells of algae.

The crabs that had waded into the water were females carrying eggs on the broad aprons of their abdomens. Because of the egg masses they moved awkwardly and were unable to run from their enemies, and so all day they had remained hidden deep in the burrows. Now they swayed to and fro in the water, seeking to rid themselves of their burdens. This was an instinct that served to aerate the eggs adhering to the mother's body like bunches of miniature purple grapes. Although the season was early, some of the fiddlers carried gray egg masses, signifying that the young were ready for life. For these crabs the evening ritual of washing brought on the hatching of the eggs. With each movement of the mothers' bodies, many eggshells burst and clouds of larvae were hurled into the water. Even the killifish that were nibbling algae from the shells in the quiet shallows of the sound scarcely noticed the throngs of newborn creatures that drifted by, for any of the baby crabs thus abruptly released from the confining sphere of the egg could have passed through the eye of a needle.

The clouds of larvae were carried away on the still-ebbing tide and swept out through the inlet. When the first light should steal across the water they would find themselves in the strange world of the open sea, amid many perils which they must surmount, alone and unaided save for the self-protective instincts with which each was endowed at birth. Many would fail. The others, after long weeks of adventurous living, would put in to some distant shore, where the tides spread abundant feasts for fiddler crabs and marsh grasses offered home and shelter.

The night was noisy with the barking cries of the black skimmers who chased each other in play over the inlet, where the moon struck a white path across the water. The sanderlings had often seen the skimmers in South America, for many of them wintered as far south as Venezuela and Colombia. The skimmers, compared with the sanderlings, were birds of the tropics and knew nothing of the white world to which the shore birds were bound.

At intervals throughout the night the calls of Hudsonian curlews, migrating at a great height, came down from the sky. The curlews sleeping on the beach stirred uneasily and sometimes answered the cries with plaintive whistles.

It was the night of the full moon, the moon of the spring tides when the water presses far into the marshes and laps at the floor boards of fishermen's wharfs and makes boats strain at their anchors.

The sea, that gleamed with the moon's lambent silver, drew to its surface many squids, dazed and fascinated by the light. The squids drifted on the sea, their eyes fixed on the moon. Gently they drew in water and expelled it in jets, propelling themselves backward away from the light at which they gazed. Moon-bewildered, their senses did not warn them that they were drifting into dangerous shoals until the harsh grate of sand brought sharp awakening. As they stranded, the hapless squids pumped water all the harder, driving themselves out of even the thinnest film, onto sand from which all water had ebbed away.