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 t
hey 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.
He helped lift the big leaden weight, fit the three-hundred-pound tom over the pursing lines, and start it sliding down the rope to close the open circle in the bottom of the net. The men were beginning to haul in the long purse lines. He thought of the mackerel down there, entrapped only by their own inability to see the way of escape through the bottom of the net. He thought of the tom sliding down, down, into the sea; of the big brass rings that hung from the lead line coming closer together as the purse line was drawn through them; of the dwindling circle at the bottom. But the way of escape must still be open.
The fish were nervous, he could tell. The streaks in the upper water were like hundreds of darting comets. The glow of the whole mass alternately dulled and kindled again to flame. It made him think of the light from steel furnaces in the sky. He seemed to see far down below the surface where the tom was shoving the rings along ahead of it, and the straining ropes were taking up the slack, and the fish were milling in the water—the fish that still had a way of escape. He could imagine that the big mackerel were getting wild. It was too large a school to have set about; but a skipper always hated to split a school. That was almost sure to send them off into deep water. Surely the big fellows would sound yet—would dive down through that shrinking circle straight toward the bottom of the sea, carrying the whole school with them.
He turned away from the water and with his hand felt the pile of wet rope in the bottom of the seine boat, trying to feel—for he could not see—the amount of rope piled up there and trying to guess how much was still to come in before the seine would be pursed.
A shout from the man at his elbow. He turned back to the water. The light within the circle of net was fading, flickering, dying away to an ashy afterglow, to darkness. The fish had sounded.
He leaned over the gunwales, peering down into dark water, watching the glow fade, seeing in imagination what he could not see in fact—the race and rush and downward whirl of thousands of mackerel. He suddenly wished he could be down there, a hundred feet down, on the lead line of the net. What a splendid sight to see those fish streaking by at top speed in a blaze of meteoric flashes! It was only later, when they had finished the long, wet task of repiling the 1200-foot length of seine in the boat, their hour’s heavy work wasted, that he realized what it meant that the mackerel had sounded.
After their mad rush through the bottom of the seine, the mackerel scattered widely in the sea, and only when the night was nearly spent did any of the fish that had known the terror of the circling net feed quietly again in schools.
Before dawn, most of the seiners that had fished these waters during the night had vanished in darkness toward the west. One remained, having had bad luck all night, for out of six sets of the seine her crew had lost the fish five times by sounding. The solitary vessel was the only moving thing on the sea that morning when the east turned gray and the black water came ashimmer with silver light. Her crew was hoping for one more set—waiting for the mackerel whom the night’s fishing had sent into deep water to show themselves at the surface at daybreak.
Moment by moment the light grew in the east. It picked out the tall mast and the deckhouse of the seiner; it spilled over the gunwales of the following seine boat and lost itself in the pile of netting, black with sea water. It shone on the mounds of the low wave hills and left their valleys in darkness.
Two kittiwakes came flying out of the dimness and perched on the mast, waiting for fish to be caught and sorted.
A quarter of a mile to the southwest, a dark, irregular patch appeared on the water—schooling mackerel, moving slowly into the east.
Quickly the seiner’s course was changed to cross in front of the drifting school. With swift maneuvering of the boats, the net was dropped around it. Working with furious haste, the crew sent the tom plunging down the purse line, hauled in the ropes, closed the bottom of the net. Little by little, the men took in the slack of the seine, working the fish into the bunt or central part of the net where the twine was heaviest. Now the vessel came alongside the seine boat and received and made fast the mass of slack netting.
In the water beside the boat lay the bag of the seine, buoyed by corks fastened to the cork line in groups of three or four. In the net were several thousand pounds of mackerel. Most of the fish were large, but among them were a hundred or more tacks or yearlings that had summered in a New England harbor and were only recently of the open sea. One of them was Scomber.
The bailing net, like a ladle of twine on a long wooden handle, was brought into position over the seine, dipped down into the churning mass of fish, raised by pulleys, and emptied out on deck. Several score of lithe and muscular mackerel flapped on the floor boards and sent a rainbow mist of fine scales into the air.
Something was wrong about the fish in the net. Something was wrong about the way they boiled up from below, almost leaping to meet the bailing net. Fish pursed in a seine usually tried to drive the net down, to sink it by sounding. But these fish were terrorized by something in the water—something they feared more than the great boat monster in the water alongside.
There was a heavy disturbance in the water outside the seine. A small triangular fin and the long lobe of a tail cut the surface. Suddenly there were dozens of fins all about the net. A four-foot fish, slim and gray, with a mouth set well back under the tip of his snout, lunged across the cork line and drove his body among the mackerel, slashing and biting.
Now all the dogfish of the pack tore at the seine in ravenous fury, eager to seize the mackerel inside. Their razor-sharp teeth ripped the stout twine as if it had been gauze, and great holes appeared in the net. There was a moment of indescribable confusion, in which the space circumscribed by the cork line became a seething vortex of life—a maelstrom of leaping fish, of biting teeth, of flashing green and silver.
Then, almost as suddenly as it had whirled up, the vortex subsided. In a swift draining away of the turmoil and confusion, the mackerel poured through the holes in the seine, fleet as darting shadows, and lost themselves in the sea.
Among the mackerel who escaped both the seine and the raiding dogfish was the yearling Scomber. By evening of the same day, following older fish and directed by overmastering instinct, he had migrated many miles to seaward of the waters frequented by gill netters and seiners. He was traveling far below the
surface, the pale waters of the summer sea forgotten, and was swimming down through deepening green along sea roads new and strange to him. Always he moved south and west. He was going to a place he himself had never known—the deep, quiet waters along the edge of the continental shelf, off the Capes of Virginia.
There, in time, the winter sea received him.
Book
3
River and Sea
13
Journey to the Sea
THERE IS A POND that lies under a hill, where the threading roots of many trees— mountain ash, hickory, chestnut oak, and hemlock— hold the rains in a deep sponge of humus. The pond is fed by two streams that carry the runoff of higher ground to the west, coming down over rocky beds grooved in the hill. Cattails, bur reeds, spike rushes, and pickerel weeds stand rooted in the soft mud around its shores and, on the side under the hill, wade out halfway into its waters. Willows grow in the wet ground along the eastern shore of the pond, where the overflow seeps down a grass-lined spillway, seeking its passage to the sea.
The smooth surface of the pond is often ringed by spreading ripples made when shiners, dace, or other minnows push against the tough sheet between air and water, and the film is dimpled, too, by the hurrying feet of small water insects that live among the reeds and rushes. The pond is called Bittern Pond, because never a spring passes without a few of these shy herons nesting in its bordering reeds, and the strange, pumping cries of the birds that stand and sway in the cattails, hidden in the blend of lights and shadows, are thought by some who hear them to be the voice of an unseen spirit of the pond.