Cynoscion darted away in momentary panic at the sudden motion and lay under a rotting deck timber, gill covers moving rapidly to his increased inspiration of water. So perfect was the camouflage of the angler that the trout had not seen his outlines; the only warnings of danger were the flash of teeth and the sudden disappearance of the spadefish. Three times more as he watched the dangling, jerking lure, Cynoscion saw fishes swim up to investigate it. Two were cunners; one was a lookdown fish, high and compressed of body and silvery of color. Each of the three touched the lure and each disappeared into the maw of the angler.
Then twilight passed into darkness, and Cynoscion saw no more as he lay under the rotting deck timbers. But at intervals as the night wore on he felt the sudden movement of a large body in the water beneath him. After about the middle of the night there was no more movement in the weed bed under the prow of the Mary B., for the angler fish had gone out to forage for bigger game than the few small fishes that came to investigate its lure.
A flock of eiders had come down to rest for the night on the water over the shoal. They had alighted first two miles to landward, but the sea ran in broken swells over the rough terrain beneath them and after the tide turn it foamed on the dark water around the ducks. The wind was blowing onshore, and it fought the tide. The ducks were disturbed in their sleep and flew to the outer edge of the shoal, where the water was quieter, and settled down once more on the seaward side of the breakers. The ducks rode low in the water, like laden fishing schooners. Although they slept, some with their heads under the feathers of their shoulders, they often had to paddle with their webbed feet to keep their positions in the swift-running tide.
As the sky began to lighten in the east and the water above the edge of the shoal grew gray instead of black, the forms of the floating ducks looked from below like dark oval shadows encased in a silvery sheen of air imprisoned between their feathers and the surface film. The eiders were watched from below by a pair of small, malignant eyes that belonged to a creature swimming slowly and with awkward motion through the water—a creature like a great, misshapen bellows.
Lophius was well aware that birds were somewhere near, for the scent and taste of duck were strong in the water that passed over the taste buds covering his tongue and the sensitive skin within his mouth. Even before the growing light had brought the surface shadows within his cone-shaped field of vision, he had seen phosphorescent flashes as the feet of the ducks stirred the water. Lophius had seen such flashes before, and often they had meant that birds were resting on the surface. His night’s prowling had brought him only a few moderate-sized fishes, which was far from enough to fill a stomach that could hold two dozen large flounders or threescore herring or could pouch a single fish as large as the angler itself.
Lophius moved closer to the surface, climbing with his fins. He swam under an eider that was separated a little from its fellows. The duck was asleep, bill tucked in its feathers, one foot dangling below its body. Before it could waken to knowledge of its danger it was seized in a sharp-toothed mouth with a spread of nearly a foot. In sudden terror the duck beat the water with its wings and paddled with its free foot, seeking to take off from the surface. By a great exertion of strength it began to rise from the water, but the full weight of the angler hung from its body and dragged it back.
The honking of the doomed eider and the thrashing of its wings alarmed its companions, and with a wild churning of the water the remainder of the flock took off in flight, quickly disappearing into the thin mist that lay over the sea. The duck was bleeding spurts of bright-red blood from a severed leg artery. As its life ebbed away in the bright stream, its struggles grew feeble, and the strength of the great fish prevailed. Lophius pulled the duck under, sinking away from the cloud of reddened water just as a shark appeared in the dim light, attracted by the scent of blood. The angler took the duck to the floor of the shoal and swallowed it whole, for his stomach was capable of enormous distension.
Half an hour later Cynoscion, the sea trout, hunting about the wreck for small fishes, saw the angler returning to his hole under the prow of the Mary B., pulling himself over the bottom by his handlike pectoral fins. He saw Lophius creep into the shadow of the vessel and saw the weeds that waved under the prow part to receive him. There the angler would lie in torpor for several days, digesting his meal.
During the day the water chilled by almost imperceptible degrees, and in the afternoon the ebb tide brought a great flood of cold water from the bay. That evening the sea trout, driven by the cold, left the wreck and ran seaward during the entire night, passing down the plain that sloped steadily away beneath them. They moved over smooth, sandy bottoms, sometimes rising to pass over a mound or shoal of broken shell. They hurried on, resting seldom because of the creeping cold. Hour by hour the water above them deepened.
The eels must have passed this way, through the country of underwater sand hills and down the sloping meadowlands and prairies of the sea.
Often during the next few days the trout were overtaken by other schools of fishes when they paused for rest or food and often they met browsing fish herds of many different kinds. The fish had come from all the bays and rivers of many miles of coast line, fleeing the winter cold. Some had come from far to the north, from the coasts of Rhode Island and Connecticut and the shores of Long Island. These were scup, thin-bodied fish with high, arched backs and spiny fins, covered with platelike scales. Every winter the scup came from New England to the waters off the Capes of Virginia and then returned in spring to spawn in the northern waters and be caught in traps and swiftly encircling seines. The farther the sea trout traveled across the continental shelf, the more often they saw the scup herds in the green haze before them, the large bronze fish rising and sinking as they grubbed on the bottom for worms, sand dollars, and crabs and drifted up a fathom or more to munch their food.
And sometimes there were cod schools, come from Nantucket Shoals to winter in the warmer southern waters. Some of the cod would spawn in this place that seemed alien to their kind, leaving their young to the ocean currents, which might never return them to the northern home of the cod.
The cold increased. It was like a wall moving through the sea across the coastal plain. It was nothing that could be seen or touched; yet it was so real a barrier that no fish would have run back through it any more than if it had been solid as stone. In milder winters the fish would have scattered widely over the continental shelf—the croakers well inshore; the flukes or flounders on all the sandy patches; scup in all the sloping valleys, rich in bottom food; and sea bass over every piece of rocky ground. But this year the cold drove them on, mile after mile, to the edge of the continental shelf—to the edge of the deep sea. There in the quiet water, warmed by the Gulf Stream, they found a winter haven.
Even as the fish were running out across the continental shelf from all the bays and rivers, boats were moving south and out to sea. The boats were squat and ungraceful of line and they pitched and rolled in the winter sea. They were trawlers, come from many northern ports to find the fish in their winter refuge.
Only a decade before, the sea trout, the fluke, the scup, and the croakers had been safe from the fishermen’s nets once they had left the bays and sounds. Then, one year, boats had come, dragging nets like long bags. The boats had moved down from the north and out from the coast, towing their nets along the bottom. At first they had taken nothing. Mile by mile, they moved farther out, and finally their nets came up filled with food fishes. The wintering grounds of the shore fish—the summer fish of the bays and river estuaries—had been discovered.
From that time on, the trawlers came every season and took millions of pounds of fishes each year. Now they were on their way, coming down from the northern fishing ports. There were haddock trawlers from Boston and flounder draggers from New Bedford; there were redfish boats from Gloucester and cod boats from Portland. Winter fishing in southern waters is easier than winter fishing on the Scotian Banks or the Gran
d Banks; easier even than on Georges, or Browns, or the Channel.
But this winter was cold; the bays were icebound, and the sea was gale-ridden. The fish were far out; seventy miles out, a hundred miles out. The fish were deep down in warm water, a hundred fathoms down.
The trawls went over the side, from decks that were slippery with freezing spray. The meshes of the trawl nets were stiff with ice, and all the ropes and the cables groaned and creaked with the frost. The trawls went down through the hundred fathoms of water; down from ice and sleet and heaving sea and screaming wind to a place of warmth and quiet, where fish herds browsed in the blue twilight, on the edge of the deep sea.
15
Return
THE RECORD OF THE eels’ journey to their spawning place is hidden in the deep sea. No one can trace the path of the eels that left the salt marsh at the mouth of the bay on that November night when wind and tide brought them the feeling of warm ocean water—how they passed from the bay to the deep Atlantic basin that lies south of Bermuda and east of Florida half a thousand miles. Nor is there a clearer record of the journey of those other eel hordes that in autumn passed to the sea from almost every river and stream of the whole Atlantic Coast from Greenland to Central America.
No one knows how the eels traveled to their common destination. Probably they shunned the pale-green surface waters, chilled by wintry winds and bright as the hill streams they had feared to descend by day. Perhaps they traveled instead at mid-depths or followed the contours of the gently sloping continental shelf, descending the drowned valleys of their native rivers that had cut channels across the coastal plain in sunshine millions of years ago. But somehow they came to the continent’s edge, where the muddy slopes of the sea’s wall fell away steeply, and so they passed to the deepest abyss of the Atlantic. There the young were to be born of the darkness of the deep sea and the old eels were to die and become sea again.
In early February billions of specks of protoplasm floated in darkness, suspended far below the surface of the sea. They were the newly hatched larvae—the only testament that remained of the parent eels. The young eels first knew life in the transition zone between the surface sea and the abyss. A thousand feet of water lay above them, straining out the rays of the sun. Only the longest and strongest of the rays filtered down to the level where the eels drifted in the sea—a cold and sterile residue of blue and ultraviolet, shorn of all its warmth of reds and yellows and greens. For a twentieth part of the day the blackness was displaced by a strange light of a vivid and unearthly blue that came stealing down from above. But only the straight, long rays of the sun when it passed the zenith had power to dispel the blackness, and the deep sea’s hour of dawn light was merged in its hour of twilight. Quickly the blue light faded away, and the eels lived again in the long night that was only less black than the abyss, where the night had no end.
At first the young eels knew little of the strange world into which they had come, but lived passively in its waters. They sought no food, sustaining their flattened, leaf-shaped bodies on the residue of embryonic tissue, and so they were the foes of none of their neighbors. They drifted without effort, buoyed by their leafy form and by the balance between the density of their own tissues and that of the sea water. Their small bodies were colorless as crystal. Even the blood that ran in its channels, pumped by hearts of infinitesimal size, was unpigmented; only the eyes, small as black pinpricks, showed color. By their transparency the young eels were better fitted to live in this twilight zone of the sea, where safety from hungry foragers was to be found only in blending with the surroundings.
Billions of young eels—billions of pairs of black, pinprick eyes peering into the strange sea world that overlay the abyss. Before the eyes of the eels, clouds of copepods vibrated in their ceaseless dance of life, their crystal bodies catching the light like dust motes when the blue gleam came down from above. Clear bells pulsated in the water, fragile jellyfish adjusted to life where five hundred pounds of water pressed on every square inch of surface. Fleeing before the descending light, shoals of pteropods, or winged snails, swept down from above before the eyes of the watching eels, their forms glistening with reflected light like a rain of strangely shaped hailstones—daggers and spirals and cones of glassy clearness. Shrimps loomed up—pale ghosts in the dim light. Sometimes the shrimps were pursued by pale fishes, round of mouth and flabby of flesh, with rows of light organs set like jewels on their gray flanks. Then the shrimps often expelled jets of luminous fluid that turned to a fiery cloud to blind and confuse their enemies. Most of the fishes seen by the eels wore silver armor, for silver is the prevailing color or badge of those waters that lie at the end of the sun’s rays. Such were the small dragonfish, long and slender of form, with fangs glistening in their opened mouths as they roamed through the water in an endless pursuit of prey. Strangest of all were the fishes, half as long as a man’s finger and clothed in a leathery skin, that shone with turquoise and amethyst lights and gleamed like quicksilver over their flanks. Their bodies were thin from side to side and tapered to sharp edges. When enemies looked down from above, they saw nothing, for the backs of the hatchetfish were a bluish black that was invisible in the black sea. When sea hunters looked up from below, they were confused and could not distinguish their prey with certainty, for the mirror-like flanks of the hatchetfish reflected the blueness of the water and their outlines were lost in a shimmer of light.
The young eels lived in one layer or tier of a whole series of horizontal communities that lay one below the other, from the nereid worms that spun their strands of silk from frond to frond of the brown sargassum weed floating on the surface to the sea spiders and prawns that crawled precariously over the deep and yielding oozes of the floor of the abyss.
Above the eels was the sunlight world where plants grew, and small fishes shone green and azure in the sun, and blue and crystal jellyfish moved at the surface.
Then came the twilight zone where fishes were opalescent or silver, and red prawns shed eggs of a bright orange color, and round-mouthed fishes were pale, and the first light organs twinkled in the gloom.
Then came the first black layer, where none wore silvery sheen or opalescent luster, but all were as drab as the water in which they lived, wearing monotones of reds and browns and blacks whereby they might fade into the surrounding obscurity and defer the moment of death in the jaws of an enemy. Here the red prawns shed deep-red eggs, and the round-mouthed fishes were black, and many creatures wore luminous torches or a multitude of small lights arranged in rows or patterns that they might recognize friend or enemy.
Below them lay the abyss, the primeval bed of the sea, the deepest of all the Atlantic. The abyss is a place where change comes slow, where the passing of the years has no meaning, nor the swift succession of the seasons. The sun has no power in those depths, and so their blackness is a blackness without end, or beginning, or degree. No beating of tropical sun on the surface miles above can lessen the bleak iciness of those abyssal waters that varies little through summer or winter, through the years that melt into centuries, and the centuries into ages of geologic time. Along the floor of the ocean basins, the currents are a slow creep of frigid water, deliberate and inexorable as the flow of time itself.
Down beneath mile after mile of water—more than four miles in all—lay the sea bottom, covered with a soft, deep ooze that had been accumulating there through eons upon eons of time. These greatest depths of the Atlantic are carpeted with red clay, a pumicelike deposit hurled out of the earth from time to time by submarine volcanoes. Mingled with the pumice are spherules of iron and nickel that had their origin on some far-off sun and once rushed millions of miles through interstellar space, to perish in the earth’s atmosphere and find their grave in the deep sea. Far up on the sides of the great bowl of the Atlantic the bottom oozes are thick with the skeletal remains of minute sea creatures of the surface waters—the shells of starry Foraminifera and the limy remains of algae and corals, the flintlik
e skeletons of Radiolaria and the frustules of diatoms. But long before such delicate structures reach this deepest bed of the abyss, they are dissolved and made one with the sea. Almost the only organic remains that have not passed into solution before they reach these cold and silent deeps are the ear bones of whales and the teeth of sharks. Here in the red clay, in the darkness and stillness, lies all that remains of ancient races of sharks that lived, perhaps, before there were whales in the sea; before the giant ferns flourished on the earth or ever the coal measures were laid down. All of the living flesh of these sharks was returned to the sea millions of years before, to be used over and over again in the fashioning of other creatures, but here and there a tooth still lies in the red-clay ooze of the deep sea, coated with a deposit of iron from a distant sun.
The abyss south of Bermuda is a meeting place for the eels of the western and eastern Atlantic. There are other great deeps in the ocean between Europe and America—chasms sunk between the mountain ranges of the sea’s floor—but only this one is both deep enough and warm enough to provide the conditions which the eels need for the act of spawning. So once a year the mature eels of Europe set out across the ocean on a journey of three to four thousand miles, and once a year the mature eels of eastern America go out as though to meet them. In the westernmost part of the drifting sea of sargassum weed some of them meet and intermingle—those that travel farthest west from Europe and farthest east from America. So in the central part of the vast spawning grounds of the eels, the eggs and young of two species float side by side in the water. They are so alike in appearance that only by counting with infinite care the vertebrae that make up their backbones and the plates of muscle that flank their spines can they be distinguished. Yet some, toward the end of their period of larval life, seek the coast of America and others the coast of Europe, and none ever stray to the wrong continent.