Under the Sea Wind (11 page)

In spite of his spasmodic struggles, Scomber was unable to break away from the entangling net of the tentacle hairs, and moment by moment his efforts grew feebler. Steadily and inexorably the contortions of the comb jelly's body were drawing the herring farther into the deadly sac, where digestive ferments worked with marvelous speed to convert the fish tissues, by subtle alchemy, into food for the ctenophore.

Now a dark shadow came between Scomber and the sun. A great, torpedo-shaped body loomed in the water and a cavernous mouth opened and engulfed the ctenophore, the herring, and the entrapped mackerel. A two-year-old sea trout mouthed the watery body of the comb jelly, crushed it experimentally against the roof of its mouth, and spat it out in disgust. With it went Scomber, half dead with pain and exhaustion, but freed from the grip of the dead ctenophore.

When a mass of seaweed that had been torn by the tides from some underlying bed or distant shore floated into Scomber's field of vision, he crept among the fronds and drifted with the weed for a day and a night.

That night as the schools of young mackerel swam near the surface they passed over a sea of death, for ten fathoms below them lay millions of the comb jellies in layer after layer, their bodies almost touching one another, twirling, quivering, tentacles extended and sweeping the water as far as they could reach, sweeping the water clean of every small living thing. Those few young mackerel that strayed down in the night to the level of this solid floor of comb jellies never returned, and when the paling of the water to grayness sent clouds of plankton and many young fishes hurrying down from above, they quickly met their death.

The hordes of the ctenophore Pleurobrachia extended for miles, but fortunately they lay at a deep level and few rose into the upper waters, for in this fashion the sea's creatures are often assorted in layers, one above another. But on the second night the large, lobed ctenophore Mnemiopsis roved through the upper fathoms, and wherever their green lights gleamed in the darkness some small unfortunate of the sea was in peril of its life.

Late that night came the legions of Beroë, the cannibal ctenophore, a sac of pinkish jelly large as a man's fist. The tribe of Beroë was moving out into the coastal waters on a tide of less saline water from a great bay. The sea brought them to the place where the hordes of Pleurobrachia lay twirling and quivering. The big ctenophores fell upon the small ones; they ate them by hundreds and thousands. The loose sacs of their bodies were capable of enormous distension, and scarcely had they been filled when the rapid process of digestion made space for more.

When morning came once more over the sea, the tribes of Pleurobrachia were reduced to a scattered remnant of their former numbers, but a strange stillness lay over the sea where they had been, for in these waters scarcely any living thing remained.

9
The Harbor

AS THE SUN ENTERED
the sign of the crab, Scomber arrived in the mackerel waters of New England, and with the first spring tides of the month of July he was carried into a small harbor protected from the sea by an outthrust arm of land. From many miles to the southward where the winds and the currents had carried him as a helpless larva, he had returned to the rightful home of young mackerel.

In his third month of life Scomber was more than three inches long. On the journey up the coast the heavy, unmolded lines of a larval fish had been sculptured to a torpedo-shaped body with a hint of power in the shoulders and of speed in the tapering flanks. Now he had put on the sea coat of the adult mackerel. He was clothed in scales, but they were so fine and small that he was soft as velvet to the touch. His back was a deep blue green—the color of the deep places of the sea that Scomber had not yet seen—and over the blue-green background irregular inky stripes ran from the back fin halfway down his flanks. His underparts gleamed of silver, and when the sun found him as he moved just under the surface of the sea he glittered with the colors of the rainbow.

Many young fishes lived in the harbor—cod and herring, mackerel and pollock, cunner and silverside— for the water was rich in food. Twice in every twenty-four hours the flood tide surged in from the open sea through the narrow entrance, flanked on one side by a long sea wall and on the other by a rocky point. The tides came in swiftly, with the push of a great weight of water being forced through a narrow passage, and as they swirled through the cove they carried a wealth of plankton animals mingled with the other small creatures that had been swept off the bottom or plucked from the rocks with the passage of the tide. Twice in every twenty-four hours when the clean, sharp salt water came into the harbor the young fish moved out in excitement to seize the food which the sea had brought them by way of the tide.

Among the young fish in the harbor were several thousand mackerel, who had spent their first weeks of life in many different parts of the coastal waters, but had been brought at last into the harbor by the interplay of currents and by their own wanderings. With the instinct of gregariousness already strong within them, the young mackerel quickly became one school. After the long migrations which each of them had made they were content to live day after day in the waters of the harbor, to rove up and down along the weed-grown sea wall, to feel the spreading of the water over the warm shallows of the cove, and to move out to meet the incoming flood, eager for the swarming copepods and small shrimps it never failed to bring.

The sea coming in through the narrow inlet sucked and swirled over holes scoured out of the bottom and raced in whirlpools and eddies and broke over the rocks in white rips. The tides here moved violently but uncertainly, for the time when the flood turned to the ebb or the ebb to the flood was different within and without the harbor, and what with the push and pull and shifting weight of tides from two sides the water in the inlet race was never still. The rocks of the inlet were matted with creatures that love the swiftly moving current and the ceaseless eddy, and from dark bulges and weed-grown ledges of rock they thrust out eager tentacles and jaws to seize the food animals that swarmed in the water.

Once through the inlet, the sea spread out fanwise into the cove, running swiftly along the old sea wall that formed the eastward rim of the harbor to slap against the wharf pilings and tug at the fishing boats that lay at anchor. Spreading into the western half of the harbor, the water caught the reflection of overhanging scrub oak and cedar and stirred the stones of the shore line to a soft chatter. Toward the northern rim of the cove the water spread out thinly to a sandy beach, wind-rippled above the water line and wave-rippled below.

Over the floor of much of the cove the sea poured through patches of seaweed that grew waist-high to a man. Wherever a rock lay on the bottom one of these underwater gardens grew, and as the floor of the cove was very rocky its pattern as seen from above by the gulls and the terns was mottled darkly with many weed patches. Over the sand-bottomed clearings between the seaweed thickets, the little fishes of the cove poured in restless shoals. The shining green and silver caravans wound in and out, swerving, diverging, and merging again, or at a sudden fright darting away like a shower of silver meteors.

By the same path followed by the sea Scomber came into the harbor, bumped and jostled in the tide rip, whirled and tumbled through the inlet until, seeking quiet water, he found and followed the sandy paths between the rockweed thickets. So he came to the old sea wall, on which the weeds grew in a thick-piled tapestry of browns and reds and greens. As he swam into the swift current that was sweeping the wall a small fish, dark and squat of form, darted out fiercely from the tangle of weeds, causing him to veer away in alarm. The fish was a cunner, like all of its kind a lover of wharfs and harbors. The cunner had lived its whole life in the cove and much of it in the shelter of the sea wall and the fishing wharfs, biting off the barnacles and small mussels that grew on the wharf pilings and finding amphipods and moss animals and scores of other creatures among the seaweeds of pilings and wall. Only the smallest of fish fell prey to the cunner, but by its savage rushes it frightened larger fish away from its feeding places.

Now as Scomber moved up along the wall and came to a dark, quiet place where the deep shadow of a fishing wharf fell across the water, a vast shoal of herring fry burst upon him out of the gloom. The sun struck from their bodies flashes of emerald and silver and bronze. The herring were fleeing from a young pollock that lived in the harbor, terrorizing and preying upon all the smaller fish. As they swirled around Scomber, a new instinct stirred swiftly to life in the young mackerel. He swerved, banked steeply, and seized a young herring athwart its body. His sharp teeth bit deeply into the tender tissues. He carried the herring down into deeper water, just above the swaying ribbons of the weed beds, where he worried it and tore from it several mouthfuls.

As Scomber turned away from his victim, the pollock swung back to look for any herring that might still be lingering in the shadow of the wharf. Seeing Scomber, he swerved down menacingly, but the young mackerel was now too large and swift for him to attack successfully.

The pollock was in his second summer of life, having been born in the winter seas off the Maine coast. As an inch-long fry he had been swept southward in the ocean currents and out to sea, far from his birthplace. Later, as a young fish, pitting the newfound strength of fin and muscle against the sea, he had returned to the coastal shallows, in which he had wandered far to the south of his native waters, preying in season upon the young of other fishes as they schooled close inshore. The pollock was a fierce and ravenous little fish. He could put to rout a school of several thousand cod fry, causing them to scatter in panic and to creep, half paralyzed with fear, into the shelter of seaweeds and rocks.

That morning the pollock killed and ate sixty young herring and in the afternoon, as the launce were coming out of the sand to feed in the flood tide, he played back and forth in the shallows of the cove, slashing at the sharp-nosed, silvery little fish as they emerged. The summer before, when the pollock had been a yearling, the launce had appeared to him the most fearful fish in the sea as they followed and harried the pollock fry, singling out their victims and falling upon them with the ferocity of a pike.

At sunset, Scomber and several score of other small mackerel lay in school formation in blue-gray water a fathom under the surface. For them it was one of the best feeding times of the day, with myriads of the plankton animals streaming by.

The water of the cove lay very still. It was the hour when fishes rise and push their snouts against the surface film, peering out into a strange world of arching sky; when the slow tolling of bells buoyed on distant reefs or shoals comes clear across the water; when the hosts of bottom-living things creep out of burrows and mud tubes and crawl from under stones and loose their grip on wharf pilings to rise into the upper waters.

Before the last shimmer of gold had faded from the surface, Scomber's flanks began to tingle with quick, light vibrations as the water filled with a shoal of clamworms. Nereids, the six-inch clamworm, the bronze water sprite with a scarlet girdle about his middle, rose by the hundred from holes in the sand and under shells of the cove's shallows. By day they lurked in dark recesses under rocks or among the protecting tangles of eel-grass roots, to the end that when a bottom-roving worm or a creeping amphipod moved near they might thrust out their fierce heads armed with amber beaks and seize it. No small bottom dweller could stray near the hole of a nereid and escape death in the waiting jaws.

Although by day the nereids were fierce little beasts of prey in their own domains, with the evening the males among them came forth and swam upward with their fellows to the silver ceiling of the sea. The females remained in their burrows as the night fell fast among the eel-grass roots and the shadows of the over-hanging rocks lengthened and grew black. The female nereids wore no scarlet doublets, and the appendages that sprang in a double row from the sides of their bodies were thin and weak, not flattened into swimming paddles as were those of their mates.

A shoal of the big-eyed shrimp had come into the harbor before sunset, followed by more young pollock and, until darkness fell, by a large flock of herring gulls. Although the bodies of the shrimp were transparent they appeared to the gulls like a cloud of moving red dots, for each had a row of brightly colored spots along its sides. Now in the darkness these spots glowed with a strong phosphorescence as the shrimp darted about in the waters of the cove, mingling their fires with the steely green flashes of the ctenophores— creatures that held no further terrors for the young Scomber.

But during that night many strange shapes moved into the water near the fishing wharfs, where the school of young mackerel lay in formation in the black, quiet water. A band of squid, ancestral enemies of all young fishes, had come into the cove. The squid had moved in during the spring from the high seas, their winter home, that they might feed on the hosts of schooling fishes that swarmed over the continental shelf in summer. And as the fishes spawned and their young came to shelter in the protected harbors, the squid, rapacious in their hunger, pressed in more closely to the land.

Moving against the ebbing tide the squid approached the cove where Scomber and his kind rested. They gave few signs of their coming. They moved more silently than the water that slapped about the wharf pilings. They darted, swift as arrows, through the moving tide, tracing gleaming wakes in the water.

In the chill light of early morning the squids attacked. With the speed of a living bullet the first squid darted into the midst of the school of mackerel, swerved obliquely to the right, and dealt one of the fish an unerring blow just behind the head. The little fish was killed instantly, without ever knowing or having time to fear its foe, for the beak of the squid cut out a clean triangular bite, deep into the spinal cord.