Under the Sea Wind (13 page)

The gulls, who watched the swordfish and the school of young mackerel, now saw a great disturbance approaching from the southeast. An enormous shoal of the big-eyed shrimp was being borne along on the flooding tidal current, which was strengthened by a wind blowing landward. But the shrimp were not browsing on smaller plankton, as the gulls sometimes saw them do, nor drifting peacefully at the surface of the sea. Instead they were fleeing from something that surged through the water with them—open-mouthed and terrible. It was a school of herring, feeding on the shrimp with swift, short rushes. The shrimp were propelling themselves at frantic speed, using all the force of their swimming legs that were flattened into paddlelike blades. And as the space between pursued and pursuers lessened steadily, a shrimp, finding in its transparent body some unused remnant of strength, would fling itself clear of the water just as the jaws of a herring yawned open behind it. But the herring followed relentlessly in pursuit and, though a shrimp might leap half a dozen times into the air, rarely did it escape once a herring had marked it as its victim.

The wind- and current-borne shoal of plankton and the following fish were carried landward; toward them the mackerel swam from the northeast and the swordfish drifted from the northwest. When the fringes of the streaming cloud of plankton reached the mackerel the young fish began to snap eagerly at the shrimp, which were larger food than most of their harbor fare. In a moment, however, they found themselves in the midst of the herring shoal, and the rushes of the larger fishes frightened them and sent them hurrying into deeper water.

The gulls saw the two black fins sink beneath the surface; saw the outlines of the swordfish blur as the large fish dropped deeper into the water and moved beneath the herring. What happened next was partly hidden from the gulls by the seething water and spurting spray; but as they dropped closer and hovered with short wing beats—drawn by awareness of a kill— they could see a great dark shadow that whirled and darted and lunged in a frenzy of attack in the midst of the closely packed ranks of herring. And when the water that foamed to whiteness had grown calmer, more than a score of herring floated at the surface with broken backs and many others swam feebly and listed dizzily, as though they had been injured by glancing blows from the sword. These the great fish now captured easily in its weak-jawed mouth, but many of the dead herring it lost to the gulls, who dropped down to feast on what the swordfish had killed.

When the large fish had killed and eaten to repletion it drifted at the surface of the sea, where the sun-warmed water lulled it to drowsiness. The herring shoals sank into deeper water and the gulls ranged farther to sea, waiting and watching for what might be driven up from below.

Five fathoms down, the school of young mackerel had come upon a crimson cloud made up of millions of the small copepod, called Calanus, that were drifting in the tidal current. The mackerel fed on these red crustaceans, which were their favorite food. When the flooding current slackened, hesitated, and grew too weak to carry the plankton with it, the red feed sank into deeper water, followed by the fish. At a depth of only a hundred feet the mackerel came to a gravelly bottom. It was the flat top or plateau of a long undersea hill that curved away to the southward and met another hill coming in from the west, so that the two formed a semicircular ridge with a gully of deep water between. Because of its shape the shoal was known as the Horseshoe to the fishermen, who set their trawl lines over it for haddock, cod, and cusk, and sometimes dragged over it their cone-shaped nets or otter trawls.

As the mackerel moved across the shoal they found the bottom beginning to slope away steadily beneath them, and about fifty feet below the highest part of the shoal they came to the edge of the central gully. Three hundred feet below them lay a deep gully floored with soft, sticky mud instead of gravel and broken shell. Many fish called hake lived in the gully, hunting their food in darkness by moving just above the bottom and dragging their long, sensitive fins in the mud. In instinctive fear of deep water, the mackerel school turned and ascended the slope of the shoal. There they moved just above the bottom, in a world that was new and strange to young surface-living fish.

As the mackerel swam over the shoal they were watched by many eyes that looked up from the sand, seeing everything that passed close overhead. They were the eyes of dabs or flounders lying with a thin film of sand over their flat, grayish bodies, so that they were well concealed both from the large predatory fish who would have eaten them and from the shrimps and crabs who scurried over the bottom and were easy prey. The large mouths of the flounders were rimmed with sharp teeth and gaped open as far as the level of the eyes, marking them as occasional fish eaters, but the mackerel were too active and quick-moving to tempt them to rise from their places of concealment and give chase.

Often, as the young mackerel moved over the shoal, a large, heavily built fish with high and pointed back fins would loom up alarmingly close in the water as a haddock swept past and was enveloped again in the gloom. The haddock were very numerous on the Horseshoe, for it was rich in the shelled animals and the spiny-skinned creatures and the tube-dwelling worms that haddock eat. Many times the mackerel came upon small herds of a dozen or more haddock rooting like pigs in the bottom. They were digging out the burrowing worms that had their tunnels deep in the soft sand. As they pushed and dug with their snouts, the black shoulder patches, or “devil's marks,” and the black lateral lines stood out vividly in the dim light. The haddock continued their digging, heedless of the young mackerel that darted past with frightened flirts of their tails, for they seldom ate fish when the bottom animals were plentiful.

Once a large, batlike creature fully nine feet across rose from the sand and with a flapping of its thin body passed just above the bottom. So evil and so menacing was its appearance that the school of young mackerel went hurrying upward several fathoms, until the screen of underlying water shut out the sight of the sting ray.

Before a steep ledge of rock they came upon an unfamiliar object dangling in the water. It swayed with the movement of the tide, which ran with great force over the shoal, but it had no motion of its own, although the taste which diffused into the water from it was fishlike. Scomber nosed at the piece of split herring that was bound to a large steel hook and, as he did so, frightened away several small sculpins that had been nibbling at the bait, which was too large for so small a fish to take. Above the hook a thin, dark streak of line stretched away toward a longer line that ran horizontally through the water for a mile over the shoal. As Scomber and his companions ranged over the plateau they saw many of the baited hooks, attached by short lines to the main trawl line. On some of them large fish like haddock were caught, turning and twisting slowly on the hooks that they had swallowed. On one of the hooks was a large cusk, a powerful and heavily built fish some three feet long. The cusk had lived on the shoal, a solitary fish of its kind, spending much of its time hiding among the weeds that grew on the shelving rocks on the outer rim. The scent of the herring bait had drawn it from its hiding place and it had taken the hook. In its struggles the cusk had coiled its powerful body several times about the line.

As the little mackerel fled from the strange sight, the cusk was drawn slowly upward through the water, toward a dim shadow like that of a monster fish on the surface above. The fishermen were running their trawls, rowing from one to another of the lines. If there was a fish on the hook they dispatched it by a blow from a short club, tossing the marketable fish into the bottom of the dory and throwing the other fish back to the sea. It was now an hour after the turn of the tide to the flood, and although the lines had been down only two hours the fishermen had to take them up. On the Horseshoe the currents were very strong, and the line trawls could be set and run only on the slack of the tides.

Now the mackerel came to the seaward rim of the shoal, where the rocky wall fell away in a sheer cliff to the sea bottom some five hundred feet below. All of this outer part of the shoal was solid rock and so it withstood the press of water from the open ocean. Scomber, passing over the rim and above the intense blue water that lay below, found a narrow ledge some twenty feet below the crest of the cliff. Brown, leathery oarweed grew in the crevices and rock layers above the ledge and sent its ribbons streaming out twenty feet or more into the stronger currents that poured by the wall of rock. Scomber nosed his way in among the flat, swaying fronds of the weed and startled a lobster who was resting on the ledge, hidden from the sight of passing fish by the seaweeds. On the under side of her body the lobster carried several thousand eggs attached to the hairs of her swimming legs. The eggs would not hatch until the following spring; meanwhile the lobster was in constant danger of being found by some hungry and inquisitive eel or cunner and stripped of the eggs.

Moving along above the ledge, Scomber suddenly came upon a six-foot rock cod, a two-hundred-pound monster of his kind, who lived on the ledge among the rockweeds. The cod had grown old and very large because of his cunning. He had found the rock ledge above the deep pit of the sea years before and, knowing it instinctively for a good hunting place, he had adopted the ledge for his own, fiercely driving away the other cod. He spent much of his time lying on the ledge, which was in deep purple shadow after the sun had passed the zenith. From this lair he could move out suddenly to seize fishes as they roved along the rock wall. Many fishes met their death in his jaws, among them cunners and hook-eared sculpins, sea ravens with ragged fins, flounders and sea robins, blennies and skates.

Sight of the young mackerel roused the cod from the semitorpor in which he had lain since the last feeding time and kindled his hunger. He swung his heavy body out from the ledge and climbed steeply to the shoal. Scomber fled before him. As the young mackerel rejoined his fellows who had been lying in an updraught of current from the face of the cliff, the whole school quickened to a sense of alarm and fled away across the shoal as the dark form of the cod loomed into sight at the brink of the rock wall.

The cod roved over the Horseshoe. He fed on all the small creatures—shelled or shell-less—that lived on the bottom or moved above it. He started flounders from where they lay on the sand and sent them darting away before him; he captured small haddock, swinging through the water in swift pursuit of them; he took young fish of his own kind who had recently completed their period of surface life and dropped down to live as true cod on the bottom. He ate dozens of large sea clams, swallowing them whole. After the meats were digested he would expel the shells, although often he carried as many as a dozen of the large shells in his stomach for days, stacked in a neat pile. When he could find no more sea clams he foraged among the Irish moss that carpeted a flat ledge with a thick, spongy mat, searching for crabs hidden deep within its curling fronds.

A mile away, across the Horseshoe, the mackerel school became aware of a strange disturbance in the water. It was like nothing they had experienced in their life in the harbor, nor during that earlier period, now only the dimmest of memories, when they had drifted with the other plankton at the surface of the sea. It came to them as a heavy, thudding vibration felt with the lateral-line canals along their sensitive flanks. It was not the feel of water vibrations over a rocky reef, nor of waves on a tide rip—yet these sensations were perhaps nearest akin to it of anything the young mackerel had known.

The disturbance grew in strength, and now a group of small cod hurried by, swimming steadily toward the sea rim of the shoal. One by one, and then in groups and small schools, other fish streamed through the water: the great, batlike form of the sting ray, haddock, cod, flounders, a small halibut. All were hurrying toward the edge of the cliff and away from the disturbance that grew until it filled the water with its trembling vibration.

Something vast and dark, like a fish of monstrous and incredible size, its whole forward end a vast, gaping mouth, loomed in the water. At the sight of the cone-shaped net the school of mackerel, which had been confused and irresolute in the presence of the strange vibration and the hurrying fish, suddenly moved as one individual and whirled up and up through water that grew clearer and paler, leaving behind the gloom of the strange world of the shoal, and returning to the surface waters to which they belonged.

As for the fish of the shoal, no such instinct led them up to sun-filled waters and escape. The trawl net had been dragged the length of the Horseshoe and had already scooped up in its cavernous bag thousands of pounds of food fish, as well as quantities of basket starfish, prawns, crabs, clams, cockles, sea cucumbers, and white worm tubes.

The old cod—the cod of the ledge on the cliff side—moved just ahead of the trawl. It was not the first trawl net the monster cod had seen, nor the hundredth. Close behind him the ironbound doors that served to spread the mouth of the net were straining at the long towing cables that stretched away obliquely through the water, stretched up and up toward the vessel steaming a thousand feet in advance of the net.

And now, as the cod swam easily if ponderously above the bottom, he saw that the water before him was changing. It was deepening to the color of water that lies over a great depth. So the cod was accustomed to tell when he was nearing the ledge where he lived above the deep chasm of the sea. The doors of the otter trawl grazed his tail fin. Summoning the great strength dormant in the muscles of his body, he put on a sudden burst of speed, shot out over the blue void, and dropped with precision to his ledge twenty feet below.

Only an instant after the cod passed through the swaying brown thongs of the oarweeds and felt the smooth rock of the ledge beneath his body, the trawl pitched over the edge of the cliff and went tumbling end over end into the deep water below.