Under the Sea Wind (14 page)

11
Indian Summer of the Sea

THE SPIRIT OF THE
autumn sea was heard in the voices of the kittiwakes, or frost gulls, who began to arrive in flocks by mid-October. They whirled in thousands over the water, dropping down on arched wings to seize small fish that darted through translucent green. The kittiwakes had come southward from nesting grounds on the cliffs of the Arctic coast and the Greenland ice packs, and with them the first chill breath of winter moved over the graying sea.

There were other signs that autumn had come to the sea. Every day the flights of ocean birds, that in September had poured in thin aerial streams over the coastal waters from Greenland, Labrador, Keewatin, and Baffin Land, swelled in volume as the birds hastened to return to the sea. There were gannets and fulmars, jaegers and skuas, dovekies and phalaropes. Their flocks spread out over all the waters above the continental shelf, where the shoals of surface fishes moved and the plankton herds browsed in the sea.

The gannets were fish eaters that patterned the sky with the white crosses of their bodies as they scanned the sea for prey. Sighting it, they plunged from a hundred feet in the air, and the shock of the heavy body striking the water was broken by a cushion of air sacs under the skin. The fulmars fed on small schooling fish, squids, crustaceans, offal from fishing boats, or any other food that they could seize from the surface, being unable to dive like the gannets. The small dovekies and the phalaropes were eaters of plankton; the jaegers and the skuas lived chiefly on what they could steal from other birds, seldom fishing for themselves.

Few of these birds would see land again until spring. Now they belonged once more to the winter sea, sharing its daylight and darkness, its storms and calms, its sleet and snow and sun and fog.

The yearling mackerel who had left the harbor in late September had at first lived timidly in the open sea, lost in its vastness after the familiar conformations of the harbor. During the three months in the protected cove they had attuned their movements to the rhythms of the tides, feeding on the flood, resting on the ebb. Now the tidal sweep of the surface waters, which here in the open sea, no less than along the coast, yielded to the pull of sun and moon, was almost imperceptible to the young mackerel. For them the tides were lost in the vaster roll of waters. As they roamed the ocean, as yet unfamiliar with its paths of current and varying saltiness, they sought in vain the safe refuges of the harbor, the shadow of the fishing wharfs, the forests of rockweed. Always they must move on into green space.

Scomber and the other yearlings had grown rapidly since they left the harbor, thriving on the rich food of the open ocean. Now in the sixth month of their lives the young fish were from eight to ten inches long—the size fishermen call “tacks.” During their first weeks at sea the yearlings moved steadily north and east. In these colder waters the red copepods, their favorite food, tinged miles of ocean with the crimson of their tiny bodies. As the yearlings swung farther offshore and the days of October were marked off by the sun, they found themselves more often among large mackerel, fish of the past dozen years' spawnings. The fall was a time of vast movements of mackerel. The swing of the summer migration, which had carried many of the fish north to the Gulf of St. Lawrence and the coast of Nova Scotia, had passed its climax; flood tide had turned to ebb; and once more the fish moved south.

Slowly the summer warmth was drained from the water. The young crabs, mussels, barnacles, worms, starfish, and crustaceans of scores of species had disappeared from the plankton, for in the ocean spring and summer are the seasons of birth and youth. Only to some of the simplest creatures did the Indian summer of the sea bring a brief and flaring renewal of life, so that they multiplied a millionfold. Among these were the one-celled animals, or protozoa, small as pinpricks, which are among the chief light producers of the sea. Ceratium, the horned one—a blob of protoplasm with three grotesque prongs—sprinkled the night seas of October with silver points of light and so filled the surface waters that over vast areas the sea lay thickened and moved sluggishly under the wind. The little globes of Noctiluca—just visible to the human eye—were each aglitter with submicroscopic grains of light within themselves. During this autumnal period of their great abundance, every fish that moved where the swarms of protozoa were most dense was bathed in light; the waves that broke on reef or shoal spilled liquid fire; and every dip of a fisherman's oar was a flash of a torch in darkness.

On one such night the mackerel came upon an abandoned gill net swaying in the water. The net was buoyed at the surface by floats, and from the cork line it hung down perpendicularly, like a giant tennis net. Its meshes were large enough to allow the yearling mackerel to slip through, although larger fish would have been gilled in the twine. Tonight no fish would have tried to pass through the net, for all its meshes were hung with tiny warning lamps. Luminous protozoa and water fleas and amphipods clung to the wet twine in the dark sea, and the pulse of the ocean stirred from their bodies countless sparks of light. It was as though all the myriad lesser fry of the sea—the plants small as dust motes and the animals tinier than a sand grain—drifting from birth to death in an ocean of infinite size and endless fluidity, seized upon the meshes of the gill net as the one firm reality in their uneasy world and clung to it with protoplasmic hair and cilia, with tentacle and claw. The gill net glowed as though it had life of itself; its radiance shone out into the black sea and down into the darkness below. The light lured many small creatures to rise from deep water and gather on the meshes of the gill net, where they rested all that night in the dark, wide sea.

The mackerel nosed at the net in curiosity and as they bumped the twine all the plankton lamps flared brighter. They followed along its length for more than a mile, for it was set in sections attached one to the other. Other fish were bumping the net. Some were picking off the small sea creatures that clung to it, but none of the fish became gilled.

On moonlight nights the gleam of the moon's radiance would have dimmed the lights of the plankton animals and then many fish, failing to see the net, would have been caught in it. Knowing this, the gill netters fished only in the bright of the moon. This net had been set two weeks before, when the moon was just past the full. For several days two fishermen had tended it from their gasoline-motored launch. Then there had been a night of heavy seas with wind and rain squalls swirling across the water. Since that night the launch had not returned, for it had been wrecked on a shoal about a mile away, and the currents had brought one of its freshly splintered spars and lodged it in the net.

Left to itself, the gill net fished on night after night, and while the moon's light lasted many fish were taken. Dogfish had found them and had torn great holes in the twine as they swarmed in and took the fish. But as the moon's light waned, the plankton lamps burned brighter and no more fish were caught.

Early one morning as the mackerel school swam into the east, Scomber saw above him a long, narrow patch of shadow made by a log that was being carried in the current. He saw the glint of silvery scales from the bodies of several small fish that were moving in the edge of the shadow and swam up to investigate. The log had been part of the cargo of a lumber freighter southward bound from Nova Scotia until it was caught in a northeast gale off the coast of Cape Cod. The freighter, driven onto a shoal, had gone down with all hands, and much of the lumber had been swept ashore in the wind-driven seas. Some, as the storm abated, had been carried offshore and caught in the vast system of ocean currents that swirled clockwise around the fishing banks. The bulk of the drifting log was shelter of the only sort the open sea afforded, and so Scomber joined the little group of fishes, for a period becoming indifferent to the movements of the mackerel school and harking back in his responses to that earlier period of his life when the shadows of fishing wharfs and of anchored boats in the harbor had represented safety from the raids of gulls and squids and large, marauding fishes.

Not long after Scomber had joined the fishes under the log, half a dozen migrating terns settled on it, alighting with a sharp flapping of wings and a scramble of slender toes as they sought a foothold on the surface of the log, already slippery with algae. This was the first time the terns had paused since they had left a beach far to the north the day before. They feared to alight on the water, for although terns take their living from the sea, they are not truly of it. To them the sea was a strange element to which they must often abandon themselves for a brief and frightening instant of contact as they dived for a fish, but not a place on which they would willingly rest their fragile bodies.

The moving wave hills slid under the forward end of the log, tipped it gently skyward, and running swiftly along its length let it slide into the hollows between. As the log lurched and rolled through the sea, seven small fishes followed beneath it, and the terns rode on it like seamen on a raft. As they rested in the midst of the sea, content to let the log carry them out of their course if it would, the terns preened their feathers; they stretched their wings high above their heads, flexing tired muscles; and presently some of them fell asleep.

A little flock of petrels, or Mother Carey's chickens, came down to the water near the log, carrying themselves daintily just above the surface by a pattering of their feet and a fluttering of their wings. Their voices were the thinnest wisps of sound as they whispered over and over their names,
pitterel, pitterel.
The petrels had come down to investigate a dense mass of very small crustaceans who were feeding on the floating body of a dead squid. No sooner had the petrels assembled than a large shearwater came in a great swoop from his patrol in the sky half a mile away and with loud cries plunged in among the small birds. His excited screams brought scores of his kind hurrying to the spot, although a moment before both sky and sea had seemed almost empty of birds. The shearwaters plunged down heavily to the water, striking it with their breasts and flapping their wings. They scattered the petrels as they searched greedily for the food which had attracted the smaller birds to the spot. The first shearwater had already seized the squid, squealing defiance of his companions. Although the squid was too large to swallow whole, the shearwater struggled to gulp it down, for he feared with good reason to relax his grip for an instant.

Suddenly a harsh chattering came down the wind. A dark-brown bird swept through the upper fringes of the cloud of shearwaters. The jaeger whirled past the bird who had possession of the squid, rose into the wind, looped backward, and dropped on the bird. The shearwater plunged and thrashed air and water with his wings, trying to throw off the jaeger and swallow the squid. Suddenly a large piece of the squid fell away and was seized by the jaeger before it could strike the water. After swallowing the prize, the pirate bird sailed off across the water, while all the shearwaters milled about in angry frustration.

By late afternoon a thick mist had closed down over the sea in a blanket spread at about the ordinary cruising height of a shearwater. From golden green the surface waters paled to a gray in which there was neither warmth nor color. The absence of the sun brought the usual rise to the surface of small animals from the lower layers of the sea, and with the lesser fry of the sea came the squids and the fishes that feed on them.

The fog heralded a week of heavy weather, in which the mackerel lived far below the surface, repelled by rough seas. Though swimming deeper than usual, they were still in the upper layers of the sea, for they were passing over a deep basin hollowed out in the continental shelf. Toward the end of the week they approached the outer rim of the basin, where a chain of undersea mountains lay between the coastal waters and the deep Atlantic.

The fall storms had abated, the sun shone again, and the mackerel came up out of the deep gloom to feed once more at the surface. So they passed over a high ridge of the submarine mountain chain. The seas swept over it with a great surge and roll, although they did not break. The movement was unpleasant to the young mackerel, who turned downward to find deeper and quieter water.

A score of the yearling mackerel followed along a dark cliff, where a deep gorge had been hollowed out eons ago. Between the two walls of the undersea valley the sea poured in a green flood. The sun came down through the clear water, leaving the sheer west wall of the cliff in deep-blue shadow. Here and there it lit up a forest of bright-green weed on a shelving ledge and in the dim haze below struck a blaze of color from a spire of jagged rock.

A conger eel lived on one of the ledges of the cliff. The ledge communicated with a deep fissure in the rocks, into which the eel retreated when occasionally it was hard pressed by some enemy. Sometimes a blue shark, roving through the valley, swerved in to the ledge to attack the thick-bodied conger; or a porpoise came roving along the rock wall, hunting over all the ledges and prying into caves in the cliff for prey. But none of these enemies had been able to capture the conger.

The eel's small eyes saw the mackerel bodies glittering as the little school of fish approached the ledge. The conger gripped the wall of the cave with a muscular tail and drew back its thick body. As the mackerel came abreast of the cave, Scomber swerved out toward the wall of the cliff to investigate a small swarm of amphipods hovering over a fragment of food on a narrow ledge. Instantly the eel loosed its hold on the rock and darted into the open water with a lithe uncoiling of its body. In alarm at the sudden apparition, the mackerel school darted away with a quick acceleration, but Scomber, intent on the amphipods, failed to notice the eel until it was almost upon him.

Down along the cliff raced the two fishes—the mackerel a slim, tapered creature flashing iridescent in the sun; the eel as long as a man is tall and thick and drab as a piece of fire hose. All along the cliff small animals darted back into thickets of weeds or into small holes in the rocks at the passing of the conger, whom they recognized as an enemy. Scomber led the chase up and down along the wall and between spires of projecting rock. At last he dropped down on a weedy ledge. He startled two cunners who had been lying with fins aquiver in a sunlit patch of water just over the margin of the ledge and sent them darting in fear into shelter among the weeds.