Under the Sea Wind Page 9

  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.

  Almost in the same moment half a dozen other squid darted into the mackerel school, but the rush of the first attacker had sent the young fish scattering in all directions. Now the pursuit began, the squid darting among the milling fish, the mackerel dashing and banking and twisting and turning—eluding only by the utmost skill and effort the bottle shapes of the squ
ids that loomed up at terrific speed in the water, tentacles outstretched and grasping.

  After the first mad melee Scomber had dashed into the shadow of the wharf and, racing up along the sea wall, had taken shelter under the weeds that grew there. Many other mackerel had done likewise or had darted out into the open water of the cove, scattering widely. Finding that the mackerel had dispersed, the squid dropped to the bottom of the harbor, where their body pigments underwent a subtle change, causing them to match the color of the underlying sand. Soon even the sharpest-eyed fish could not have detected an enemy anywhere about.

  The mackerel began to forget their fears and to wander back singly and in little groups to the wharfs where they had been lying, waiting for the turn of the tide. As one by one they swam over the place where a squid lay in motionless invisibility, what had appeared a water-mounded ridge of sand suddenly whirled up from the bottom and seized them.

  By these tactics the squid harassed the mackerel all the morning, and only those that remained hidden in the seaweeds of the stone wall were safe from the threat of sudden death.

  At the full of the tide the waters of the cove seethed with movement as droves of sand eels or launce raced shoreward. The launce were pursued by a small band of whiting—slender but muscular fish about as long as a man’s forearm—with flashing silver underparts and teeth sharp as lancets. The whiting had fallen upon the launce as they emerged from the sand of a shoal two miles to seaward of the cove, to feed on the copepods that the tide was bringing in from farther at sea. The launce fled in terror, not seaward against the tide where they might have found safety by scattering, but with the tide into the cove and into shoaling waters.

  As the launce fled, the whiting harried them, driving back and forth across the thousands of slim, finger-long fish. Scomber, lying a foot under water with fins aquiver, felt with suddenly taut nerves the thin staccato vibrations of the racing launce and the heavier roll of the pursuing whiting. The waters about him filled with hurrying shadows. Scomber darted into the shadow of the wharf and hid in the weeds of one of the pilings. Once he would have feared the launce. Now he was as large as they, but the waters were filled with warnings of a hunt and of danger.

  As the launce drove deeper into the cove the water began to thin away beneath them, but in their overmastering terror of the whiting they failed to heed the warnings of shoaling water and stranded by hundreds and thousands. The gulls that had followed in expectantly from outside the inlet, sensing what was happening in the seething water below, mewed and squealed and laughed their excitement when they saw the sandy flats beneath them turn to silver. Black-headed laughing gulls and gray-mantled herring gulls came down with flapping wings, plunging shoulder-deep into the water and seizing the launce, screaming threats to the newcomers that dropped down to the feast, although there was an abundance for all.

  As the launce piled up inches deep on the shelving beach, the whiting, whirling after in reckless pursuit, drove up on the beach by the dozen, and as the water had now turned to the ebb there was no means of escape. When the tide withdrew the beach was silvered for half a mile with the bodies of the launce, and among them were scattered the larger forms of their pursuers. The squid had followed into the shallow water, attracted by the slaughter, and many of them had stranded while feeding on the hapless launce. Now gulls and fish crows gathered from miles around and, with the crabs and beach fleas, ate of the fish. During that night, wind and tide combined to sweep the beach clean.

  The next morning a small bird in bold black and white and ruddy plumage alighted on one of the rocks of the harbor inlet and sat, dozing and dreaming, through fully a quarter of the tide rise before it could rouse itself to pick off and eat some of the small black snails that clung to the rock. The bird was exhausted from fighting the west winds that had threatened to blow it out to sea as it came down the coast from far to the north. It was a ruddy turnstone—one of the first of the great fall flights.

  And now as July gave way to August the warm air moving in on the west wind met the cool sea air, and the harbor lay under a dense, dripping fog. From the point a mile down the coast the reedy voice of the foghorn cut through the mist day and night, and bells rang on all the reefs and shoals. For seven days no throb of boat engines came down through the water to the fish in the harbor, for nothing moved over the sea except the gulls, who knew their way in the fog, and the herons, who came to perch on the wharf pilings, guided by the scent of fish in the bait compartments of the boats.

  Then the fog passed, and days of blue sky and bluer water followed swiftly one upon another. On these days the flocks of shore birds hurried over the harbor like gusts of autumn leaves, and like wind-blown leaves their passing betokened the end of summer.

  But if knowledge of approaching fall came early to the creatures of shore and marsh, it was slow to awaken in the water world of the cove. When it came it was brought by the southwest wind. Toward the end of August an onshore blow brought rain out of a sky that was grayer than the leaden surface of the harbor. For two days and nights the southwest storm continued, with slanting sheets of water piercing the surface film of the sea with an endless barrage of drops. The rain beat down the incoming and the outgoing tides, so that they rose and lapsed in a waveless surge of water. The flood tides brimmed to the top of the sea wall and swamped many of the fishing boats, so that they wallowed to the bottom, attracting the fishes who nosed curiously at the strange shapes. All the fish lay deeper under water, and the terns huddled, drenched and disconsolate, on the rocks of the harbor inlet, for with the rain pelting down into the gray opacity of the water they could not see to fish. Unlike the terns, the gulls feasted, for the high storm tides had brought into the harbor much food in the form of injured sea animals and refuse.

  After the first day of storm many weeds with narrow, toothed leaves and air vessels like clusters of berries began to appear in the cove, and on the following day the water was filled with floating sargassum weed, which the wind had blown in from the Gulf Stream. Among the fronds of the weed were small and brightly colored fishes that had been carried by the Stream from far to the southward, beginning their long journey as larvae in tropical waters. They had been sheltered by the gulfweed, during the many days and nights of the northward journey, and when the wind blew the weed out of the blue river of warm tropical water the fish accompanied it to the coastal shallows. There most of them would remain, until the coming of unaccustomed cold should abruptly end their lives.

  After the storm the waters of the flood tides came in laden with the moon jelly, Aurelia. It was a fateful journey for the beautiful white jellyfish. For a season the ocean had carried them, raised from the algae-grown rocks and shells of the shore line, where they had begun life as small, plantlike things clinging to stones throughout the winter. In the spring there had budded off from these small creatures a series of flattened discs. These had been quickly transformed into tiny swimming bells, and these to the adult stages. They had lived at the surface when the sun shone and the wind held its breath, often gathering in winding columns miles in length at the meeting places of two currents, where their forms were seen by the gulls, the terns, and the gannets, shimmering in opalescent splendor.

  After a time the jellyfish had matured their eggs and then they carried the young in the folds and margins of the tissues that hung like empty sleeves from the under side of the disc. Perhaps the spawning effort had left them weakened, for with bloated tissues and air-inflated egg sacs many of them capsized and floated helplessly in the seas of the late summer. These were set upon by swarms of small crustaceans with hungry jaws and further weakened or destroyed.

  Now the southwest storm, kneading the waters deeply, had found the moon jellies. Rough waters seized them and hurried them shoreward. In the jostling and tumbling many tentacles were lost and delicate tissues torn. Every flood tide brought more of the pale discs of the jellyfish into the harbor and cast them up on the rocks of the shore line. Here their battered bodies became
once more a part of the sea, but not until the larvae held within their arms had been liberated into the shallow waters. Thus the cycle came to the full, for even as the substance of the moon jellies was reclaimed for other uses by the sea, the young larvae were settling down for the winter on the stones and shells, so that in the spring a new swarm of tiny bells might rise and float away.

  10

  Seaways

  NOW THE HOURS OF darkness were as many as the hours of daylight; the sun passed through the constellation of the scales; and September’s moon waned to a thin ghost of itself. And as the tides poured through the inlet race into the harbor, creaming with white ripplings over the rocks, and lapsed again to the sea from which they came, they carried away day after day more of the small fish of the harbor. So there came a night when the flood tide stirred in the young mackerel Scomber a strange uneasiness, and on that night the ebb tide, running to the sea, drew him with it. With him went many of the young mackerel who had spent the late summer in the harbor, a school of several hundred cleanly molded young fish each longer than a man’s hand. Now they had left behind the pleasant life of the harbor; until death should claim them their world would be open sea.

  In the inlet race the mackerel yielded to the eddies and were carried in a swift rush of water past the rocks of the harbor mouth. The water was sharply salt and clean and cold; in its scramble over rocks and shoals it had burst so many rents and tatters in its surface film that it was heavily charged with oxygen. Through this water the mackerel darted in exhilaration, aquiver from their snouts to their last tail finlets—ready and eager for the new life that awaited them. In the inlet the mackerel passed the dark forms of sea bass ranged in the tide, waiting to snap up small crustaceans and sandworms that the water plucked from the rocks or washed out of the holes in the bottom of the channel. The mackerel fled the dark shapes, streaking in swift silver flashes beyond the surging channel where the bass lay, heads into the tide.