Salar the Salmon: I. Tideways

I

AT full moon the tides swirling over the Island Race carry the feelings of many rivers to the schools of fish which have come in from their feeding ledges of the deep Atlantic. The returning salmon are excited and confused. Opalescent is the moon’s glimmer under broken waters; the fish swim up from ocean’s bed and leap to meet the sparkling silver which lures and ever eludes them, and which startles them by its strange shape as they curve in air and see, during the moment of rest before falling, a thrilling liquescence of light on the waves beneath.

The Island Race is a meeting place of currents over a sunken reef, or chain of reefs. The sea is never still there. Twice every day and twice every night the tide rips over the ledges and pinnacles of the reef, streaming the seaweed under its white surges and mingling the layers of river waters in its green massive drifts.

Salmon feed in the Atlantic and return to the fresh-water rivers to spawn, and, by this arduous and pleasurable act, give of themselves to the immortality of salmon. For twr years after hatching, the samlet lives and feeds in the river, and, having survived many dangers, in the month of May drops down to the estuary in a new silver sea coat, slender little fish no longer than a man’s hand, bewildered and brave, venturing with others of its school the thickening salt waters beyond the known river water of its birth. It feels its way by the link of nerves, sensitive to the least pressure or density, along its sides from gill covers to tail. The samlet — or smolt, as it is called in its first armor of bright sea scales — feeds eagerly on the new food moving on and stirring the sandy shore of ocean, shrimps and other small crustaceans and fish. In fresh-water life it was always head to stream, poised in eddy or by stone; thus it breathed through mouth and gill, thus it waited and watched for food moving or floating before and above its eyes. In the sea it drove itself forward, a sideway sinuating movement, boring into the unknown and deepening densities of ocean. Always it was traveling farther from the shallow coast, yet following the weakening stream of fresh water beyond the last ribs of sand.

It came to a dark wall of rock from which ribbon weed was unrolling and swaying. The green water moved as in the river, but with greater press, and there the smolt waited in the race of tides, feeding on small fish which drifted past.

The tide took the smolts south of the Island, to where beyond rocks the water deepened and was quiet below the lift and roll of waves. So they began a far sea journey, their rivers forgotten. As the different schools found their food easily or hardly, so they grew quickly or slowly; thus salmon were returning to their rivers flowing into the North Atlantic at all months of the year, in varying tapers or sea mouldings. Nevertheless the salmon’s cycle of renewal is fixed in the orbits of the sun, served by the moon; its spawning time is the end of the year, when days are short and rivers run high with wild rains.

II

The Romans, sailing in their galleys between the Island and the mainland of Damnonia, knew the meeting place by the reef, and named the fish Salar — the Leaper. So shall be called the big keeper, or male, fish who sprung toward the moon from the waves of one of the biggest tides of the year on that coast, the Easter tide.

Salar was one of many thousands returning from the ocean feeding banks. As the moon at night rose fuller, he had traveled on, pausing neither to feed nor to sleep. He had come at medium ocean cruising speed, traveling about a hundred miles from one sunrise to another, faster with the currents, slower aslant them. The current guided him; his body remembered. His mouth opened forty times every minute, and each time, as his mouth closed, his gill covers opened, and red gill rakers absorbed oxygen from the water for his blood stream. In the blood stream were units of life, even as the fish was a unit in the living sea.

Salar was five years old. During the two years of river life he had grown to a weight of two ounces; three years of ocean feeding had added another twenty pounds to his weight. Growth had not been regular or uniform. In two periods of sea wandering he, with other salmon, had increased rapidly, while following herring shoals on their westward migration after spawning in the shallow waters of the north. Every day during those two periods Salar had gorged his own weight of herrings, catching them across the back as they turned from his upward rush, holding and crushing a fish in his jaws until it was dead, then swallowing it head first. Soon his shoulders were hog-curved.

Pursuing the salmon were porpoises. The porpoises hunted by swimming in formation under the salmon, which were under the herrings. They were invisible from above. The only warning of a porpoise’s approach was by a swirl and sudden varying water pressure of the upward dash. A porpoise swam up under a salmon, gathered and launched itself at the fish, turned on its back and snapped at the salmon’s belly. Porpoises fed by tearing away their bites; they seldom pursued a fish further. Being mammals, they had a sense of sport equal with the sense of feeding.

Salar had avoided death by bite of porpoise, shark, ray, and other predatory fish — nearly all fish prey on other fish — and now, five years and one month from hatching out of a round egg about three sixteenths of an inch in diameter in the headwaters of a mountain stream, he was more than a yard long, and his girth was half his length.

He was lying on the edge of a current where it dragged against an eddy or back trend of water, using one moving weight of water to buoy him against an opposing weight. He lolled there, at rest. He was nearly asleep.

III

During the time of one wave crest breaking white and re-forming again in phosphoric streaks, nearly a thousand salmon which were resting in the tail of the Island Race had broken formation and were zigzagging into the northerly sweep of the tide. Many schools had been hovering there in echelon, bound for their various rivers: very large springers, fiveand six-year-old fish; smaller spring fish with between two and three years of sea feeding; mended kelts, — spawned fish that had ‘ cleaned themselves’ after spawning,— the few survivors of the autumn run, biggest of the year, the authentic spawning run of salmon. The mended kelts would return along the way they had traveled as smolts.

A few of the schools were grilse, small fish which had been only a year in salt water, weighing from three to eight pounds, slender, silver-gray, unspotted except faintly on gill covers, with forked tail fins and gracile ‘wrists’ — the slender part of the body where it splayed into the tail fin. One of the grilse, of a school of eleven which had been skittering along the moonlit surface and sporting among the wave crests, was Gralaks, a young maiden salmon who had been born in one of the streams running down from the moor of the wild red deer, in the gravel redds above the pool called Fireplay.

When Salar came in from the Atlantic feeding banks, the rivers of that coast were low, for little rain had fallen since the New Year. He swam on without direction, followed by the school of young salmon which was making for the coast. The grilse were in familiar water, for here as smolts they had traveled the year before.

Salar, disturbed by a current of colder water into which he had swum, turned across to avoid it. Gralaks, entering the cold current a few lengths behind the big salmon, half-rolled and then thruddled up and leapt for joy. The other grilse did likewise. This was water of the Two Rivers, their mother stream, their home!

Salar cruised on slowly, alone. He rose to the surface and flopped out, falling back on his side, irritated by the sea lice clinging to his skin behind the ventral fins and on the descending taper of his back. The grilse falling made each a bubbled or seething hole, entering head first, with little splash: this was the joy leap. Salar made the smacking splash of an aimless fish.

He swam on, having crossed the layer of colder, less dense water, and came to warmer salt again. Seeing a pollack above him, he curved up and while on his side gripped it across the back. But he was not hungry; his flesh was stored full of power. He expelled the pollack from his mouth, caught it again head first, and then, after hesitation, closed his gill covers and the expulsion of water pushed it out. He swam on dismally, a lost salmon.

After four hours he had swum east nearly twenty miles; so he came into an area of strong coastal currents. They swept over jags of rocks faster than his slow cruising speed. This was the race over Dead Man’s Reef. Had Salar chanced to stray here a few hours later or earlier he would have entered the current running north and gone with it along the rocky shore and past the Morte Stone and so to the Severn Sea, where he would have found the fresh-water guides to his parent river. Now a strong race was setting south; not liking white or broken water, Salar turned into the tide, and, swimming with it, he came to sandy shallows ribbed by the periodic sway and roll of waves. His nervous liquid cells knew the rhythm of these waves; it was the same rhythm of the Severn Sea, the pulse of shallow Atlantic rollers at the full of the moon. He leapt through a wave, a gleaming impulse of joy.

The sudden appearance of a large leaping fish startled a bird that was paddling aimlessly in the foamy back drag of creaming wave tops. It hastened seawards, paddling a score of times and then ceasing through weariness. This bird had thick waterproof plumage and a long sharp beak: a guillemot. Its head, neck, and back were dark brown; its breast, which should have been white, was also dark brown, in clotted streaks of featherlets. When it had been white-breasted the guillemot had enjoyed movement in air and water; now it was cold, weary unto death; the filaments of its feathers were stuck together with oil-fuel waste cast overboard by a ship. The guillemot had swum up from its chase of fish into a floating mass of crude petroleum, and thereafter it flew no more, its skin was painful, winds and tides drifted it away from its parent Island, it starved. Three years before, it had nearly caught the little smolt Salar as he swam with his brethren in the strange currents of the Race; now Salar, leaping near it, shocked some of its remaining life from it. He swam on under the guillemot, seeing its two feet and airglistening body mingled with the reflections of feet and body. Later the bird was thrown on the beach by the surge and dragged itself about until the shore rats found it dying and feasted on it; and soon it was water, air, sand, salt again.

Salar cruised on, jumping not so often as his excitement at finding shallow water grew less. Stimulated by the vivid pulse of his blood, his parasites secured their holds between his scales and sucked that blood. He leapt and fell back on his side with a splash that set the gulls screaming in envious competition. A couple of hundred yards farther on he jumped and smacked down on the water again, on his other side.

The porpoises were following a large school of salmon making for the Two Rivers estuary. More than sixty fish were traveling fast before the black glistening-bottle-noses, which drove forward in two tiers, one layer or line diving below the other as it rose to the surface to vent. When hunting, the porpoises breathed thrice every sea mile. The lower tier swam under the salmon, gathering together again after a massed drive. Appearing suddenly from the invisibility below, the porpoises scattered the salmon in terror surfacewards, where they were pursued and chopped by the upper tier.

Behind the herd of porpoises, traveling fast, was Orca the grampus, the killer whale, blowing a jet of spray into the air as it rose to breathe every quarter of a mile.

As he was swimming under a ledge of rock above deeper water, Salar came face to face with Orca, who had just crushed a porpoise in its great teeth and swallowed the mid part of its body, leaving the head to float away on one side of its jaws, and the tail flukes on the other. Orca was eighteen feet long, and when it could get salmon to eat it ignored other creatures, except occasionally to chop them in fun.

Instantly Salar turned and shot away, but Orca was as quick, swishing forward under the salmon. Salar leapt thrice from the wide peg-toothed gape, each time nearly falling back into its jaws. He flickered and doubled, and scurried under an overhanging rock, and lay there with fast-beating heart, hidden by a fringe of bladder weed swaying gently in the tide. His head and body were in half darkness, and pressed against the rock worn concave by the sweep of sand and water at low tide. Orca tried to get him, but the head of the grampus was big and blunt; vainly it wallowed round the rock, shoving and blowing the sand about. It rose through the waves and gave a loud snorting grunt and swam out to sea, at a tangent to the direction taken by the porpoises. About a mile from the rocks it turned and swam back slowly, swinging down to the base of the ledge where the body and tail of Salar were still moulded in fear against the rock. It came to the surface, grunting angrily, and swam down once more, to swim up and jump clear of the water, showing its black fluked tail and mackerel-like shape in a wide splash. It swam away fast, throwing itself over lines of waves it crossed diagonally, in pursuit of the porpoises.

IV

An hour before midnight, in bright moonlight, a dozen crews of four men each, silently in rubber thigh boots, went down to their salmon boats moored on the sandbank at the edge of the deep water of the fairway. ‘Let’n come,’ said one, truculently, with a glance down the estuary. All the fishermen felt an angry but subdued sense of injustice against water bailiffs employed by the Board of Conservators. They believed that the laws were imposed only for the benefit of rich sportsmen, while they themselves were poor men with families to feed and clothe from what they got by fishing. Most of the fishermen ignored the limits of the season for net fishing, and fished for salmon all the year through when the weather was favorable. During the close season they fished only at night, beginning two hours before low ebb, and continuing until the returning flow made the drag on the nets too heavy.

The tide ebbed brightly; the water looked white, and yet the dark shapes of boats going down were indiscernible. There was no wind. The night was in the moon’s unreal power. Curlews and other wading birds were crying on sandbank and gravel ridge. In each boat two men pulled at the sweeps, a youth sat in the bows, the owner sat in the stern, where the net was piled.

An old man in the stern of one boat sat upright as light flicked on the starboard bow and was scattered in a loud splash. The oarsmen, dipping enough to keep way on the boat, looked over their left shoulders. Salar had leapt near the Pool Buoy, at the tail of The String, where the ebbing waters of the Two Rivers met and bickered.

On the shillets of the lower ridge known among fishermen as The Fat and the Lean, the keel shoe of the salmon boat grated; the man in the bows leapt out and held the gunwale. The boat swung round to the shore, noisy with the water streaming against its length. When the other three men had clambered out, he shortened the anchor rope in the ring and carried the anchor a little way up the slope of the ridge, putting it down carefully lest the clank of metal be heard over the water. The tide was too strong for shooting a draft, and they waited there quietly, talking in low voices and sometimes standing silent to listen for sound of the water bailiffs’ motorboat.

Soon the boat was heeling over, and they shoved it down into the lapsing water. Splash! ‘My Gor, that was a master fish — thirty pound by the noise of’n.’

‘Shall us shoot, Feyther?’

‘Bide a bit; ’tes rinning too strong yet.’

They waited. The youth struck a match to light a cigarette.

‘Put’n out, I tel! ’eel’

‘Aw, I ban’t afraid of no bliddy bailies.’

‘Nor be us, but us wants fish tonight, don’t us? Tes no sense hadvertisin’ us be yurr, be ut?’

Other boats wore going down, gliding fast on the ebb and in silence but for the occasional squeak of sweeps in tholepins. A flight of shelduck went by overhead, wind sibilating in a wing where a quill had dropped. Far away down the estuary the piping and trilling of birds running and feeding by the wave-lap line were changing to cries of alarm as the first boats reached their stances on shore and sandbank.

In lessening tide the boat put out, leaving one man on the ridge. He took a turn of the rope round back and shoulder, trod a firm stand, and gripped the rope in his hands, watching the boat drifting down and across, shedding net from stern as it glided into luminous obscurity. It was a flake of darkest shadow in the moon dazzle on the water, and then was lost to sight. He braced himself and affirmed his footholds, to take the weight of water on rope and net which hung aslant in the tide between head rope buoyed with corks and heel rope weighted with lead. The boat turned into the tide, and he leaned against the curved drag of the net with its two-inch mesh stipulated by Conservancy by-law for the escape of smolts.

He heard the noise of the boat touching uptide, the others leaping out, the clank of anchor, and one of his mates hastening to help him. Together they took strain on the rope and waited for the others, who were trudging down to meet them with the other rope. The arc cast by the two hundred yards of net was now an elongated and narrowing bulge which must be drawn in as quickly as possible before any fish found a way out by the space between ropes and the ends of the net.

They hauled slowly, steadily, hand under hand, leaning back against the scarcely yielding ropes, pulling against an area of water restrained by eight hundred thousand meshes. The two coconut-fibre ropes came in four yards a minute. Each rope ended at a wooden stretcher, to which were tied the head rope and the heel rope. At every concerted tug less water was restrained, and the net came in less slowly. Now the skipper became more anxious, and ordered two of the crew to haul at the heel rope to foreshorten the net under any fish which might be dashing about the enclosed water. The men at the heel rope hauled rapidly, bending down, their hands near the gravel to keep the bottom of the net as low as possible. The seine, or purse net, came in swiftly, seeming to hiss in the water. There was nothing in the net.

The fishermen showed no disappointment. They had been wet in sea labor since boyhood. The youth fetched the boat and they shook small crabs and seaweed from the net and repiled it in the stern of the boat. After a few minutes’ rest they shot another draft, and hauled in again, bending low as before when the seine came fast and easy near the top of the water, which was asplash and glinting; they lifted the seine and ran back a few paces, while the youth dropped on hands and knees, and gripping a fish by the wrist, his thumb by the tail fin, lugged it out and struck vigorously the base of its head with a wooden tholepin. It ceased to slap the gravel, and lay still. He killed four other fish, three of them grilse. A good draft! One twenty-pounder, another fifteen, and the others between five and six pounds apiece.

The fish were flung in the well of the boat, and covered with sacks.

After a while of slack water, the tide began to flow, and with the flow came Salar and the school of grilse led by Gralaks, forerunners of larger schools to arrive from the feeding banks in later spring. Three of the grilse were gone, taken in the net.

Salar and the eight grilse swam a little ahead of the flow, to breathe and control the current. Suddenly alarmed by a fearful apparition, Salar shot up and across, breaking the water with a bulging splash and a glittering ream or traveling wavelet. Gralaks also leapt, and the watchers saw the arrowy glints of their reaming. They saw too a broader, slower flash, and thought this to be the roll of an immense fish. The boat was already afloat, the rowers waiting at the sweeps, the fourth man holding the wooden stretcher. Immediately the boat put out, the rowers bending the sweeps with full strength, across the tide, then with it, and back across; they shipped sweeps and ran ashore; the skipper threw out the anchor and hastened to help the fourth man. They heard and saw splashing, and imagined a great haul, bigger than the record of seventeen fish a few years before. As they hauled he exhorted the heel-rope men in a voice hoarsely earnest to pull faster, and together. Although only half the net was in, they could feel the jags on the walls as fish struck them trying to escape.

Then a shout from the direction of the Pool told them of danger: the water bailiffs had landed on the ridge. The fishermen did not fear being fined if caught and convicted; they dreaded confiscation and destruction of their net, and their license for the season, soon to open, not being renewed.

Glancing over his left shoulder, the skipper saw several moving spots of light from electric torches, and realized the bailies were there in force. He knew they could not search without a warrant, and he could plead he was rough-fish catching; but if the bailies arrived while they were giving salmon a dap on the head, they would have all the proof needed. Gladly he heard the sound of raised voices up along, and hoarsely exhorted the others to get the seine in and away. He began to speak rapidly to himself: wife and children needing food and covering, one law for the rich, another for the poor, but ‘if they bailies corned near, they’d find what they was n’t looking for.’ An extraordinary plunging and beating of the water inside the distorted horseshoe of corks made him pause in his mental tirade, and haul the stronger on his rope. He realized something other than fish was in the seine; the tugging plunges against the net made him anxious lest it be broken.

The shouts from the upper end of the Ridge had ceased; the water bailiffs, having come upon a boat with net piled for a draft, were moving down, hoping to find one in the act of taking salmon. ‘’Errin’ ’ogs!‘ cried the skipper, with a roar of disgust. ‘Fetch the boat,’ he ordered his son. Seven porpoises were clashing and threshing about in the seine. Gralaks was there, too, her sides and shoulders scored crisscross where she had driven against the net and broken her scales.

‘Quick! Into the boat!’ cried the skipper, shouting as a spot of approaching light wavered and dazzled his eyes an instant. Holding the head rope, he shoved off and scrambled aboard. ‘Pull like something!’ he cried, taking a turn with the head rope round a thwart, and hauling over the stern. The skipper did not swear — he was Chapel through and through, as he occasionally informed those who did. Several torchlights were flashing as the water bailiffs hastened over the gravel bank, wary of falling into pits left by the barges digging gravel.

‘Make’n spark!’ cried the skipper, and the rowers grunted with their efforts. Then, seeing that the net was safe, the skipper bellowed indignantly, ‘Why don’t you chaps stop they witherin’ ’errin ’ogs — can you answer me that, tho’?’

The youth wanted to leave the net trailing in the water, to taunt the bailies into giving chase, and then clog the screw of their motorboat with the net. ‘Tidden no sense,’ grunted his father, who was in shape not dissimilar from a Meerschwein. ‘Besides, the tide be flowin’; if’t were ebbin’, might be some use; ’t would serve the bailies right to be drove out to sea and wrecked.’

The net was taken aboard, with one small porpoise, which was soon battered to death, and the boat made for the sandbank below the sea wall of the village.

There they were met by the skipper’s wife, who whispered in a voice deep and hoarse that two bailies with policemen were wailing by the slip, up which they must walk to get home. ‘They witherin’ bailies, they deserve to get their boat rammed and zunk below ’em,’ declared the skipper, in disgust.

The salmon were taken from under the sack. While the two hands and her son lit cigarettes at a discreet distance, the skipper’s wife removed a wide black skirt much speckled with dried fish scales. Rapidly the skipper threaded a stout cord through gill and mouth of each salmon. The cord was then tied round the wife’s waist, after which the skirt, by a feat of balancing made more difficult on the wet and infirm sand, was put on and fastened. Having anchored the boat, and carrying the oars, the crew went slowly toward the slip leading to the quay.

‘What have you got in that bag?’ one of the waiting water bailiffs demanded, pointing to the bulging sack on the skipper’s shoulder.

‘My own property.’

‘Of what nature?’

“Og.’

‘I don’t want no sauce,’ threatened the bailiff. ‘I have a constable here. What’s in that sack?’

‘ ’Og, I tell ’ee.’

‘Turn it out.’

‘You can’t make me. Where’s your search warrant?’

‘I know what you’ve got. You’re caught this time. Do you want me to go to a magistrate and get a warrant, when you’ll lose your renewal of license? I’ll ask you once more, what have you got in that sack?’

Og, I tells ee. For a bailie’s breakfast, if you likes.’

‘Turn it out..’

‘ If you promises to fry it for tomorrow’s breakfast.’

‘I promise nothing.’

‘Why don’t you try and search me?’ screeched the old woman, amidst the laughter.

‘For the last time I ask you, will you turn out that bag?’ shouted the bailiff. ‘Or shall I give you in charge?’

‘Aw, don’t ’ee vex yourself so,’ said the skipper, in a gentle voice. ‘Here’s an Easter egg for ’ee,’ and he dropped the heavy weight and tugged the sack from the blubbery mass.

‘It’s yours, Nosey Parker,’yelled the fishwife, as she staggered away, holding the arm of her husband and laughing stridently.

V

Salar knew now the meaning of a net, and he avoided those places in the estuary where strange enemy dropped slowly down the water, behind a more fearsome enemy, in shape between bird and seal, which moved with dip of wings or flippers along the surface. Whenever he saw a boat he sped away down the current, seeking a depth of pit or hole from which he watched while resting on the bottom.

A boat sailed slowly up The String, in it a fisherman holding tiller tucked between elbow and side. He held a line in his hand. In his other hand he held a rope, attached to a sail shaking in the wind abeam. On the submerged line was a lead weight, below it a length of catgut, and at the end of the gut was a hook half concealed by an artificial worm of red rubber. A nickel spinner just above the shank of the hook made a bright blur in the water, behind which the worm wriggled. The line slanted in the tide.

Salar did not see the boat until it was nearly over him, then he sped up against the current, turned, and went down to the bed of the Pool, with other salmon whose heads, fins, and flanks had been hurt in escape from nets.

While Salar was watching the lure, something was watching Salar. This was an enemy he had never seen in his life before — Petromyzon, the stone sucker. The Greeks were kind when they gave its family that name. Petromyzon was a relative of the hagfishes, creatures with a low organization of skeleton. Petromyzon was like an eel, or a worm, a huge torpid worm. Its body resembled the artificial rubber thing escaped from the fisherman’s hook, magnified, discolored, sunk in living slovenliness, animated waste product of the spirit of life. Petromyzon had a scaleless body and a sucker mouth thorny with teeth for rasping off scales and flesh and drawing the blood of fishes. It had no jaws or ribs. It had no real bone in its body. It drew breathing life through seven branchial openings instead of gills. It had a single nostril at the top of its head. Now, stuck to a stone on which grew bladder weed hiding its head, Petromyzon was waiting to sneak up on Salar and clamp itself to the richness of his body.

Salar lay where the moving fronds of weed stroked the azure-white skin of his belly. Within his body, and under the forepart of his backbone, was a cavity or air bladder which automatically adjusted itself to the lift of the water: thus he was able to continue floating a few inches above the stone, for the pleasing sensation of being touched by the brown seaweed. Every moment the pockets and eddies of the tide were changing with the altering set of currents. Automatically the salmon shifted with them.

Petromyzon now loosened its ringed mouth on the stone, and slithered toward Salar. The thick soft lips of the sucker mouth began to work over the thornlike teeth. The expressionless eyes were fixed on the salmon’s flank. Slowly it moved. Having no swimming bladder, it could only rise in water by muscular exertion; it quivered, seeming to shorten and thicken, and launched itself at Salar, rearing its head to strike at the scaled side, and instantly clamped itself there.

Salar’s acceleration up the Pool, his turn and zigzagging dash down the tide, made other salmon leave their resting places and sink together to the bottom, whence they could observe the widest area of water above them. In fear Salar leapt out of the water, causing the boatman holding the line with the red rubber bait to sit upright and puff rapidly at his cold pipe. ‘‘ T was the largest Zeven-Ole I ivver zeed,’ he told them later in the Royal George.

Salar could not shake off Petromyzon. The lamprey’s mouth was stuck firmly to his left side below the medial line of nerves, forward of the ventral fins. Indifferent to the salmon’s slipping and turning rushes, to his rolling staggers as he changed from one tide pressure to another, Petromyzon sucked the scales closer to his teeth, and began to rasp away and swallow skin and curd and flesh. He drew blood, and fed contentedly.

Salar rested on the bed of the Pool, exhausted, gulping water irregularly, for his fast-beating heart. In front of him the iron links of the Pool Buoy chain turned and re-turned slowly as the buoy above wallowed twisting in the combined weights of two tides. He could see the movements of the hind part of his enemy’s body as Petromyzon allowed itself to be borne on the moving water, holding securely with its mouth. Starting forward with pain, Salar rolled and tried to scrape off the lamprey against a stone. Although the salmon weighed twenty pounds, his body had no weight in water; so Petromyzon continued to feed undisturbed. Suddenly frenzied by the feeling of lost freedom, Salar swam up to the surface and leapt with all his strength, deliberately to fall back on his side and knock away his enemy. Petromyzon, used since its earliest life to irregular motion when attached to its hosts, most of which were quitted only when they had died, endured the buffeting and sucked the harder.

After slack water, and the returning flow, Salar became accustomed to the lamprey. The pain had gone, and he had no more fear of it. Petromyzon was a hindrance, something to be gotten rid of by leaping and by scraping against stones. He was used to the extra drag, to the queerness of moving aslant when he meant to swim straight. In the tide’s swilling murkiness he drifted, past lessening sandbanks and muddy glidders, a large quiet fish, as though unseeing among smaller coarse fish feeding eagerly. He moved slowly through the water, scarcely overtaking clusters of seaweed loose in the tide.

Higher up the estuary swam Salar, quiet among a drove of bass turning on their sides amidst seaweed, crabs, flatfish, and bubbles streaming from mudholes of cockles and ragworms. The tide poured into a deep pool with a rocky bottom and here the current divided, to flow up a creek which was the mouth of a small river.

A small boat was riding at anchor in the pool. As Salar approached the boat the fisherman was pulling in his line, with its two score of hooks. Flatfish, pollack, and bass were hooked. One of the bass was but a loose bag of skin and bones attached to a head.

This was the work of Myxine, the glutinous hag of the Two Rivers. The hag was a relation of Petromyzon, but one which lampreys avoided. Myxine’s eyes were sunk beneath her skin, deep in the muscles of her head. They were without lenses. Myxine did not need sight, for much of a hag’s life is spent within the bodies of fishes. While the bass had been struggling on a hook of the night line, Myxine had fastened to it and bored a way inside, eating steadily hour after hour until, gorged, she lay at rest in a bag of bones and water. The water poured out as the fisherman lifted it up, and the hag’s head, with whiskerlike barbels, looked out of the bass’s mouth.

The fisherman had never seen such a horrid sight before. With a religious exclamation he dropped it in the boat, and Myxine slithered out of the hollow corpse. He picked the hag up to knock it on the gunwale, but was horrified to find that it was turning itself into a length of slime in his hand.

‘Ah, git out, you bissley bigger [beastly beggar] you,’ muttered the fisherman, shaking the long hair grown to hide his stumps of ears — they had been frozen off during a blizzard aboard a whaler in his youth — as he flung the glutinous hag into the sea.

Myxine swam down to the bed of the pool, and rested there. The act of exuding slime from the thread cells along her body was additionally exhausting, and the hag lay still, unseen by Salar as he moved slowly in the wedge of tranquil water at the division of currents. Petromyzon waved indolently at his side. Salar had no desire to go up with the tide. His bounding sea vitality had shrunk within him through fear and the draining wound in his flank. He lay inert on a rock. Half his length away lay Myxine.

The hag saw the waving tail of Petromyzon, and the sight made her teeth work. She got under the lamprey’s tail, and fastened her sucker there. Petromyzon lashed, but the hag stuck. In fear Salar started forward. By the time he had reached the sunken limekiln by the bend of the sea wall half a mile away, Myxine’s head was inside Petromyzon’s belly.

Salar waited in an eddy beside the rounded broken wall of the kiln, until the rising tide swept through the eddy and he went on, feeling strangely light.

By the Long Bridge of the port three miles distant he leapt, and a boy on the quay saw what looked like a red poppy on the silver flank. Less than three months later, all of Petromyzon was mud again.

(To be continued)