IV: THE MARAUDERSBorne on a gentle breeze, a large crane-fly comes sailing out of the wood. It likes to cool its long legs, as it flies, by trailing them along the surface of the water. The whirligigs are after it, but it easily avoids them. Then comes a sudden surprise: a fish pops up its mouth, and closes its scissor-jaws with a snap on the insect’s legs, and it disappears in the centre of a rocking series of rings.The lake is perfectly calm, its green-black surface smooth and shining, and full of drifting summer clouds. The reeds are reflected in it and look double their height, and the trees mirror their branches there, seeming twice as leafy; and a red house with a white flagstaff on one of the banks becomes quite a little submarine palace.More crane-flies arrive, and circle after circle breaks the stillness of the water, just as mole-hills break the uniform smoothness of the meadow, as fishes’ mouths dart up by the score side by side.It is in one of the valleys in the submarine mountainous region that this shoal of thousands of bleak lies. It covers the area of a market-place, and makes the water alive for fathoms down.On the one side rises the forest of weed, like a fir-forest on a Norwegian mountain; on the other the thick green water-grass waves and bends like the corn on some fertile plain in Hungary. In front and behind, the valley winds on between the hill-sides until it widens out and finally loses itself in the barren, sandy desert.Suddenly, at the end of the neighbouring valley, the water seethes and foams. It is cleft incessantly from bottom to surface, bubbles rise and whirlpools are formed, and a long strip of lake foams and spurts.It is not like a single large animal darting forward with rapidly twisting tail, and leaving a wake and waves behind it; but a general effervescence that makes the depths gleam with millions of scales.It is the perch, the marauders of the lake, on a hunting expedition!They go together in a large company, like soldiers in an army, rows of them above, beside, and behind one another. There are hundreds upon hundreds of them, and yet a single unit.With their uppermost layer only a couple of inches below the surface of the water they hasten on. Then all turn at once, changing from the long, narrow marching column into compact formation. A fresh signal, inaudible, imperceptible to all but themselves, and once more, in a trice, the narrow, smoothly-gliding hunting-column is reformed.Just as they twist and turn in the horizontal plane, so do they in the vertical. They go suddenly and headlong from the surface to the depths, spinning out from their compact mass a long, living thread.And the thread becomes longer and longer, and thinner and thinner, while they pass through one of the narrows in the submarine mountainous region.It is the shoal of bleak they are after. Now they are in the valley where it lies.The lively little freshwater herring as yet suspect no danger; they are in constant motion, occupied in snapping up the fallen, half-drowned insects. Noses are pushed up, and little thimble-like mouths open; the water streams in, and with it the food. An eager interchange from bottom to surface goes on; for when the upper layer is satiated, it likes to enjoy its feeling of well-being in peace, until voracity once more makes them all rivals.The splash of the waves on the surface lifts the gluttons up and down, while the ground-swell rocks the satiated to rest.The perch have quickened their pace; involuntarily the speed is increased; they already scent their prey.Foremost of the company, with a dark-golden, high-backed leader at their head, swim a couple of hundred of the finest perch. They are at their strongest age, and in best possible condition, suffering neither from too great a weight of fatness, nor from the nervous lassitude of insufficient nourishment. They lead, and with frolicsome eagerness push past one another, so as to be the first to arrive.After them comes the great mass of the horde, big, heavily-laden craft, their round backs and swelling bellies testifying to their success in their toil for material needs. There are perch among them of half an arm’s-length, and the thickness of the biggest of wrists. Sheaves of silvery-gleaming rays flicker far out in their wake.The rest of the fierce horde are large and small mingled--hundreds of perch of half-a-pound’s weight, and rank upon rank of others well over two pounds.For the present the whole flock keeps to the bottom, darting along with dorsal fin erect, the stiff spines bristling menacingly. It is as well to have bayonets fixed in case of the sudden appearance of a pike.All at once the van slips away from the rest, and the latter have to exert themselves to catch up, twisting and turning their tails, and unfurling the stiff sail of their dorsal fin. There must be nothing now to check their speed; fair-weather sailing is over, and the privateering expedition has begun.The certainty of booty fills them all.The vanguard has led the marauders well; they have comeundertheir prey, and now shoot up among the unfortunate, unsuspecting bleak. All order among the assailants instantly ceases, and each member thinks only of its own mouth, and cares for nothing but getting it filled.Like yellow flashes of water-lightning the perch dart into the shoal of little fish, and like grain among a flock of chickens, masses of bleak disappear into their mouths. They kill and devour--and it will be still worse when the rear-guard comes up.Now they arrive, and the alarm in the swarm of bleak below spreads with magical swiftness to the upper layers, where the bewildered little creatures make off at full speed. Gleam after gleam flashes up as the little shining fish, uncertain of their way, twist and turn about. Each makes itself as long and thin as it can, so as to show as little as possible, and disappear, as it were, in the water.But now the fierce horde becomes still fiercer. The rear-guard overtakes the fugitives and cuts off their retreat; and smack after smack is heard after their charge.The swarm of bleak scatters in wild panic. Thousands of them, in their terror, make for the surface, leaping into the air like jets from a fountain. They tumble over one another and try in their bewilderment which can leap highest and farthest. They rise like flying-fish out of the water with a flash, and once more disappear with a splash into the water. There is a splash when they rise, and a splash when they again reach the surface of the water; making a sound like the falling of torrents of rain.Hell is beneath them in the water! The yellow devils not only menace them from the side; they come upon them from all directions. When they descend in crowds from their flight into the air, they grow stiff with terror on finding themselves face to face with great, amber eyes that seem starting out of their sockets to go greedily hunting on their own account. Then a mouth opens, shoots out a pair of concertina-like lips, and changes into a funnel; and the poor little fish disappear into a chasm, like threads into a vacuum cleaner.Above the spot a cloud of terns is circling. They fly low with half-extended legs and drooping wings, ready to dart down. Sometimes they make a catch, sometimes miss their aim, but have the good fortune to take a fish that inadvertently appears close by; indeed the bleak often leap straight into the birds’ open beak. The birds hold them at all sorts of angles in their beak, and fly away with them, shrieking and screaming, pursued by their fellows.Poor little bleak! they were so pretty to look at. An emerald green colour extended from the back right over the head and nose; and the rims of their eyes when they blinked could sparkle and shine like the gem itself. Their shining breast was whiter than a swan’s, and their plump sides gleamed and sparkled like ice under a wintry moon.But from the time they left their Creator’s hand they were intended to serve as food forothers.A boat lay anchored a few hundred yards off. In it was an elderly man.An angler this. He had been out since early morning, and had a delightful day.Not a single bite. But what did that matter?He was lying now at the bottom of the boat, dreaming.He was a regular visitor to the lake. His ancestors’ love of a free, out-of-door life had entered into his blood.It is well known that it takes three generations to make a gentleman; but it would take three times as many to create, out of a race that ever since the morning of time had lived out of doors, a generation that did not care to handle either gun or rod.In his youth his gun had been his best friend; but the chase demands much of legs and muscles and heart. When a man is no longer in his prime, he should beware of paying ardent court to Dame Diana. In her suite--it is useless to deny it--the old man is seldom looked upon with favour: he has had his day. But Father Neptune clasps him rapturously in his wet embrace, and sets the fish around his boat leaping and playing.It was thus in his later years that his fishing rod had become the old man’s joy and companion.Season after season he made his weekly journey from town by rail, and then drove out to the lake. He fished in the good old-fashioned way, talked very little, and was always alone in the boat.The weather to-day, from a fisherman’s point of view, is the worst possible. The July sun is shining hotly, and sends its beams deep down into the water.The lake slumbers. There is a bottle-green hue above the deep water, and a lilac shade in the shallows; but over the sandy bottom the colour is drab. Far off a flock of wild ducks rising raise some little, gentle waves, that look so blue, so blue!The angler, who is a big, sturdy man with large, black-rimmed spectacles upon his voluminous nose, is in his customary fishing-dress--an old straw hat with an elastic under the chin, his coat off, and no collar, on his legs a pair of thick, yellowish brown moleskin trousers, his feet in a pair of felt shoes, lined with straw.He generally stays all day, and it is still far from evening.He is now lying outstretched in midday drowsiness, enjoying the great peace that rests on the lake. He has wound the ends of his lines round his wrist; he waits patiently, and if towards evening he is fortunate enough to haul in a pike, he will be filled with a quiet, intense joy.Suddenly he awakes with a start. He hears a rushing sound like that of the paddles of a distant steamer striking and tearing the water; he sees the terns flocking, and the surface of the water broken again and again by bleak leaping high into the air. He takes up his anchor, and rows up until he hears the smack, smack of the greedy perch all round him, and knows he is in the middle of the whirlpool of fish.He gets four lines clear, and has enough to do in throwing them out and pulling them in. He throws off his hat and waistcoat, and loosens his belt--but even then he is drenched with perspiration.At last he can do no more, and drops exhausted on to a thwart.In less than twenty minutes he has caught more than fifty perch, weighing from one to three pounds apiece; they are lying in a brassy heap in the boat.Then he opens his wallet, takes out the bottle containing clear liquid, and takes a nip. This he is accustomed to do every time he catches a fish of any importance. He drinks to the health of the lake, the lake with the fresh waves and the clear, bright water--the lake that treasures his dearest memories.
Borne on a gentle breeze, a large crane-fly comes sailing out of the wood. It likes to cool its long legs, as it flies, by trailing them along the surface of the water. The whirligigs are after it, but it easily avoids them. Then comes a sudden surprise: a fish pops up its mouth, and closes its scissor-jaws with a snap on the insect’s legs, and it disappears in the centre of a rocking series of rings.
The lake is perfectly calm, its green-black surface smooth and shining, and full of drifting summer clouds. The reeds are reflected in it and look double their height, and the trees mirror their branches there, seeming twice as leafy; and a red house with a white flagstaff on one of the banks becomes quite a little submarine palace.
More crane-flies arrive, and circle after circle breaks the stillness of the water, just as mole-hills break the uniform smoothness of the meadow, as fishes’ mouths dart up by the score side by side.
It is in one of the valleys in the submarine mountainous region that this shoal of thousands of bleak lies. It covers the area of a market-place, and makes the water alive for fathoms down.
On the one side rises the forest of weed, like a fir-forest on a Norwegian mountain; on the other the thick green water-grass waves and bends like the corn on some fertile plain in Hungary. In front and behind, the valley winds on between the hill-sides until it widens out and finally loses itself in the barren, sandy desert.
Suddenly, at the end of the neighbouring valley, the water seethes and foams. It is cleft incessantly from bottom to surface, bubbles rise and whirlpools are formed, and a long strip of lake foams and spurts.
It is not like a single large animal darting forward with rapidly twisting tail, and leaving a wake and waves behind it; but a general effervescence that makes the depths gleam with millions of scales.
It is the perch, the marauders of the lake, on a hunting expedition!
They go together in a large company, like soldiers in an army, rows of them above, beside, and behind one another. There are hundreds upon hundreds of them, and yet a single unit.
With their uppermost layer only a couple of inches below the surface of the water they hasten on. Then all turn at once, changing from the long, narrow marching column into compact formation. A fresh signal, inaudible, imperceptible to all but themselves, and once more, in a trice, the narrow, smoothly-gliding hunting-column is reformed.
Just as they twist and turn in the horizontal plane, so do they in the vertical. They go suddenly and headlong from the surface to the depths, spinning out from their compact mass a long, living thread.
And the thread becomes longer and longer, and thinner and thinner, while they pass through one of the narrows in the submarine mountainous region.
It is the shoal of bleak they are after. Now they are in the valley where it lies.
The lively little freshwater herring as yet suspect no danger; they are in constant motion, occupied in snapping up the fallen, half-drowned insects. Noses are pushed up, and little thimble-like mouths open; the water streams in, and with it the food. An eager interchange from bottom to surface goes on; for when the upper layer is satiated, it likes to enjoy its feeling of well-being in peace, until voracity once more makes them all rivals.
The splash of the waves on the surface lifts the gluttons up and down, while the ground-swell rocks the satiated to rest.
The perch have quickened their pace; involuntarily the speed is increased; they already scent their prey.
Foremost of the company, with a dark-golden, high-backed leader at their head, swim a couple of hundred of the finest perch. They are at their strongest age, and in best possible condition, suffering neither from too great a weight of fatness, nor from the nervous lassitude of insufficient nourishment. They lead, and with frolicsome eagerness push past one another, so as to be the first to arrive.
After them comes the great mass of the horde, big, heavily-laden craft, their round backs and swelling bellies testifying to their success in their toil for material needs. There are perch among them of half an arm’s-length, and the thickness of the biggest of wrists. Sheaves of silvery-gleaming rays flicker far out in their wake.
The rest of the fierce horde are large and small mingled--hundreds of perch of half-a-pound’s weight, and rank upon rank of others well over two pounds.
For the present the whole flock keeps to the bottom, darting along with dorsal fin erect, the stiff spines bristling menacingly. It is as well to have bayonets fixed in case of the sudden appearance of a pike.
All at once the van slips away from the rest, and the latter have to exert themselves to catch up, twisting and turning their tails, and unfurling the stiff sail of their dorsal fin. There must be nothing now to check their speed; fair-weather sailing is over, and the privateering expedition has begun.
The certainty of booty fills them all.
The vanguard has led the marauders well; they have comeundertheir prey, and now shoot up among the unfortunate, unsuspecting bleak. All order among the assailants instantly ceases, and each member thinks only of its own mouth, and cares for nothing but getting it filled.
Like yellow flashes of water-lightning the perch dart into the shoal of little fish, and like grain among a flock of chickens, masses of bleak disappear into their mouths. They kill and devour--and it will be still worse when the rear-guard comes up.
Now they arrive, and the alarm in the swarm of bleak below spreads with magical swiftness to the upper layers, where the bewildered little creatures make off at full speed. Gleam after gleam flashes up as the little shining fish, uncertain of their way, twist and turn about. Each makes itself as long and thin as it can, so as to show as little as possible, and disappear, as it were, in the water.
But now the fierce horde becomes still fiercer. The rear-guard overtakes the fugitives and cuts off their retreat; and smack after smack is heard after their charge.
The swarm of bleak scatters in wild panic. Thousands of them, in their terror, make for the surface, leaping into the air like jets from a fountain. They tumble over one another and try in their bewilderment which can leap highest and farthest. They rise like flying-fish out of the water with a flash, and once more disappear with a splash into the water. There is a splash when they rise, and a splash when they again reach the surface of the water; making a sound like the falling of torrents of rain.
Hell is beneath them in the water! The yellow devils not only menace them from the side; they come upon them from all directions. When they descend in crowds from their flight into the air, they grow stiff with terror on finding themselves face to face with great, amber eyes that seem starting out of their sockets to go greedily hunting on their own account. Then a mouth opens, shoots out a pair of concertina-like lips, and changes into a funnel; and the poor little fish disappear into a chasm, like threads into a vacuum cleaner.
Above the spot a cloud of terns is circling. They fly low with half-extended legs and drooping wings, ready to dart down. Sometimes they make a catch, sometimes miss their aim, but have the good fortune to take a fish that inadvertently appears close by; indeed the bleak often leap straight into the birds’ open beak. The birds hold them at all sorts of angles in their beak, and fly away with them, shrieking and screaming, pursued by their fellows.
Poor little bleak! they were so pretty to look at. An emerald green colour extended from the back right over the head and nose; and the rims of their eyes when they blinked could sparkle and shine like the gem itself. Their shining breast was whiter than a swan’s, and their plump sides gleamed and sparkled like ice under a wintry moon.
But from the time they left their Creator’s hand they were intended to serve as food forothers.
A boat lay anchored a few hundred yards off. In it was an elderly man.
An angler this. He had been out since early morning, and had a delightful day.
Not a single bite. But what did that matter?
He was lying now at the bottom of the boat, dreaming.
He was a regular visitor to the lake. His ancestors’ love of a free, out-of-door life had entered into his blood.
It is well known that it takes three generations to make a gentleman; but it would take three times as many to create, out of a race that ever since the morning of time had lived out of doors, a generation that did not care to handle either gun or rod.
In his youth his gun had been his best friend; but the chase demands much of legs and muscles and heart. When a man is no longer in his prime, he should beware of paying ardent court to Dame Diana. In her suite--it is useless to deny it--the old man is seldom looked upon with favour: he has had his day. But Father Neptune clasps him rapturously in his wet embrace, and sets the fish around his boat leaping and playing.
It was thus in his later years that his fishing rod had become the old man’s joy and companion.
Season after season he made his weekly journey from town by rail, and then drove out to the lake. He fished in the good old-fashioned way, talked very little, and was always alone in the boat.
The weather to-day, from a fisherman’s point of view, is the worst possible. The July sun is shining hotly, and sends its beams deep down into the water.
The lake slumbers. There is a bottle-green hue above the deep water, and a lilac shade in the shallows; but over the sandy bottom the colour is drab. Far off a flock of wild ducks rising raise some little, gentle waves, that look so blue, so blue!
The angler, who is a big, sturdy man with large, black-rimmed spectacles upon his voluminous nose, is in his customary fishing-dress--an old straw hat with an elastic under the chin, his coat off, and no collar, on his legs a pair of thick, yellowish brown moleskin trousers, his feet in a pair of felt shoes, lined with straw.
He generally stays all day, and it is still far from evening.
He is now lying outstretched in midday drowsiness, enjoying the great peace that rests on the lake. He has wound the ends of his lines round his wrist; he waits patiently, and if towards evening he is fortunate enough to haul in a pike, he will be filled with a quiet, intense joy.
Suddenly he awakes with a start. He hears a rushing sound like that of the paddles of a distant steamer striking and tearing the water; he sees the terns flocking, and the surface of the water broken again and again by bleak leaping high into the air. He takes up his anchor, and rows up until he hears the smack, smack of the greedy perch all round him, and knows he is in the middle of the whirlpool of fish.
He gets four lines clear, and has enough to do in throwing them out and pulling them in. He throws off his hat and waistcoat, and loosens his belt--but even then he is drenched with perspiration.
At last he can do no more, and drops exhausted on to a thwart.
In less than twenty minutes he has caught more than fifty perch, weighing from one to three pounds apiece; they are lying in a brassy heap in the boat.
Then he opens his wallet, takes out the bottle containing clear liquid, and takes a nip. This he is accustomed to do every time he catches a fish of any importance. He drinks to the health of the lake, the lake with the fresh waves and the clear, bright water--the lake that treasures his dearest memories.