Living Silver 



were a drug on the market and, more importantly, they were a 

 parasite in the trawl. Unlike Gadus esmarkii and Ammodytes they 

 tended to be caught in the meshes, even the wide meshes that 

 were used in the north ; and they sometimes cluttered the whole 

 lint with their dead bodies to such an extent that there was little 

 movement of water through the net and it therefore ceased to fish 

 effectively. How often this happened was uncertain, but Jan soon 

 became bored with the sight of big floating cod-ends full of noth- 

 ing but dabs, dabs that the fishermen would eat and that he him- 

 self loved but that would fetch no worthwhile price if they were 

 brought back for sale. They were almost as bad as weeds or jelly- 

 fish, though their slime was not so dense as the slime of weeds and 

 they did not sting and cause skin disease like the jellyfish. They 

 were just a monumental but living nuisance. And yet they were, 

 unluckily, useful. They could not be exterminated. Too many 

 good fish depended on them, the cod, the whiting, the plaice, the 

 turbot. They all feasted on dabs, but the dabs were always as 

 plentiful as though they were immune from predators. 



The turbot particularly. Both the cod and the whiting had 

 many other fish to gobble. But the turbot lived right in among the 

 dabs, on the bottom in shallow waters, and it therefore ate more 

 of them than did the roundfish that wandered aimlessly between 

 the surface and the bed of the sea. And the turbot, of course, was 

 a prime fish, a very valuable one. 



Turbot, too, lived alone or, at best, in conjugal seeming pairs, 

 rather like the lemon sole. And it was as exclusive in its diet as 

 the lemon sole. Only it was not worms that the turbot ate. A 

 glance at the head was now enough for Jan. He knew that kind of 

 mouth, with its straight hard jaws like the lips of a snake, the 

 powerful bones in a background of taut, lean muscles. The head, 

 too, was huge in proportion to the rest of the body, not small and 

 button shaped like the head of a sole. The turbot looked like 

 what it was, an animal bent on the. destruction of its own kind, a 

 relentless cannibal. And that was probably why turbots lived in 

 isolation from one another. Almost like eagles, each had its terri- 



ii6 



