CHAPTER EIGHT 



THE PRIMITIVES 



THE dogfish was hated. When it arrived, it came in numbers, 

 huge numbers of boneless, grey, living materials that stretched the 

 cod-end to bursting and left no room for more valuable catches. 

 That was why fishermen hated it. It was the least saleable of North 

 Sea families (two species were commonly caught, and there were 

 many others that appeared more occasionally) and yet it crowded 

 the sea from top to bottom so that all other forms of life became 

 negligible in dogfish-infested areas. The swarms of them could 

 be compared in numbers and in nuisance value only to the late 

 spring rushes of Canadian mosquitoes. Jan heard about the mos- 

 quitoes from one of his shipmates. 'When I was out there,' he 

 said, with only the trace of a brag in his voice, Sve used to turn up 

 our sleeves to the elbows and, if we got more than sixty bites on 

 our arms in a minute the farmer would tell us that we couldn't 

 work. ''There's a wee bit too mony o' them the day", he'd say, 

 the flickering slave-driver.' And the dogfish too were like that. 

 God alone knew how many bites a man's arm might expect in a 

 minute's exposure to these devils. Certainly sixty, perhaps two 

 hundred. 



When they came the trace of them thickened the echo-sounder 

 into a laddery spider's web of parallelish striations. One dogfish 

 would have left no sign since it wouldn't have had any air-bladder 

 and the air-bladder was the chief source of fish traces. So they had 

 to be thick, the dogfish, even to leave that powdery spider's mark. 



And air-bladders weren't the only things that they didn't have. 



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