Living Silver 



Was there a lobster in the trap ? or was that gHnt their untouched 

 bait? All other senses disappeared. He became a mere machine 

 for looking. But even his eyes seemed swallowed up in anticipa- 

 tion, the archetypal anxiety of a hunter when faced with the hope 

 of prey. He had eyes for only one thing, the emerging creel. 



Like all others who have ever looked at it, Jan was recurrently 

 surprised that such a primitive gadget was an effective snare for 

 anything. The lobster's stupidity, he thought, must be un- 

 equalled among animals. He could understand quite well why 

 they walked into the trap, baited as it was with a fresh herring, 

 but why they didn't simply walk out again was more than his 

 imagination could construe. There was certainly nothing to stop 

 them and Frank had often assured him that some of them realised 

 the fact and escaped. Yet it was quite certain that the majority 

 never left a creel except in the hands of a fisherman. It was a 

 puzzle. 



These lobster creels had a base of wood, about an inch thick, 

 and three hoops of wood were inserted into it. Three rafters of 

 a similar slimness intersected the hoops and were lashed fast to 

 them. Around this skeleton the fine meshes of a tanned herring 

 net were draped until the whole thing looked like a doll's version 

 of a Nissen hut, a delicate lace substituting for corrugated iron. 

 It stood a foot and a half high and was well over two feet long. 

 Two circular doorways threaded into it but these too were made 

 of net, tunnel-shaped anterooms of netting inserted into the 

 net walls. Through these eyes, so reminiscent of the centre of a 

 spider's web, the lobsters had to enter if they wished to feed on 

 the bait. Although they lay on opposite sides of the creel, the 

 eyes did not face one another for then it would have been possible 

 for their prey to walk straight through both of them and out on 

 the other side. The base of both eyes was made of a coarser- 

 textured but more fine-meshed netting. A lobster which had 

 climbed through one of them would descend into the main 

 chamber where, his hunger satisfied, he usually remained until 

 Frank and Jan came to release him. There was no closing device 



4 



