Living Silver 



hankered after the wickerwork of a Cornish pot. As fancy as it 

 was homely, it reminded him of the ornate domesticity of an iced 

 cake at a birthday party. Folk art as well as folk craftsmanship 

 had gone into its design. The Scots job seemed a drab utilitarian 

 affair by comparison. 



But it was utilitarian ; and Frank, whose temperament was very 

 similar, contented himself with the drabness. Though he fished 

 only twenty creels he often collected more than ten lobsters a 

 day and that was good fishing for an amateur - even an Orcadian 

 amateur. For the Orcadians were expert amateurs, their coastal 

 waters among the richest, as well as the most dangerous, in the 

 world. Usually Frank manoeuvred his traps singly or in four 

 fleets of five creels each, but sometimes, when a particular bay 

 seemed rich in lobsters, he would have all twenty stationed to- 

 gether, fishing in their level-bottomed way within ten fathoms of 

 one another. 



As he watched the first oblong articulating itself out of the 

 green dimness Jan's excitement dispelled into a sense of dis- 

 appointment. There was no lobster, and the bait was blousy with 

 escaping gases. Frank grunted in his unworried fashion. The 

 whole business of fishing was evidently a damned nuisance. He 

 hauled the creel aboard, edging some cold water down into the 

 well of his sea-boots as he did so. 'Water's hellishly wet.' And 

 he undid the knots that tied the netting to one of the end hoops 

 and scraped out the slimy putrescence that was sticking to the 

 base board. A filthy grin of disgust overspread his face as he 

 rinsed his hand in the surrounding water. 'Pass me another 

 herring.' After he had placed the bait on the floor of the creel 

 and re- tied the end flap, Frank lowered the apparatus even more 

 gingerly than he had raised it, hand over hand, studiously edging 

 out the corks that held each segment of rope taut and vertical. 

 He was a careful man by nature who preferred that things be kept 

 in their proper place : and the proper place for a lobster creel was 

 sitting evenly on its broad backside at the bottom of the sea. Not 

 heads up, with the cotton net fraying among the gravel, not on its 



6 



