Market Whimsies 



quantity or quality of the fish landed, was still a real thing. It 

 belonged to the objective world of facts and ran independent of 

 any subjective human considerations. What bedevilled fish prices 

 was not objective. It was the whimsical and illogical factor of 

 what was called personal, of what was really mass, taste. At times 

 it almost seemed that the public was doing its best to create diffi- 

 culties for the men who hunted its fish. And Jan was not long in 

 finding out that there were plenty of difficulties without the arti- 

 ficial ones manufactured by the vagaries of the market - difficulties 

 such as get in the way of any hunting community. 



For fishermen were hunters. It was such a simple fact that it 

 was easy to forget and often forgotten- but then, of course, sim- 

 plicity is the most tenuous thing in the world. And yet, for those 

 who see the simple thing, it is infuriating that others miss it. Or 

 so, at least, thought Jan. The two basic industries upon which all 

 civilisation ultimately depended were agriculture and fishing. Of 

 these two, agriculture had a long history of successful experiment 

 behind it. Flocks had been tamed. Fields had been manured. 

 Crops had been bred so selectively that their present forms bore 

 little resemblance to their ancestral ones. All these things had 

 been accomplished over centuries, centuries in which every arable 

 acre was minutely observed by men who were very wise in the 

 ways of the land. But the sea had never been observed. Fish did 

 not grow out of it like grass from a field. They lived deep within 

 it and were invisible. 



The work of farmers was simplified by the intelligence of their 

 domestic animals. They could train them to keep together, to 

 stay within an enclosure, to allow themselves to be milked. But 

 nobody could train a fish. It was always a wild beast. Men could 

 do one thing and only one thing with it. Theycouldkill it. Other- 

 wise the fish would wander wherever its luck or its nature took 

 it. There were no fences in the sea. What natural barriers existed 

 were better known to fish than to men, for man was not really an 

 aquatic animal. The sea was secret from him. His prey had the 

 advantage of being in its own element. That was probably why 



^9 



