Living Silver 



England, a skate would be lucky if he went as cat food, yet the 

 Cornish mackerel sold there and supported an industry. On the 

 eastern coast of Scotland, however, Jan couldn't give away a 

 basket of the best mackerel, even though he had lifted them out 

 of the sea that very morning. Some of the older fishermen in 

 Peterhead and Buckie relieved him of one or two when he was 



SKATE 



able to assure them that the fish were almost kicking, but mack- 

 erel were not a marketable possibility. Yet the skate, shunned in 

 England and on the west of Scotland, was very popular in the 

 Aberdeen area. Again the absurdity of fish economics, the raw 

 formalities of public taste, again the waste. For the skate was a 

 good fish, chicken-white muscle inches deep, and every ounce as 

 tender as the twilight. 



Perhaps it was the look of the skate that put customers ofF. It 

 was a cross between a death-mask and a petrologist's specimen. 

 One side of it, the ventral, was all mask while the other was rough 

 stone. And then it had a tail like a cow's, quite unlike the tail of 

 any other fish, so that Jan found himself wondering whether there 



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