Living Silver 



to help them, without the aid of the organs of smell and touch, 

 the fishermen tracked down the species they wanted, the species 

 that would sell. In this chase, they were helped only by the anti- 

 quated furniture of their own brains, a bric-a-brac of memories 

 resting on heavy mahogany superstitions. No man could hope to 

 be a successful fisherman without such a victorian confusion with- 

 in his head. Scientists sneered at it. Music hall comedians laugh- 

 ed. But it caught fish. It was a form of knowledge, a primitive 

 form suited to the primitive vocation of a hunter. Usually the 

 men who had most of it were singularly inarticulate when asked 

 to express their reasons for shooting their gear over a particular 

 strip of sea-bottom. But the incommunicable is not necessarily 

 the unknown. These men were obeying laws formulated by gene- 

 rations of experience, laws that often took the form of super- 

 stition but always bore a very close and very practical relation to 

 what was in the sea and what could be taken out of it. The proof 

 of the knowledge lay dead in the ice in the market, fish by the 

 hundred ton that had been tracked down and caught and killed 

 with no more help from the gadgets of modern technology than 

 could have been supplied by a nineteenth-century engineer. 



Fish moved inshore or offshore with more or less regularity, 

 concentrating to spawn, dispersing to feed, burrowing into sand 

 when their shallows were attacked by heavy weather, or saunter- 

 ing lackadaisically in the deeper water. The grounds they lived on 

 differed, one species preferring rough rock while another was 

 associated with a fine black mud that clotted the meshes of a trawl 

 unless a coir rope was suspended just above the foot-rope to shove 

 it out of the net's path. Then, too, not all of the bottom-living, 

 or demersal, species were really found on the bottom. Many of 

 them lived a little above it, darting down there only when they 

 detected food to their liking. When fishing for these species, the 

 head-rope had to be as high as possible or it skimmed harm- 

 lessly underneath the bulk of their communities. Or thick chains 

 would have to be rigged in front of the foot-rope if the skipper was 

 after the burrowing fish: they had to be dug out. 



62 



