Koundfish 



the gadoid type but just that they were sHghtly eccentric. And 

 perhaps it was this eccentricity that made them so hated among 

 fishermen. In April, off the Faroes, twenty, thirty, forty baskets 

 of haddock would come aboard in a single haul : and there were 

 times when they all seemed to be female, all full of the large oily 

 eggs. The trawl would be shot again and the men would sit down 

 and set to work on the tumbling deck, trying to gut this multitude 

 of fishes. Knife in the right hand, fish in the left, and the thumb 

 of the left finger following the knife through the body cavity, the 

 home of the ovaries, through the orange hosts of the eggs. At first 

 Jan did not notice. But after a hundred fish had passed through 

 his hand he felt a prickling in his left thumb. After two hundred 



HADDOCK 



it was a sore itch. After three hundred there was only a mess of 

 spoiling blood, not festering yet but beginning to. And so it went 

 on to the end of the trip. More than two weeks with this swollen 

 bleeding, almost putrid bag for a thumb. And most of the others 

 were the same. It was worse than the salt water boils that devel- 

 oped round their wrists as a result of the coarse friction of oilskins 

 and the continual rub of salt water into the frayed skin. The had- 

 docky thumb throbbed out to fill his whole body with pain. It 

 itched through him festering even on his tongue, making food 

 taste bad, disturbing what little sleep he could get. And still they 

 kept coming, the haddock ready to spawTi. They were shoaling 

 together for the reproductive act. They were easy to catch. They 

 paid well. But they hurt. 



They paid better than cod. And that often seemed strange, for 



77 



