Living Silver 



est of the Scottish bays and it was equally at home in the mid 

 Atlantic where four hundred fathoms of water might be lying on 

 top of it. Sometimes it hunted among the waters near the surface, 

 gobbling herring by the score. At others it slouched on the bed 

 of the sea and fed, with democratic impartiality, on crabs and 

 snails, cuttlefish and worms, the sand-eel, the whiting, the cod. 



COD 



There was nothing it wouldn't attack, stones and bits of wood, 

 flatfish and roundfish, everything was gulped into the tough mus- 

 cular elastic folds of its stomach. There was no hint of the fin- 

 nicky in its gluttony. 



It was, of course, a big fish ; and the further north Jan went the 

 larger his largest cod. But it was not one of the truly massive 

 brutes that the sea sometimes breeds. Its deep bellied lines tended 

 to make it look smaller than it was. This, the simplicity of its cir- 

 cular eyes, its greenbacked colouring freckled with splashes of 

 white, all contrived to give a lazy middle-aged air, a solid bourgeois 

 sense of proportion that was belied by the clench of its powerful 

 jaws with their hundreds of pin-point steel-hard teeth. And then 

 too, when Jan opened its belly and found a large crab squatting 

 alive at the bottom of the cardiac pouch, its claws fastened deep in 

 the walls of the stomach, a live crab being slowly digested, he 

 would know again that the cod was no more urbane and decorous 

 than the blossoming tentacles of a red anemone or the plunge of a 

 harpooned whale. There were no nice beasts in the sea. The fish 

 were all savages and many of them had cannibalistic tendencies. 



74 



