Living Silver 



single family. It supported the whole fleet, one family with about 

 a dozen fishable species. The fantastic forms that dangled on tropi- 

 cal surfaces, swallowing gallons of sea water, the swift mackerel- 

 like hunters, the tuna, the bonito, the swordfish, the flying fish 

 and the mud skippers, he heard about them and knew they were 

 roundfish. Occasionally even, one of them would be landed. 

 Occasionally too, there were even stranger specimens in the net - 

 a gigantic mud-smothered sturgeon, with its archaic knobbly scales 

 and its odd legal status as the property of the Royal Household. 

 But all these were finally irrelevant to the trawling fleet. They 

 were taken by accident. They amused rather than gratified the 

 crews. They were simple curiosities. Only one family mattered 

 - the Gadoids . 



It took Jan a long time before he could recognise a gadoid. 

 They looked so ordinary, just like fish, like any kind offish. There 

 was nothing distinctive about them. They were shaped like fish, 

 fought like fish, were caught like fish. They were a kind of ideal- 

 ised and generalised version of what a fish should be. They were 

 particles of sheer fishiness, of an essential life-stuff that had some- 

 how got separated into individual organisms. And even at that, 

 there were times when Jan saw them heaped high to the gunwales 

 in their hundreds and he began to wonder whether they were not 

 really all one, all one huge and dispersed mass of fish tissue, each 

 with about as much independence as a cell in his own body, each 

 part of the same living creature, each an organ, a cell of fish, 

 rather than a beast in its own right. 



But, as he grew to know them better, the amorphous living 

 matter did develop into individuals and into classes - into indivi- 

 duals to begin with and then into cod and whiting and haddock. 

 Though they appeared so generalised the gadoids were not primi- 

 tive fish, not even so primitive as the herring or the salmon. They 

 were one of the most recent products of the evolutionary ascent 

 through ever more complex series of prototypes. They were al- 

 most as successful in the sea as man had been on land, and they 

 didn't owe their success to the sophistication of their social be- 



72 



