Living Silver 



I 2o fathoms ahead of it. This final rope was attached to one drum 

 of the winch and, when the bufiFs were picked up, the free end of 

 the first coil was swung on to the other drum. 



At that point the April Morning lay with both her ropes aboard, 

 wound on the winch that stood far forward but faced aft, and the 

 ropes sagged down into the slack waves, downwards to the sea- 

 bottom. There they formed a rectangle, corralling off almost one- 

 fifth of a square mile of water, 1 80 acres, a fair sized farm, but the 

 livestock wild and the corral itself the slaughter-house. Gulls 

 hung above the tail of the ship where the ropes slipped out through 

 the double roller on the starboard side of the stern. The wavelets 

 jolted awkwardly against the gunwale as though they could barely 

 drag themselves forward. It was a quiet sea, so quiet that the 

 water did not seem to be comfortable. It wanted the support of a 

 little wind. Jan stood by the side of the winch, close by one of the 

 automatic coilers. It would soon be time to haul. 



But first the engine started and they began to move forwards, 

 quickly at first then suddenly more slowly as the ropes took the 

 strain of the underwater gear and tautened into straight tense lines. 

 For five minutes they went foi-wards, the wide angle between the 

 ropes gradually lessening. The net that faced them, gaping emp- 

 tily from the other side of the underwater rectangle, must have 

 begun to move also. Jan could almost feel the tension being trans- 

 mitted down the tightening rope. And Tadeusz started the winch, 

 rotated it quickly then, putting it in gear, began to haul slowly, 

 two turns a minute to begin with, then quicker, and quicker, and 

 quicker. The ropes on the ground were now converging, the area 

 of the corral diminishing, its boundaries swinging along the mud 

 and sand with the soft slushy underwater sound of a man drawing 

 a blunt knife through an apple, converging, diminishing, the angle 

 at the stern becoming more and more acute, the wet ropes drip- 

 ping through the coiler and arranging themselves in cylinders nine 

 inches high. And the fish were flurrying forward, away from the 

 sound of the ropes and the tremor they started on the sea floor, 

 flurrying away as the net tiptoed forwards toward them, undul- 



168 



