Living Silver 



get so as you can count them. Don't smile. You can count every 

 ruddy herring that passes between you and the weight. And you 

 can reckon how deep they are swimming by the pulse of the wire 

 against your fingertips. I can't tell you quite how it is done but I 

 can damn well do it.' 



Jan and Tadeusz believed him. Before their herring days they 

 had both used echo-sounders, largely for navigational purposes, 

 partly to avoid the nasty snags, like a sunk wreck or an uncomfort- 

 able jut of rock, but partly also when they were searching for the 

 furry hazy bottom-huddling trace of the whiting. But they had 

 never imagined how the echo-sounder would one day become the 

 focus of their lives. To watch it incessantly, to make conjectural 

 interpretations of every tiniest blip on paper, was now the main 

 occupation of their hours at sea. More important than tide or 

 wind, than gannets or herring whales, more important than the 

 compass itself, was the magic box on the wheelhouse wall. A 

 stylus continually arced across the face of it. The paper shifted 

 slowly from right to left. The sea-bed appeared as a thick black 

 line, rising alarmingly when they approached such places as the 

 lightship on Smith's Knoll. The intermediate water, between the 

 keel of the ship and this black line, was however the thing that 

 they were studying. Usually clear, a virgin strip of greyish paper, 

 it would occasionally be freckled by plume-like traces, and the 

 Stanislaw would stop and her nets would go over the side. Or the 

 whole clear space would be stained black and dark brown as the 

 hordes of pilchards ran under her keel. The Stanislaw would swing 

 round and make ofF with all the engine-power at her command. 

 Pilchards were not what driftmen wanted : pilchards were the dog- 

 fish of the herring fleet. Their soft bodies clotted the delicate 

 meshes of a drift net. Where herring could be shaken freely into 

 the fish-hold, these marine vermin had to be hand-picked out of 

 their slimy mortuary. And, when they came, they came in such 

 hordes that it might take as long as two days to clean a fleet of nets. 



At first sight, though, and to the inexperienced, the pilchard 

 swarms looked on the echo-sounder as though they might be a 



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