Kinging 



particularly rich shoal of herring. Tadeusz and Jan had been con- 

 vinced that they were going to be rich at the end of a half hour's 

 drifting and, in spite of George's warnings, they had shot over a 

 deep black trace. He had been decent enough to help them clean 

 their gear, but they made nothing on that night's haul, since pil- 

 chards were definitely unsaleable, except in Cornwall, and they 

 were still disentangling the rotting creatures from their meshes 

 when the other herring boats sailed on the following day. This 

 experience had, at least, convinced them of George's understand- 

 ing of echo-traces so that, later in the year but over another 

 ground while they were still waiting for the main heiTing shoals, 

 they had allowed him to warn them against some light brown 

 ladder-like blips which had appeared in sudden profusion. On the 

 following day, they were able to enjoy the sight of half a dozen 

 ships' crews picking shad out of torn nets. Unlike the pilchard, it 

 was the hardness of the shad that made it a nuisance. Useless from 

 the commercial point of view, it got caught in drift nets by the 

 spine of its dorsal fin and, when it could not lash itself free by tear- 

 ing a bar of netting, it too had to be carefully hand-picked if the 

 nets were to be cleared. 



While the Poles had been thinking these thoughts, George had 

 gone imperturbably on, moving his words through such a maze of 

 memories that, at times, it became almost impossible to follow 

 him. Chiefly, he was concerned with the construction of the ring 

 net, but there were, apparently, several thousand variations of it 

 and the old man could hardly recount a single fact without quali- 

 fying it in one way or another. 'But, of course, the Norwegian 

 net is quite different, much bigger, for it's meant to fetch up those 

 big devils that live in the Norwegian Deeps. . . .' And so on. 

 But, by the time he had finished his pint, he had given some idea 

 of what the most common type of Scottish net was like. 



It was quite different from anything Jan had ever used. About 

 fifty odd fathoms long, it hung down in the water like a drift net 

 but was more than twice as deep. Five buffs, very similar to the 

 huge floats of a drifter, were attached to the five main panels into 



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