290 Fish Stories 



fish's wounds and make them bigger and bigger, until at 

 last the cavity of the abdomen is pierced and little creatures 

 of many kinds, plant and animal, go in there and plunder all 

 this fish's internal organs, to carry them away, atom by 

 atom, for their own purposes. 



But when the lampreys come up the April brook it is not 

 to feed on fishes, nor is it to feed at all. Nature is insistent 

 that the race should be kept up, and every animal is com- 

 pelled to attend to the needs of the species, even though it 

 be at a sacrifice of all else. If she were not so, the earth 

 and the seas would be depopulated, and this is a contingency 

 which Nature would surely find intolerable. She abhors 

 Death, as she is said to abhor a vacuum. A dead leaf 

 could not rot, were it not that its cells are full of living 

 creatures. 



The lampreys come up the stream to spawn, and while 

 on this errand they fasten their round mouths to stones or 

 clods of earth, that the current may not sweep them away. 

 When so fastened they look like some strange dark plant 

 clinging to the bottom of the brook. When the spawning sea- 

 son is over some of them still remain there, forgotten by 

 Nature, who is now busied with other things, eaten up by 

 bacteria, and they wear their lives away still clinging — a 

 strange, weird piece of brook-bottom scenery which touched 

 the fancy of Thoreau. 



When the young are hatched they are transparent as jelly, 

 blind and toothless, with a mouth that seems only a slit 

 down the front end of the body. These little creatures 

 slip down the brook unobserved, and hide themselves in the 

 grass and lily pads till their teeth are grown and they go 

 about rasping the bodies of their betters, grieving the fishes 

 who do not know how to protect themselves. 



The lamprey is not a fish at all, only a wicked imitation of 

 one which can deceive nobody. But there are fishes which 

 are unquestionably fish — fish from gills to tail, from head to 

 fin, and of these the little sunfish may stand first. He comes 



