Some Summer Lands by Gaskell Jane

Author:Gaskell, Jane [Gaskell, Jane]
Format: epub
Tags: Fantasy
Publisher: Pocket Books
Published: 1977-08-10T04:00:00+00:00

“Whale so pale and dear as ale

In the low waves washing wet

Tender rock ye in the water

Like a palest little daughter

And I’ll come and find and get you yet.”

All Fishhead’s songs had “sweet” and “wet” in them and lines about fish obliquely sneaking into neat nets sweetly.

We pulled a female cuttlefish behind the boat so the males that rose to her would be scooped into nets.

But sometimes she attracted bigger prey. Then it was uncertain as to whether we might not end up as prey ourselves. Fishhead was always sure it was the end of us. At the very least he would go through several pairs of gloves when hauling in a big fishbecause of the burning of the line past his hands (you could see the smoke off the line). Fishhead would curse and insult and hate the fish while he held on the line and the fish leaped and fought, every now and then coming up like a peacock-kingfisher, all spun biues and greens and flashes of gold. The boat bucked like a rocking-chair; this was no vehicle from which to win at tug-of-war.

A big fish in the net could break it, that must never be allowed, so we had to be watchful. We’d have to cut the net and let the beast go. But once a big fish was on the lineyou could tie the line round the short samson post at the transom end of the square-nosed clinker-built little trundler boat, and let the fish tire itself while you stayed in the front of the boat to balance the weight. (If you were Fishhead, not if you were me; but out on the sea hour after hour. we’d think of each other’s weight and dryness and so on unconsciously, as though we were each other as well as ourselves.) A fish-hook through its gilts later, when the fight and go had gone out of it, kept it at the side of the boat, travelling in the water with you, if it was too heavy to lift in alone.

But how you had to be sure. We caught a sharkwe didn’t want it, it insisteda huge shark, or seemed huge. Fourteen rows of teeth, said Fishhead, and when it was tired (that took a long time) he leaned over to try to cut its throat from the boat.

That thrilled it. It smelled its own life-blood ebbing. It turned with the thrill. It turned, it was thrashing, looking for itselfa\l lust for blood.

The boat was turned and tossed with it. Fishhead was screaming the unfaimess of it. “Die, you pig, die’” Fishhead leaned over dangerously and shouted into the shark’s snapping great head. I sat huddled by the samson, sending my thought like a dull metal pick into the shark. Fishhead was quite right, the only thing for all of us was for the shark to die. It died. Fishhead wiped his gloves across his plaits. He was slick with sweat and salt and the shark’s blood and froth and the light of the sun which set well, like a jelly.

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