Two years with no fish. Then dramatically, just when Lothar knew himself beaten, there had been some subtle shift in the ocean current or a change in the prevailing wind and the fish had returned, good wild fish, rising thick as new grass in each dawn.
Let it last, Lothar prayed silently, as he stared out into the fog. Please God, let it last. Another three months, that was all he needed, just another three short months and he would pay it off and be free again.
She's lifting, the boy said, and Lothar blinked and shook his head slightly, returning from his memories.
The fog was opening like a theatre curtain, and the scene it revealed was melodramatic and stagey, seemingly too riotously coloured to be natural as the dawn fumed and glowed like a display of fireworks, orange and gold and green where it sparkled on the ocean, turning the twisting columns of fog the colour of blood and roses so that the very waters seemed to burn with unearthly fires. The silence enhanced the magical show, a silence heavy and lucid as crystal so that it seemed they had been struck deaf, as though all their other senses had been taken from them and concentrated in their vision as they stared in wonder.
Then the sun struck through, a brilliant beam of solid golden light through the roof of the fog-bank- It played across the surface, so that the current line was starkly lit. The inshore water was smudged with cloudy blue, as calm and smooth as oil. The line where it met the up welling of the true oceanic current was straight and sharp as the edge of a knife-blade, and beyond it the surface was dark and ruffled as green velvet stroked against the pile.
Daar spring hy! Da Silva yelled from the fore-deck, pointed out to the line of dark water There he jumps! As the low sun struck the water a single fish jumped. It was just a little longer than a man's hand, a tiny sliver of burnished silver.
Start up! Lothar's voice was husky with excitement, and the boy flung his mug onto the chart-table, the last few drops of coffee splashing, and dived down the ladder-way to the engine-room below.
Lothar flipped on the switches and set the throttle as below him the boy stooped to the crank-handle.
Swing it! Lothar shouted down and the boy braced himself and heaved against the compression of all four cylinders.
He was not quite thirteen years old but already he was almost as strong as a man, and there was bulging muscle in his back as he worked.
Now! Lothar closed the valves, and the engine, still warm from the run out from the harbour, fired and caught and roared. There was a belch of oily black smoke from the exhaust port in the side of the hull and then she settled to a regular beat.
The boy scrambled up the ladder and shot out onto the deck, racing up into the bows beside Da Silva.
Lothar swung the bows over and they ran down on the current line. The fog blew away, and they saw the other boats. They, too, had been lying quietly in the fog-bank, waiting for the first rays of the sun, but now they were running down eagerly on the current line, their wakes cutting long rippling Vs across the placid surface and the bow waves creaming and flashing in the new sunlight. Along each rail the crews craned out to peer ahead, and the jabber of their excited voices carried above the beat of the engines.
From the glassed wheelhouse Lothar had an all-round view over the working areas of the fifty-foot trawler and he made one final check of the preparations. The long net was laid out down the starboard rail, the corkline coiled into meticulous spirals. The dry weight of the net was seven and a half tons, wet it would weigh many times heavier. It was five hundred feet long and in the water hung down from the cork floats like a gauzy curtain seventy feet deep. It had cost Lothar over five thousand pounds, more money than an ordinary fisherman would earn in twenty years of unremitting toil, and each of his other three boats was so equipped. From the stern, secured by a heavy painter, each trawler towed its bucky an eighteen-foot-long clinker-built dinghy.
With one long hard glance, Lothar satisfied himself that all was ready for the throw, and then looked ahead just as another fish jumped.
This time it was so close that he could see the dark lateral lines along its gleaming flank, and the colour difference, ethereal green above the line and hard gleaming silver below. Then it plopped back, leaving a dark dimple on the surface.
As though it was a signal, instantly the ocean came alive.
The waters turned dark as though suddenly shaded by heavy cloud, but this cloud was from below, rising up from the depths, and the waters roiled as though a monster moved beneath them.
,Wild fish! screamed Da Silva, turning his weathered and creased brown face back over his shoulder towards Lothar, and at the same time spreading his arms to take in the sweep of ocean which moved with fish.
A mile wide and so deep that its far edge was hidden in the lingering fog-banks, a single dark shoal lay before them.
In all the years as a hunter, Lothar had never seen such an accumulation of life, such a multitude of a single species.
Beside this the locusts that could curtain and block off the African noon sun and the flocks of tiny quelea birds whose combined weight broke the boughs from the great trees on which they roosted, were insignificant. Even the crews of which the racing trawlers fell silent and stared in awe as the shoal broke the surface and the waters turned white and sparkled like a snow bank; countless millions of tiny scaly bodies Caught the sunlight as they were lifted clear of the water by the press of an infinity of their own kind beneath them.
Da Silva was the first to rouse himself. He turned and ran back down the deck, quick and agile as a youth, passing only at the door of the wheelhouse. Maria, Mother of God, grant we still have a net when this day ends. It was a poignant warning and then the old mail ran to the stern and scrambled over the gunwale into the trailing dinghy while at his example the rest of the crew roused themselves and hurried to their stations.
Manfred! Lothar called his son, and the boy who had stood mesmerized in the bows bobbed his head obediently and ran back to his father.
Take the wheel. It was an enormous responsibility for one so young, but Manfred had Proved himself so many times before that Lothar felt no misgiving as he ducked out of the wheelhouse. In the bows he signalled without looking over his shoulder and he felt the deck cant beneath his feet as Manfred spun the wheel, following his father's signal to begin a wide circle around the shoal.
So much fish, Lothar whispered. As his eyes estimated distance and wind and current, old Da Silva's warning was in the forefront of his calculations: the trawler and its net could handle 150 tons of these nimble silver
