Chapter 12: Seine Haul
Another apex predator arrives: MAN. I would call them human beings, but it’s very likely that only men stood on that fishing boat at night, watching fish disturb millions of luminous plankton animals, causing them to glow with a fierce luster. So the darkness of the moonless night was broken in many places by flickering patches of light that came and went, flared to brilliance, and died away. (p. 109)
There is much technical information about seine fishing in this chapter. Carson shows the boat moving in ever-smaller circles over the flock of mackerels, describes the net, how it drops off the side of the seine boat’s dory, its dimensions, and how it grows from an arc to a semicircle to a circle. Point of view moves between human and mackerel, enlivening the text with a fisherman’s awareness of the fish below and the many ways they might lose the catch. Unlike other chapters, in which I rooted solely for Scomper, I found my sympathies with the mackerel as well as the tired fishermen at dawn, their catch failing five out of six times.
Then came a faint but unmistakable patter like a squall of rain on the sea–the sound of mackerel, the sound of a big school of mackerel feeding at the surface. (p. 110)
This is Carson’s superb use of the imagery of sound. Reading this, I feel profoundly grateful for her precise and sensitive writing.