II

At intervals during the summer, often enough when the tides are high

and the moon is near the full, the surf along the beach turns from a

churn of empty moonlit water to a mass of panic life. Driven in by

schools of larger fish, swarms of little fish enter the tumble of the

surf, the eaters follow them, the surf catches them both up and throws

them, mauled and confused, ashore.

Under a sailing moon, the whole churn of sea close off the beach

vibrates with a primeval ferocity and intensity of life; yet is this

war of rushing mouth and living food without a sound save for the

breaking of the seas. But let me tell of such a night.

I had spent an afternoon ashore with friends, and they had driven me

to Nauset Station just after nine o’clock. The moon, two days from

the full, was very lovely on the moors and on the channels and flat,

moon-green isles of the lagoon; the wind was southerly and light. Moved

by its own enormous rhythms, the surf that night was a stately incoming

of high, serried waves, the last wave alone breaking. This inmost wave

broke heavily in a smother and rebound of sandy foam, and thin sheets

of seethe, racing before it up the beach, vanished endlessly into the

endless thirst of the sands. As I neared the surf rim to begin my walk

to the southward, I saw that the beach close along the breakers, as

far as the eye would reach, was curiously atwinkle in the moonlight

with the convulsive dance of myriads of tiny fish. The breakers were

spilling them on the sands; the surf was aswarm with the creatures; it

was indeed, for the time being, a surf of life. And this surf of life

was breaking for miles along the Cape.

Little herring or mackerel? Sand eels? I picked a dancer out of the

slide and held him up to the moon. It was the familiar sand eel or sand

launce, _Ammodytes americanus_, of the waters between Hatteras and

Labrador. This is no kin of the true eels, though he rather resembles

one in general appearance, for his body is slender, eel-like, and

round. Instead of ending bluntly, however, this “eel” has a large,

well-forked tail. The fish in the surf were two and three inches long.

Homeward that night I walked barefooted in the surf, watching the

convulsive, twinkling dance, now and then feeling the squirm of a fish

across my toes. Presently something occurred which made me keep to the

thinnest edge of the foam. Some ten feet ahead, an enormous dogfish

was suddenly borne up the beach on the rim of a slide of foam; he moved

with it unresisting while it carried him; the slide withdrawing and

drying up, it rolled him twice over seaward; he then twisted heavily,

and another minor slide carried him back again to shore. The fish was

about three feet long, a real junior shark, purplish black in the

increasing light--for the moon was moving west across the long axis of

the breakers--and his dark, important bulk seemed strange in the bright

dance of the smaller fish about him.

It was then that I began to look carefully at the width of gathering

seas. Here were the greater fish, the mouths, the eaters who had driven

the “eels” ashore to the edge of their world and into ours. The surf

was alive with dogfish, aswarm with them, with the rush, the cold

bellies, the twist and tear of their wolfish violence of life. Yet

there was but little sign of it in the waters--a rare fin slicing past,

and once the odd and instant glimpse of a fish embedded like a fly in

amber in the bright, overturning volute of a wave.

Too far in, the dogfish were now in the grip of the surf, and presently

began to come ashore. As I walked the next half mile every other

breaker seemed to leave behind its ebb a mauled and stranded sharklet

feebly sculling with his tail. I kicked many back into the seas,

risking a toe, perhaps; some I caught by the tails and flung, for I did

not want them corrupting on the beach. The next morning, in the mile

and three quarters between the Fo’castle and the station, I counted

seventy-one dogfish lying dead on the upper beach. There were also a

dozen or two skates--the skate is really a kind of shark--which had

stranded the same night. Skates follow in many things, and are forever

being flung upon these sands.

I sat up late that night at the Fo’castle, often putting down the book

I read to return to the beach.

A little after eleven came Bill Eldredge to the door, with a grin

on his face and one hand held behind his back. “Have you ordered

to-morrow’s dinner yet?” said he. “No.” “Well, here it is,” and Bill

produced a fine cod from behind his back. “Just found him right in

front of your door, alive and flopping. Yes, yes, haddock and cod often

chase those sand eels in with the bigger fish; often find them on

the beach about this time of the year. Got any place to keep him?

Let me have a piece of string and I’ll hang him on your clothesline.

He’ll keep all right.” With a deft unforking of two fingers, Bill drew

the line through the gills, and as he did so the heavy fish flopped

noisily. No fear about him being dead. Make a nice chowder. Bill

stepped outside; I heard him at the clothesline. Afterward we talked

till it was time for him to shoulder his clock and Coston case again,

pick up his watch cap, whistle in his little black dog, and go down

over the dune to the beach and Nauset Station.

[Illustration: _The Sequel of Fog on a Summer Night_]

There were nights in June when there was phosphorescence in the surf

and on the beach, and one such night I think I shall remember as the

most strange and beautiful of all the year.

Early this summer the middle beach moulded itself into a bar, and

between it and the dunes are long, shallow runnels into which the ocean

spills over at high tide. On the night I write of, the first quarter

of the moon hung in the west, and its light on the sheets of incoming

tide coursing thin across the bar was very beautiful to see. Just after

sundown I walked to Nauset with friends who had been with me during

the afternoon; the tide was still rising, and a current running in

the pools. I lingered at the station with my friends till the last

of sunset had died, and the light upon the planet, which had been

moonlight mingled with sunset pink, had cleared to pure cold moon.

Southward, then, I turned, and because the flooded runnels were deep

close by the station, I could not cross them and had to walk their

inner shores. The tide had fallen half a foot, perhaps, but the

breakers were still leaping up against the bar as against a wall, the

greater ones still spilling over sheets of vanishing foam.

It grew darker with the westing of the moon. There was light on the

western tops of the dunes, a fainter light on the lower beach and the

breakers; the face of the dunes was a unity of dusk.

The tide had ebbed in the pools, and their edges were wet and dark.

There was a strange contrast between the still levels of the pool and

the seethe of the sea. I kept close to the land edge of the lagoons,

and as I advanced my boots kicked wet spatters of sand ahead as

they might have kicked particles of snow. Every spatter was a crumb

of phosphorescence; I walked in a dust of stars. Behind me, in my

footprints, luminous patches burned. With the double-ebb moonlight and

tide, the deepening brims of the pools took shape in smouldering, wet

fire. So strangely did the luminous speckles smoulder and die and glow

that it seemed as if some wind were passing, by whose breath they were

kindled and extinguished. Occasional whole breakers of phosphorescence

rolled in out of the vague sea--the whole wave one ghostly motion, one

creamy light--and, breaking against the bar, flung up pale sprays of

fire.

A strange thing happens here during these luminous tides. The

phosphorescence is itself a mass of life, sometimes protozoan its

origin, sometimes bacterial, the phosphorescence I write of being

probably the latter. Once this living light has seeped into the

beach, colonies of it speedily invade the tissues of the ten thousand

thousand sand fleas which are forever hopping on this edge of ocean.

Within an hour the grey bodies of these swarming amphipods, these

useful, ever hungry sea scavengers (_Orchestia agilis_; _Talorchestia

megalophthalma_), show phosphorescent pinpoints, and these points grow

and unite till the whole creature is luminous. The attack is really

a disease, an infection of light. The process had already begun when

I arrived on the beach on the night of which I am writing, and the

luminous fleas hopping off before my boots were an extraordinary

sight. It was curious to see them hop from the pool rims to the

upper beach, paling as they reached the width of peaceful moonlight

lying landward of the strange, crawling beauty of the pools. This

infection kills them, I think; at least, I have often found the larger

creature lying dead on the fringe of the beach, his huge porcelain

eyes and water-grey body one core of living fire. Round and about him,

disregarding, ten thousand kinsmen, carrying on life and the plan of

life, ate of the bounty of the tide.