ODD FISH.
The sea-breeze was fresh and full, and it blew from a favorable quarter.
There were various windings about among the small islands to be made,
and now and then the course for a brief distance was against the wind,
and as this was the case only where the channel was narrow, it was
necessary to make a series of very short "tacks," which gave Ned an
opportunity to instruct his companions in the art of sailing a boat. In
the main, however, there was an abundance of sea-room, and Ned could lay
his course directly for Bee Island and keep the wind on the quarter. It
was barely eleven o'clock, therefore, when the _Red Bird_ came to her
moorings on the island, and the boys went ashore.
"Now the first thing that Robinson Crusoe did after he got his wits
about him," said Jack, "was to build his residence. Let's follow the
example of that experienced mariner, and choose our building-site before
we begin to bring away things from the wreck; I mean, before we unload
our plunder."
"Yes, that's our best plan," said Ned. "We don't want to do any more
carrying than we must. Let me see. We're on the north side of the
island. If I remember right, the negro quarters used to be to the east
of this spot, and the negroes must have got water from somewhere, so
we'd better look for the ruins of that African Troy, in search of the
ancient reservoirs."
"How far from the shore were the quarters?" asked Charley.
"I don't remember, if I ever knew; but why?"
"Well, it seems to me this island has grown up somewhat as the hair on
your head does, in a shock. The large trees, as nearly as I can make
out, think six feet or so to be a proper interval between themselves,
and the small trees have disposed themselves to the best of their
ability between the big ones; then all kinds of vines have grown up
among the big and little trees, as if to make a sort of shrimp-net of
the woods, and cane has grown up just to occupy any vacant spaces that
might be left. It occurs to me that if we're to hunt anywhere except
along shore for the old quarters, we'd best make up our minds to clear
the island as we go."
"I say, Charley," said Jack, "if you were obliged to clear an acre of
this growth with your own hands what would you do first?"
"I'd get a good axe, a grubbing hoe, some matches, and kindling wood;
then I'd take a good look at the thicket; and then I'd take a long, long
rest."
"Yes, I suppose you'd need it. But that isn't what I meant. Never mind
that, however. Ned, I don't see why this isn't as good a place as any
for our camp. There's a sort of bluff here, and we can clear away a
place for our hut and get the hut built with less labor than it would
take to find traces of negro quarters that were destroyed twelve or
fifteen years ago."
"Yes, but how about water?"
"Well, I don't think it likely that we'd find any visible remains of a
well in the other place, and if we did we'd have to dig it all out
again. Why not dig here?"
After some discussion, and the examination of the shore for a short
distance in each direction, this suggestion was adopted. The building of
a shelter was easy work. It was necessary only to erect a framework of
poles, to cut bushes and place them against the sides for walls, and to
cover the whole with palmete leaves--that is to say, with the leaves of
a species of dwarf palm which grows in that region in abundance. These
leaves are known to persons at the North only in the form of palm-leaf
fans. On the coast of South Carolina they grow in all the swamps and
woodlands.
A little labor made a bunk for the boys to sleep upon, and while Ned and
Charley filled it with long gray Spanish moss, Jack got dinner ready,
first rowing out from shore and catching fish enough for that meal while
his companions finished the house.
"Now," said Jack, when dinner was over and the boys had stretched
themselves out for a rest, "it's nearly sunset, and we're all tired.
We've got the best part of two kegs of water left, so I move that we
don't begin digging our well till morning."
"Agreed," said the other boys, glad enough to be idle.
"Now, I've got something I want you to tell me about," said Jack. "Two
things, in fact." With that, he went to the boat and looked about.
Presently he came back and said:
"One of 'em's dried up. Here's the other."
He handed Ned a queer-looking fish, almost black, about eight inches
long, very slender, and very singularly shaped.
"See," he said; "its jaw protrudes in so queer a way that I can't make
out which side of the creature is top and which bottom. Turn either side
you please up, and it looks as if you ought to turn the other up
instead; and then the thing has a sort of match-lighter on top of his
head, or on the bottom--I don't know which it is. Look."
He pointed to the creature's head. There was a flat, oval figure there,
made by a ridge in the skin, and the flat space enclosed within this
oval line was crossed diagonally by other ridges, arranged with perfect
regularity. The whole looked something like the figure on the opposite
page.
[Illustration]
"Now, what I want to know," said Jack, "is what sort of fish this is,
which side of him belongs on top, and what use he makes of this
match-lighter."
"I'm afraid I can't help you much," said Ned. "A year ago I would have
told you at once that the fish is a shark's pilot, so called because he
follows ships as sharks do, and the sailors think he acts as a pilot for
the sharks. But now I don't know what to call it."
"Why not?" asked Charley.
"Because I don't know. I've been reading up in the cyclopædias and
natural histories and ichthyologies about our fishes down here, and have
found out that whatever I know isn't so."
"Why, how's that?"
"Well, take the whiting, for example. When I began reading up to see if
there was any sort of cousinship between him and the dolphin, I soon
found that the whiting isn't a whiting at all, but I couldn't find out
any thing else about him. The whiting described in the books is a sort
of codfish's cousin, and he lives only at the North. Neither the
pictures nor the descriptions of him at all resemble our whiting, so I
don't know what sort of fish our whiting is. I only know that he isn't a
whiting, and isn't the remotest relation to the dolphin, because he is a
fish and has scales, while the dolphin is a cetacean."
"What's a cetacean?" asked Charley.
"A vertebrated, mammiferous marine animal."
"Well; go on; English all that."
"Well, whales, dolphins narwhals, and porpoises are the principal
cetaceans. They are not fish, but marine animals, and they suckle their
young."
"Well, that's news to me," said Charley.
"Now, then," said Jack, "if you two have finished your little side
discussion, suppose we come back to the subject in hand. What do you
know, Ned, about this fish that I have in my hand, and why don't you
call him a shark's pilot now, as you say you did a year ago?"
"Why, because the books treat me the same way in his case that they do
in the whiting's. They describe a shark's pilot which is as different
from this as a whale is from a heifer calf, and so I don't know what to
call this fellow. Did he make a fight when you caught him?"
"Indeed he did. I was sure I had a twenty-pound something or other on my
hook, and when I pulled up this insignificant little creature, with the
match box on his head, I was disgusted. I looked at him to see if he
hadn't a steam-engine somewhere about him, because he pulled so hard,
and that's what made me observe his match box and his curious
up-side-down-itiveness."
"I say, Ned," said Charley, "why is it that our Southern fishes are so
neglected in the books?"
"Well, I've asked myself that question, and the only answer I can think
of is this: in the first place, there is no great commercial interest in
fishing here as there is at the North; and then the natural history
books and the cyclopædias are all written at the North or in Europe, and
so there are thousands of curious fish down here which are not
mentioned. There's the pin-cushion fish, for example. I can't find a
trace of that curious creature in any of the books."
"What sort of thing is a pin-cushion fish?" asked Jack.
"He's simply a hollow sphere, a globular bag about twice the size of a
walnut, and as round as a base ball."
"Half transparent, is he? Red, shaded off into white? with water inside
of him, and pimples, like pin-heads, all over him, and eyes and mouth
right on his fair rotundity, making him look like a picture of the full
moon made into a human face?" asked Jack eagerly.
"Yes, that's the pin-cushion fish."
"I thought so. That's my other one," said Jack.
"What do you mean?" asked Ned.
"Why, that's the other thing I had to show you, but couldn't find. I
caught him with the cast net."
"And kept him to show to me?" asked Ned.
"Yes, but he disappeared."
"Of course he did. He spat himself away."
"How's that?"
"Why, if you take a pin-cushion fish out of the water, and put him down
on a board, he'll sit there looking like a judge for a little while;
then he'll begin to spit, and when he spits all the water out, there's
nothing left of him except a small lump of jelly. They're very curious
things. I wish we had a good popular book about our Southern fishes and
the curious things that live in the water here on the coast."
"Don't you suppose these things are represented at all in scientific
books?" asked Jack.
"I suppose that many of them are, but many of them are not, and those
that are described, are described by names that we know nothing about,
and so only a naturalist could find the descriptions or recognize them
when found. With all Northern fishes that are familiarly known, the case
is different. If a Northern boy wants to find out more than he knows
already about a codfish, he looks for the information under the familiar
name 'Codfish,' and finds it there. He does not need to know in advance
that the cod is a fish of the _Gadus_ family, and the _Morrhua vulgaris_
species. So, when he wants to know about the whiting that he is familiar
with, he finds the information under the name whiting; but the
scientific men who wrote the books, however much they may know about the
fish that we call whiting, do not know, I suppose, that it is anywhere
called whiting, and so they don't put the information about it under
that head. They only come down South as far as New Jersey, and tell
about a species of fish which is there called whiting, though it isn't
the real whiting. If they had known that still another and a very
different fish goes by that name down here, they would have told us
about that too, in the same way."
"What's the remedy?" asked Charley.
"For you, or Jack, or me," answered Ned, "to study science, and to make
a specialty of our Southern fishes. When we do that and give the world
all the information we can get by really intelligent observation, all
the scientific writers will welcome the addition made to the general
store of knowledge. That is the way it has all been found out."
"Why can't we begin now?"
"Because we haven't learned how to observe. We don't know enough of
general principles to be able to understand what we see. Let's form
habits of observation, and let's study science systematically; after
that we can observe intelligently, and make a real contribution to
knowledge."
"You're not going to write your book on the Marine Fauna of the Southern
States to-night, are you?" asked Jack.
"No, certainly not," said Ned, with a laugh at his own enthusiasm.
"Then let's go to bed; I'm sleepy," said Jack.