The Wreck of the Red Bird: A Story of the Carolina Coast

by George Cary Eggleston

  CHAPTER VI.

  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 wasnecessary to make a series of very short "tacks," which gave Ned anopportunity to instruct his companions in the art of sailing a boat. Inthe main, however, there was an abundance of sea-room, and Ned could layhis course directly for Bee Island and keep the wind on the quarter. Itwas barely eleven o'clock, therefore, when the _Red Bird_ came to hermoorings on the island, and the boys went ashore.

  "Now the first thing that Robinson Crusoe did after he got his witsabout him," said Jack, "was to build his residence. Let's follow theexample of that experienced mariner, and choose our building-site beforewe begin to bring away things from the wreck; I mean, before we unloadour plunder."

  "Yes, that's our best plan," said Ned. "We don't want to do any morecarrying than we must. Let me see. We're on the north side of theisland. If I remember right, the negro quarters used to be to the eastof this spot, and the negroes must have got water from somewhere, sowe'd better look for the ruins of that African Troy, in search of theancient 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 onyour head does, in a shock. The large trees, as nearly as I can makeout, think six feet or so to be a proper interval between themselves,and the small trees have disposed themselves to the best of theirability between the big ones; then all kinds of vines have grown upamong the big and little trees, as if to make a sort of shrimp-net ofthe woods, and cane has grown up just to occupy any vacant spaces thatmight be left. It occurs to me that if we're to hunt anywhere exceptalong shore for the old quarters, we'd best make up our minds to clearthe island as we go."

  "I say, Charley," said Jack, "if you were obliged to clear an acre ofthis 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, longrest."

  "Yes, I suppose you'd need it. But that isn't what I meant. Never mindthat, however. Ned, I don't see why this isn't as good a place as anyfor our camp. There's a sort of bluff here, and we can clear away aplace for our hut and get the hut built with less labor than it wouldtake to find traces of negro quarters that were destroyed twelve orfifteen years ago."

  "Yes, but how about water?"

  "Well, I don't think it likely that we'd find any visible remains of awell in the other place, and if we did we'd have to dig it all outagain. Why not dig here?"

  After some discussion, and the examination of the shore for a shortdistance in each direction, this suggestion was adopted. The building ofa shelter was easy work. It was necessary only to erect a framework ofpoles, to cut bushes and place them against the sides for walls, and tocover the whole with palmete leaves--that is to say, with the leaves ofa species of dwarf palm which grows in that region in abundance. Theseleaves are known to persons at the North only in the form of palm-leaffans. On the coast of South Carolina they grow in all the swamps andwoodlands.

  A little labor made a bunk for the boys to sleep upon, and while Ned andCharley filled it with long gray Spanish moss, Jack got dinner ready,first rowing out from shore and catching fish enough for that meal whilehis companions finished the house.

  "Now," said Jack, when dinner was over and the boys had stretchedthemselves 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 wedon'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. "Twothings, 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 incheslong, very slender, and very singularly shaped.

  "See," he said; "its jaw protrudes in so queer a way that I can't makeout which side of the creature is top and which bottom. Turn either sideyou please up, and it looks as if you ought to turn the other upinstead; and then the thing has a sort of match-lighter on top of hishead, 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 thisoval line was crossed diagonally by other ridges, arranged with perfectregularity. The whole looked something like the figure on the oppositepage.

  "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 thismatch-lighter."

  "I'm afraid I can't help you much," said Ned. "A year ago I would havetold you at once that the fish is a shark's pilot, so called because hefollows ships as sharks do, and the sailors think he acts as a pilot forthe 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 cyclopaedias andnatural histories and ichthyologies about our fishes down here, and havefound 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 ifthere was any sort of cousinship between him and the dolphin, I soonfound that the whiting isn't a whiting at all, but I couldn't find outany thing else about him. The whiting described in the books is a sortof codfish's cousin, and he lives only at the North. Neither thepictures nor the descriptions of him at all resemble our whiting, so Idon't know what sort of fish our whiting is. I only know that he isn't awhiting, and isn't the remotest relation to the dolphin, because he is afish 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 principalcetaceans. They are not fish, but marine animals, and they suckle theiryoung."

  "Well, that's news to me," said Charley.

  "Now, then," said Jack, "if you two have finished your little sidediscussion, suppose we come back to the subject in hand. What do youknow, Ned, about this fish that I have in my hand, and why don't youcall 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 doin the whiting's. They describe a shark's pilot which is as differentfrom this as a whale is from a heifer calf, and so I don't know what tocall 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 myhook, and when I pulled up this insignificant little creature, with thematch box on his head, I was disgusted. I looked at him to see if hehadn't a steam-engine somewhere about him, because he pulled so hard,and that's what made me observe his match box and his curiousup-side-down-itiveness."

  "I say, Ned," said Charley, "why is it that our Southern fishes are soneglected in the books?"

  "Well, I've asked myself that question, and the only answer I can thinkof is this: in the first place, there is no great commercial interest infishing here as there is at the North; and then the natural historybooks and the cyclopaedias are all written at the North or in Europe, andso there are thousands of curious fish down here which are notmentioned. There's the pin-cushion fish, for example. I can't find atrace 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 awalnut, and as round as a base ball."

  "Half transparent, is he? Red, shaded off into white? with wate
r insideof him, and pimples, like pin-heads, all over him, and eyes and mouthright on his fair rotundity, making him look like a picture of the fullmoon 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. Icaught 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 downon 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'snothing left of him except a small lump of jelly. They're very curiousthings. I wish we had a good popular book about our Southern fishes andthe curious things that live in the water here on the coast."

  "Don't you suppose these things are represented at all in scientificbooks?" asked Jack.

  "I suppose that many of them are, but many of them are not, and thosethat are described, are described by names that we know nothing about,and so only a naturalist could find the descriptions or recognize themwhen found. With all Northern fishes that are familiarly known, the caseis different. If a Northern boy wants to find out more than he knowsalready about a codfish, he looks for the information under the familiarname 'Codfish,' and finds it there. He does not need to know in advancethat 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 familiarwith, he finds the information under the name whiting; but thescientific men who wrote the books, however much they may know about thefish that we call whiting, do not know, I suppose, that it is anywherecalled whiting, and so they don't put the information about it underthat head. They only come down South as far as New Jersey, and tellabout a species of fish which is there called whiting, though it isn'tthe real whiting. If they had known that still another and a verydifferent fish goes by that name down here, they would have told usabout 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 makea specialty of our Southern fishes. When we do that and give the worldall the information we can get by really intelligent observation, allthe scientific writers will welcome the addition made to the generalstore 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 ofgeneral principles to be able to understand what we see. Let's formhabits of observation, and let's study science systematically; afterthat we can observe intelligently, and make a real contribution toknowledge."

  "You're not going to write your book on the Marine Fauna of the SouthernStates 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.