In Which We Meet Darcy, Learn What Being in a Shoal Means and That Not All Fish Are Born

CHAPTER 1

Shoal Survivors

In which we meet Darcy, learn what being in a shoal means and that not all fish are born equal.

The shoal was in danger. Squeezed out from their home around Old Willow Bend they had been forced to roam the faster water of the main stream. Here in the rock tumbling current every member of the shoal had to work harder to keep together. It was hardest for the weaker fish; the younger and older shoal members or those whose fins weren’t quite perfect or who were carrying an injury or illness. And always there was the enemy, never far from the shoal, ready to pounce on a struggling fish or one that strayed too far from the protection of the shoal.

Darcy often wondered what stopped the predators from attacking the main shoal as readily as they would a single fish. Surely a lunge at the many fish who concentrated together at the centre of the shoal was bound to result in a victim every time? But something about the dancing silver flashes, random movement and panicked noisy tail swirls of the dace shoal seemed to confuse the river wolves that looked to the shoal for their food. Sure the tiger-striped perch, with their bristling crests and gaping mouths would occasionally dart into the shoal, but rarely did even the biggest and wisest in the ways of The River catch a shoal member in this way. So instead they circled and watched and waited – until some poor shoal member saw the flash of orange fins and knew that the stripe death had come for them.

Darcy didn’t worry about this on his own account, he was fin perfect and easily able to keep up with the shoal as it forayed further and further up river, seeking to replace their Old Willow Bend home, so recently stolen from them by the roach shoal that had forced them out. One hundred and twenty-three shoal members had left Old Willow Bend last autumn, when the leaves first floated on The River and the roach had come. Now there were just 98 left and the older shoal members began to talk about the coming of the ice, when food would become scarce and the perch would become more desperate and daring through hunger. Darcy was smarter than most of the shoal and he knew that there may even come a time when the shoal broke up under the pressure, the safety of the silver cloud of fishes being replaced by the terror of being alone, of darting from reed bed to rock shelter, of living in fear every second of every day. Like it had been when he was just a fry, hiding in the tangled roots and stalks of Old Willow Bend. Darcy remembered well how many fry had started that journey with him, indeed the roots had seemed thick with tiny dace as they shot this way and that chasing the tiny water insects that made up their diet in those early days. Not many of those fry now swam with the shoal: other than Darcy himself there were perhaps two dozen shoal mates who had been fry with him at Old Willow Bend.

So it was that, one bright spring morning found Darcy the dace shoal starting out again on its voyage upriver, the never ending hunt for food in the fast current that was so different to the Old Willow Bend days, when the slower reaches of the river would waft tasty morsels right into dainty dace mouths. That bounty belonged to the roach now, with which the smaller and less numerous dace could not hope to compete – still there was no point harking back to what had been lost, though Darcy. It was as the shoal was briefly resting in the slack water by the pilings of Stone Bridge that an event happened that was to change the lives of Darcy and the rest of the dace shoal.

A couple of large perch, with their gaping mouths and insatiable appetites, who lived in that vicinity, had lunged at a tired old dace. “Stripey” shouted one of the young dace, alerting his older shoal mate to the danger. The warning had come in time and the dace had been able to throw off his tiredness and disappear out of reach of his attacker in a flash of silver flanks. Missing out on a looked-for easy lunch, the two striped terrors had cast about in search of a possible mouthful. Safely huddled in the dazzling, bewildering dace shoal, Darcy watched as the larger of two perch, a humpbacked warrior distinguished by a tear that split his magnificent dorsal crest in two, spotted something out of the corner of his eye. Peeking out from behind one of the pilings was a much smaller perch, no bigger than Darcy himself, who had caught the beady black eye of their larger cousin. With a crash of his tail the big perch was after the newcomer, the other large stripey following in his wake, bubbles streaming from their pumping fins. Only the piling saved the little perch, her size letting her slip round it just in time as Rip-fin’s mouth opened to gobble her up.

Darcy looked on as, darting this way and that, the little perch girl tried desperately to keep ahead of her attackers. Safe within the shoal, Darcy could see the energy ebbing from her, the two larger perch having abandoned their initial frenzied attacks now hunted her down, taking it in turns to dart at her and cause her to shift hiding places. Nowhere she could go in this stretch of The River would be safe; there were no roots or nooks in which she could take refuge. The end was only a matter of time, and the little perch girl’s last sight, like so many small fish before her, would be impossibly huge gaping white maw of a large perch closing around her and then …. nothing.

What made Darcy act even he couldn’t explain. Did he feel sorry for the little perch? Perhaps in his dace heart she came to represent all the little fishes of The River, destined to be harried and hunted from the day they broke egg until the day they made a mistake, got to slow or were unlucky and went to the Great River in the sky. Who can tell – certainly not Darcy. Ever afterwards he would just say that, for a moment, that little perch girl seemed to him to be a shoal mate in need of help.

“Here” he called “come to the shoal”; but she didn’t seem to hear him, her concentration all focussed on the two predators closing in on her from either side. “We must help her” Darcy bubbled to the shoal, finning to the edge of it and dragging the shoal edge to wards where she was backed up against the stone facing of the bridge.

“Noooooo!” bubbled back the other shoal members as the shoal swirled closer to the stripeys “she’s not one of us.” Their instincts were resisting the movement towards the obvious danger, their shoal memory refusing to accept something new.

“We must help her” cried Darcy again, pushing harder, barging other dace on the shoal’s edge and knocking them towards the bridge face. As fast as he could knock them, however, the bewildered shoal members were back into the shoal. Then Darcy spied a friend, a fry mate who he had known since egg-break. “Duncan” he bubbled “help me move the shoal closer to the bridge.”

Now Duncan wasn’t perhaps the smartest dace who ever broke egg. Nor was he the fastest or the bravest; but two things set Duncan apart from the rest of the shoal. Firstly he believed in Darcy, and had followed his lead since they had been fry together, hunted by everything that swam in the reaches of Old Willow Bend. If it came to a choice, either listen to Darcy or follow the shoal, then Duncan was as likely to trust Darcy as he was to follow his shoal instincts. Darcy had got him out of more scrapes and dangerous situations than Duncan had had juicy caddis fly larvae. And that was a lot. You see the second thing that distinguished Duncan was his tremendous size. Duncan was by far the biggest dace in the shoal, half again as big as any of the other shoal members. “If it wasn’t for that dacy mouth of yours” shoal mates would say, meaning his upturned lips, “you’d be mistaken for a chub.” The older dace, those who passed on the shoal memories, said that he was quite the biggest dace they’d ever heard of, perhaps even as big as the legendary Dace Father who had founded the shoal in some dim and frankly vaguely described past (dace chronology being, at best, somewhat haphazard.)

So Duncan was big and, most of the time, was inclined to do whatever Darcy asked of him. These two characteristics may seem unconnected, but in fact the opposite was true. In following Darcy as a fry and later, as he grew, Duncan was unerringly given access to the best food in the greatest supply. Darcy just seemed to know where to go at any given time to find the larvae, water snails and other tasty grub that Duncan craved. So by following Darcy, Duncan grew bigger. A lot bigger. So much bigger that when Duncan decided the shoal was changing direction, change it did.

With Duncan’s help, and with Darcy directing, the reluctant and wild-eyed shoal members swam closer and closer to the face of the bridge. The shoal’s swirling took on a frantic, twisting and twirling aspect and picked up speed. Once a shoal started moving in one direction it picked up momentum and became almost a single animal – and this one was heading for the bridge at some speed.

By now Rip-fin and the other stripey were slowly finning towards the smaller perch, evil grins splitting into wide open maws as they prepared to reap the rewards of their hunt. Whether it was the startled glance over his humped shoulders, or some other instinct that made him look round only rip-fin could tell you, but turn he did – in time to see the silver maelstrom that the shoal had become bearing down on him. Rip-fin snapped his mouth shut, all thought of food suddenly gone from his mind and his own, little used, instincts for self-preservation kicked in. He dived beneath the leading edge of the shoal but his companion was not so lucky. Caught by the edge of the shoal he was slammed into the face of Stone Bridge before his limp body was swirled away by the eddies caused by the shoal’s passing as it squeezed under the bridge.

“There she is, grab her!” shouted Darcy to Duncan, the noise of the shoal and its endless motion making it hard to hear, to think or even to know which way was which. Duncan threw his bulk into the way of a shoal mate who, slightly dazed, bounced off him and by doing so saved the perch girl from suffering the same fate as her larger cousin, who now lay flat on the surface of The River and was being swept downstream by the current.

So it was that Priscilla found herself in the shoal. At first it was all she could do to keep upright and finning, the mad pell-mell rush of the agitated shoal carrying her through Stone Bridge and away from everything she had ever known. Slowly though the shoal calmed down, its members tired by the excitement and now a long way clear of the source of the danger that had made them shoal up in the first place. Priscilla found that she was able to keep up easily now, though no doubt her shorter, stubbier tail meant that she had to work harder than the dace around her. A dace finned alongside her, his eye roving over her. “Welcome to our shoal” he bubbled. Priscilla didn’t recognise Darcy; in fact the only dace she could tell apart from the others was Duncan. It was to him that she directed her thanks. “I owe you my life” she bubbled shyly.

Thanking a dace for her life was not easy for Priscilla you see. After all she had been brought up to believe that dace were inferior to perch, in fact were seen as nothing but food by the river predators such as pike and perch. Yet here was one who had clearly saved her from becoming food herself, and therefore deserving of her thanks. “Oh – you’re welcome, I guess” bubbled back Duncan “though its Darcy you should really thanks ‘cos he told me to do it.” He waved a pectoral fin at Darcy, who rolled over in acknowledgement. “Well – thank you both then” said Priscilla.

And that is how Priscilla, a small perch from Stone Bridge, joined the dace shoal, and it is there that their story really begins.