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Doc was collecting marine animals in the Great
Tide Pool on the tip of the Peninsula. It is a fabulous place;
when the tide is in, a wave-churned basin, creamy with foam,
whipped by the combers that roll in from the whisting buoy on
the reef. But when the tide goes out the little water world becomes
quiet and lovely. The sea is very clear and the bottom becomes
fantastic with hurrying, fighting, feeding, breeding animals.
Crabs rush from frond to frond of the waving algae. Starfish
squat over mussels and limpets, attach their million little suckers
and then slowly lift with incredible power until the prey is
broken from the rock. And then the starfish stomach comes out
and envelops its food. Orange and speckled and fluted nudibranchs
slide gracefully over the rocks, their skirts waving like the
dresses of Spanish dancers. And black eels poke their heads out
of crevices and wait for prey. The snapping shrimps with their
trigger claws pop loudly. The lovely, coloured world is glassed
over. Hermit crabs like frantic children scamper on the bottom
sand. And now one, finding an empty snail shell he likes better
than his own, creeps out, exposing his soft body to the enemy
for a moment, and then pops into the new shell. A wave breaks
over the barrier, and churns the glassy water for a moment and
mixes bubbles into the pool, and then it clears and is tranquil
and lovely and murderous again. Here a crab tears a leg from
his brother. The anemones expand like soft and brilliant flowers,
inviting any tired and perplexed animal to lie for a moment in
their arms, and when some small crab or little tide-pool Johnnie
accepts the green and purple invitation, the petals whip in,
the stinging cells shoot tiny narcotic needles into the prey
and it grows weak and perhaps sleepy while the searing caustic
digestive acids melt its body down.
Then the creeping murderer, the octopus, steals
out, slowly, softly, moving like a grey mist, pretending now
to be a bit of weed, now a rock, now a lump of decaying meat,
while its evil goat eyes watch coldly. It oozes and flows toward
a feeding crab, and as it comes close its yellow eyes burn and
its body turns rosy with the pulsing colour of anticipation and
rage. Then suddenly it runs lightly on the tip of its arms, as
ferociously as a charging cat. It leaps savagely on the crab,
there is a puff of black fluid, and the struggling mass is obscured
in the sepia cloud while the octopus murders the crab. On the
exposed rocks out of water, the barnacles bubble behind their
closed doors and the limpets dry out. And down to the rocks come
the black flies to eat anything they can find. The sharp smell
of iodine from the algae, and the lime smell of calcareous bodies
and the smell of powerful protean, smell of sperm and ova fill
the air. On the exposed rocks the starfish emit semen and eggs
from between their rays. The smells of life and richness, of
death and digestion, of decay and birth, burden the air. And
salt spray blows in from the barrier where the ocean waits for
its rising-tide strength to permit it back into the Great Tide
Pool again. And on the reef the whistling buoy bellows like a
sad and patient bull.
Chapter VI of "Cannery
Row"
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