“Turbulence! Did you say turbulence, young fella? By God, I’ll tell you about a turbulence that’ll have your scales standing upside down and turning white at the tips!” Mmph. A phlemy expectoration, she used a subtle, sideways slip to steady a sudden, slight instability. “Where was I, ah, yes – there we were, our tightly assembled three hundred and forty thousand, facing an enormous abyss.” Rheumy eyes took on that scrunched, semi-closed disposition, and peeked back through the watery past.
“Our school had only recently drawn together. Discipline dictated our survival, and our every movement, our ordering, our turns, left or right, up or down, from the front, at the rear, or resting in the mid-sections practiced, over and over. We were uniformly sized, kitted and experienced.”
“Training was a series of endless drills. The Drill Sergeant was a mean Spratt, brooking no dissension. Over the generations, instruction had been reduced to jargon, scarcely understood through the junior ranks, mostly non-verbal signs that had the school moving en masse, this way, and that, one moment a silver phalanx, dense, solid, immense and in the flick of a fin, gone! On and on we practiced! Moving at ‘operational’ speed and in one flick, a turn and in that same instance, effectively achieving ‘escape’ speed. Wonderful!
“A manoeuvre that I took personal delight in, occurred when the school was moving northward, a bitterly cold, sparklingly blue above. For the trick to work, there needed to be shafts of silvery wonder coming down and through the school. With conditions aligning, the Maestro would give the signal, a sharp left-hand turn and we entirely disappeared. My God, I just loved it, and I chortled, bubbling as I pictured the rows of hungry, expectant mouths snapping shut, mostly empty!
“But the endless training paid off. We were a disciplined pack, and I participated and survived many potential devastations. I remember one time when our navigational leaders miscalculated. Instead of the open world, we were in contained, deep but narrow confines. Deputations of senior members sought manual observation to correct our navigational snafu. It meant moving up to where the silvery shafts appear. I was a member of one of those teams, and vividly recall the green steepness on either side. Everything tasted different too, things were warmer, stiller.
“And I saw them too. Hundreds and hundreds of birds, maybe they were ducks, in a row, and in the instance that our team members saw them, they saw us too. They rose as one, squawking in an echoey chorus. They wielded, dove, sploosh, beaks at the ready, following our panicked escape down into the darkness.
“We mostly survived. The turbulent energy generated as we turned and fled provided a safety shield, a barrier that both confused the birds and provided a slipstream for the school to ride into the depths.
A few months after the birds, the school was moving south, away from the world of ice. Warmer climes, plankton, better pickings. The school relaxed somewhat, maybe our guard slipped a notch, too! One moment we were cruising, the next there were beaked mouths at every turn, snapping, grabbing at the flanks of the school with frenzied success. There were turtles (or were they tortoises) coming at us from below, launching into our junior, central ranks from above, so many that our flight-turns were ineffective. Surface turbulence was attracting giant Pacific gulls and albatross. And when we thought it couldn’t get any worse, up from the deep arrived a pod of Blue whales. Talk about turbulence! They circled, tail-slapped, breached and scooped, baleen filters guiding thousands of my comrades into those dark vortexes.
Attempts to regroup were being tried, largely unsuccessfully until I noticed what I thought was a fixed, dark recess coming up from the watery depths. Assuming leadership, I gave the signal, our depleted force moved left suddenly, right and down maximising our collective forces and swiftly entered the cave.
The beaks continued for a while, snapping, some successful attacks. But with our rear and flanks largely protected, we were able to mount our own forward actions, collective and sustained nipping at flippers, eyes, legs. They wearied and retreated, while the whales were left to move over the battlefield, scooping up the remains of dead and broken bodies.
That was my last battle. When the school moved on, I decided to stay in the cave, moving out occasionally when hunger dictated. I had eggs to lay, youngsters to raise, a new generation of anchovy to nurture.