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The caplin'll school any
time from naow on. Where'll we lay, Tom Platt?"

Pushing, shoving, and hauling, greeting old friends here and
warning old enemies there, Commodore Tom Platt led his little
fleet well to leeward of the general crowd, and immediately three
or four men began to haul on their anchors with intent to lee-bow
the "We're Heres". But a yell of laughter went up as a dory shot
from her station with exceeding speed, its occupant pulling madly
on the roding.

"Give her slack!" roared twenty voices. "Let him shake it out."

"What's the matter?" said Harvey, as the boat flashed away to the
southward. "He's anchored, isn't he?"

"Anchored, sure enough, but his graound-tackle's kinder shifty,"
said Dan, laughing. "Whale's fouled it. . . . Dip, Harve! Here
they come!"

The sea round them clouded and darkened, and then frizzed up in
showers of tiny silver fish, and over a space of five or six acres
the cod began to leap like trout in May; while behind the cod
three or four broad grey-black backs broke the water into boils.

Then everybody shouted and tried to haul up his anchor to get
among the school, and fouled his neighbour's line and said what
was in his heart, and dipped furiously with his dip-net, and
shrieked cautions and advice to his companions, while the deep
fizzed like freshly opened soda-water, and cod, men, and whales
together flung in upon the luckless bait. Harvey was nearly
knocked overboard by the handle of Dan's net. But in all the wild
tumult he noticed, and never forgot, the wicked, set little eye -
something like a circus elephant's eye - of a whale that drove
along almost level with the water, and, so he said, winked at him.
Three boats found their rodings fouled by these reckless mid-sea
hunters, and were towed half a mile ere their horses shook the
line free.

Then the caplin moved off and five minutes later there was no
sound except the splash of the sinkers overside, the flapping of
the cod, and the whack of the muckles as the men stunned them. It
was wonderful fishing. Harvey could see the glimmering cod below,
swimming slowly in droves, biting as steadily as they swam. Bank
law strictly forbids more than one hook on one line when the
dories are on the Virgin or the Eastern Shoals; but so close lay
the boats that even single hooks snarled, and Harvey found himself
in hot argument with a gentle, hairy Newfoundlander on one side
and a howling Portuguese on the other.

Worse than any tangle of fishing-lines was the confusion of the
dory-rodings below water. Each man had anchored where it seemed
good to him, drifting and rowing round his fixed point. As the
fish struck on less quickly, each man wanted to haul up and get to
better ground; but every third man found himself intimately
connected with some four or five neighbours. To cut another's
roding is crime unspeakable on the Banks; yet it was done, and
done without detection, three or four times that day.

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