A cave fisher hangs from a cavern roof with its back against the stone and lets down one glistening line, which it reels in the moment anything touches it. It will wait weeks for that touch. At Lysbotn, a limestone throat above the fjord village of Aldvik, one has held the same crack in the third chamber for at least eleven years. Its carapace is slate blue with orange banding, and a rusted iron arrowhead sits wedged between two plates, the shaft long rotted away. The left pincer ends in a blunt knob where the tip once snapped and healed over.
People in Aldvik know it is near by sound before sight. A fisher knocks its pincers on rock, two slow clacks and a pause, to settle the line, and the knocking stops when a lamp comes into view. They read the ceiling too. A patch scraped pale of moss, about the size of a door, means something heavy has been hanging there, and under each roost lies a drift of picked bones and flattened lantern tins. The rule is the boot. Before a party enters any passage, the first caver drags an old boot packed with gravel along the floor on a rope. If the boot lifts by itself, everyone turns around. Nobody argues with the boot, and nobody goes back for one that has been taken.
They are mistaken about the line. They call it the tongue and believe that cutting it kills the animal, so most households keep a hatchet for the purpose, and a cave counts as cleared once the strands are down. The filament comes from a gland under the belly, and a severed line is back by morning. Eirik Aasen, who guides parties into Lysbotn, keeps a shed shell on his porch. I measured it with iron calipers: thirty-one inches from head plate to tail. He cuts lines too. He says it gives the hands something to do.
Over three trips in eleven years I have watched the boot rope shrink. It ran forty feet the first summer and twenty-five on the third, because the fisher has crept toward daylight, a few paces each winter, and nobody trusts the longer length now. A second roost has opened in the second chamber, a scraped patch still raw at the edges. Leaving on the last trip, I turn at the cave mouth to check the rope. The boot is gone from its end. What remains is a frayed tuft, still wet, and Eirik coils it without a word and starts down toward the flat gray water of the fjord.
- Classification
- Cavern ambush predator, armored and six-legged
- Habitat
- Limestone cave ceilings and roof cracks
- Danger
- High
- Size
- 31 inches, head plate to tail
- Activity
- Always
- Realm
- Underground caverns above fjord country
- Binomial
- Speleochela filaria
- Diet
- Bats, blind fish, strays and lost cavers
- Temperament
- Patient, motionless, strikes on contact