Brood tide reaches Rovnica Bay in the last week of the cold months, and the argument arrives with it. The males come in first. Upright in the shallows, a giant sea horse stands nine feet from the crook of its snout to the curl of its tail, ribbed in bone bands the color of old rust, with a brood pouch under its belly as big as a flour barrel. Each winds its tail around whatever will hold and waits there, ticking, for the females to come in from the deep and fill the pouch. It will not let go for eleven days.
That is why the bay has pole-setters. Three families drive ash trunks into the shallows each autumn so the males have something to grip, and they are paid in salted herring and woken when the first male is sighted. Without a pole a male takes the nearest thing, which has been a fish weir, a jetty leg and, one year, a skiff loaded with barrels. This year the argument is about where the poles go. Kazek Dolinar, who sets them, wants them inside the bay, south of the weirs, where the water lies flat. The net families want them out on Mlazna Bar, two miles off, away from their stakes. Both sides bring me the same evidence. On the bar the surf rolls a male off his pole twice a night, and the sand is pitted where he has been dragged. In the bay the males sit steady and feed, a pop and a cloud of shrimp gone up the snout, and leave pale scoured circles in the sand that anyone can follow. They also drop ring plates, dinner-plate discs of bone that flake from the bands, and the bay's tideline is thick with them.
Two winters ago I counted fifty-four poles on the flat. This year there are thirty-one. Ice took some. The third family moved inland and nobody replaced its share, so the males crowd what is left, three to a pole, tails knotted together like wet rope. Some have started on the weir stakes anyway. No one whistles or hums over the water in brood week. A male answers a whistle by rising and clicking, delighted, and he rises under whatever made it, so the net men muffle their oars in sacking and keep their mouths shut.
My ruling is the bay, with every pole at least forty feet from a stake, since a male will drift toward the nearest wood in the dark. The net families grumble. Kazek spits on his palm and lifts the maul. "Forty feet," he says, "and not one inch more for the net men."
- Classification
- Giant bony-ringed marine fish
- Habitat
- Cold, sheltered bays and kelp flats
- Danger
- Minimal
- Size
- 9 ft upright, snout to tail curl
- Activity
- Seasonal
- Realm
- Coastal shallows
- Binomial
- Hippocampodon rostratus
- Diet
- Shrimp swarms and small crustaceans
- Temperament
- Patient, gentle, devoted to its pole