Boats working Mazurel Sound begin each month at the wax chandler's, and every crew complains about the price. Beeswax climbs when the chandler's hives fail, and the sirens do not adjust their habits to match. A lump the size of a thumb joint goes into each ear before the mooring line comes off the post. A skipper who forgets his is lashed to the tiller by his own crew, who enjoy the job more than they admit.
The first written mention is a customs note scratched on a roof slate at Cuvenna Skerry: four boats overdue, one man returned, and the word "humming." Some generations later a pilot drew the Gannet Stack on his chart with a woman seated on top of it and wrote "quiet" beside her. He meant a warning. Readers took it as a recommendation, and boats went to look. By the time the harbor kept proper ledgers, the wrecks around the stack outnumbered the houses on the quay, and the sirens had settled into the hulls the way gulls settle into a roof. From a boat, an adult is a young woman of startling beauty, sitting on a wet rock in a net shawl with one hand lifted, plainly in need of rescue. Close in, the picture turns: the jaw unhinges on rows of needle teeth, the eyes go lidless and black, the fingers lengthen into hooked claws, and the throat and shoulders scale over gray-green. The mouth stays open on one held note even when nothing sounds.
I rowed out with one ear waxed and one bare and had the boy count strokes until the note thinned, then rowed the same count along a measured stretch of beach to learn what each stroke covered. Downwind the song carried 1,100 yards. Upwind it gave out at 300. When I came back three winters later the stack was empty. Quarrymen had taken its crown for harbor stone, and the sirens had moved to a grounded grain barge half a mile east. The song had changed as well. It now carried the two notes of the harbor fog horn, sung slightly flat, and the net-menders at Cuvenna took the flatness personally.
Sirens lift gloves, left ones only, from any hand resting on a gunwale, and hang them along the barge's rail. I counted thirty-one, none matched. Crews leave one worn left glove on the last piling at the harbor mouth, so that the sirens take that one and not a good one. Lisbet Orrow, who mends nets on the quay, hangs hers every morning. "She can have the left," she says. "The right stays with me."
- Classification
- Shape-changing siren, rock-bound lurer
- Habitat
- Rock skerries and grounded wrecks
- Danger
- High
- Size
- reach near 9 ft when changed
- Activity
- Crepuscular
- Realm
- Cold coastal sounds and skerries
- Binomial
- Cantrix scopulina
- Diet
- Herring, cod, storm-blown seabirds
- Temperament
- Patient, covetous, petty