Pond and Stream

by Arthur Ransome

"I come from haunts of coot and hern,
I make a sudden sally,
and sparkle out among the fern,
To bicker down a valley.
"I chatter over stony ways
In little sharps and trebles,
I bubble into eddying bays,
I babble on the pebbles.
"I wind about, and in and out,
With here a blossom sailing,
And here and there a lusty trout,
And here and there a grayling."

This is not all the song, but only his favourite verses.

The Imp builds stone on stone across the stream, and makes a bridge with a dozen piers, and flat stones laid across. Or he sets a row of big stones in the stream, so that the water gushes between them. Then he piles little stones against them, and fills the joints with moss and earth until he makes a solid dam, so that the stream rises up and up, deeper and deeper, unable to go any farther, until at last it overflows the top of the dam and, rushing down, pulls everything to pieces beneath it. That is really exciting. It is exciting, too, to make little canoes of folded paper, and put a pebble in for ballast, and let them shoot the rapid, as if there were Red Indians inside, skilfully guiding with carved and painted paddles. These are only a few of the running water games.

In a little hollow of the stream, below the waterfalls, where the falling water has churned out a basin for itself, we sometimes see a trout, silvery bellied, and dark of back, with spots along his sides. But the place where we go to look for fish and other water folk is farther down the stream, below the wood and moorland. The beck is tamer down there, and has given up leaping from ledge to ledge, but flows quietly and smoothly, with a rippling song of its own, over a broad pebbly channel between the green meadows.

Footpaths cross the meadows, and where they come to the brook, bridges have been made by simply laying a huge flat slate stone from bank to bank across the water. One of our favourite ways of picnicking is to take our basket of food across the meadows and camp in the long grass close by one of these bridges. For then we get the best of everything. The best of the meadow things, purple orchids, and kingcups, like enormous buttercups twice gilded, and the delicate butterfly orchids, who are rare indeed, with their pale green spikes, with the white flowers tinted with green, fluttering round them. There is plenty of the little blue forget-me-not growing in clumps close to the water, and ragged robin, with his touzled pink petals close under the meadow hedge. And, best of all, perhaps we see a blue flash, and then another blue flash, and then another, and we know that there is a dragon fly shooting about over the water, and among the water plants, like a small azure comet. Sometimes, when he hovers over a flower, we can see him, but we can never see his wings. They move too fast. And when he is flying about, we can see nothing but the blue glittering flash that shows that he is there.

The best of the water things, too, we get. For lying on the banks of the stream, even while we are eating our sandwiches, we can see the caddises in the muddy shallows, and sometimes a water shrimp, and often a shoal of minnows. And, when the stream is low, the Imp can crawl along, from one side of the bridge to the other, under the big slate, putting his feet and hands on the stones left dry by the water. And that is fun indeed. The Elf and I lie flat on our fronts on the stone bridge, and hang our heads over the edge, and look backwards up the tunnel. And we see the Imp start in at the other end, and come crawling under like a rat in a wet hole. We see his hands and feet clawing about for stones to rest on, and the Elf shouts to him, "There is a stone there—no, there—there, stupid!" and sometimes he finds the stone, and sometimes he does not. We hear him grunt with hotness and excitement. And usually we hear him splash, as one leg or the other slips from its resting-place into the water. And then out he comes, mightily panting, at our end of the bridge. Somehow, with a great pull, he tumbles round on to the bank. And then, because one foot is wet he must take his shoe and stocking off. And if one shoe, why not the other? And if the Imp is allowed to take his shoes and stockings off, why not the Elf? And so, in about three minutes, there are two pairs of stockings and two pair of shoes neatly laid out on the bank, and two small people paddling in the stream, playing for a little, just for the joy of feeling the water stream past their ankles, and then searching about and looking for the little folk of the stream and talking about them, and asking all sorts of questions.

The first and easiest of all the small water folk for people like the Imp and the Elf to find are the caddisworms. Do you know a stonefly when you see one? A long brown-winged dirty-looking fly; you must often have seen one skimming along a brook, and settling on the pebbles that the water has left partly dry. A caddisworm is the thing that is some day going to be a stonefly, just as caterpillars are one day going to be butterflies or moths, and just as Imps and Elves are some day going to be grown-ups. That is all very well. But it does not tell you what a caddisworm is like. This is how the children find one. They paddle to a shallow part of the stream, where it flows under grassy banks, a place where the bottom is a little muddy, instead of being covered with small round pebbles. Then they stand and look into the water, up stream, for the ripples flowing from their ankles make it impossible to see into the water clearly if they look the other way. Then, searching carefully over the bottom, they look for anything small that moves. Presently they see something. It may be a little bundle of tiny sticks, or some pieces of dead grass, or a couple of irregularly shaped twigs, moving crookedly over the sand or mud. And they know that they have found a caddisworm. One or other of them, usually the Imp, dives a hand down into the water and catches it, which is very easy to do, for caddisworms are leisurely people, and do not move much faster than snails. It is lifted out of the water and held out, looking like a little bundle of sticks in the palm of his paw. But while we watch something comes jerkily out of the end of the bundle—a black head and six busy legs, and soon the caddis is crawling along as fast as it can, dragging its house behind it. For the bundle of sticks is really a log house that the caddis has built for itself. He builds it about his own body all round him, adding stick by stick in the neatest, cleverest manner. He builds with anything he can find, and it is often possible to make him a present of a twig, and see him use it up as a new log in the walls of his house. Nothing comes amiss to him. If the stream he lives in is full of little snails, he is quite ready to cover his home with their shells. Beads, twigs, pieces of grass cut short, flat seeds, scraps of paper, anything you can think of, he will somehow manage to make useful. The odd part of it is that instead of bringing the bricks to his house, or the logs, or whatever you like to call them, he goes in his house to look for each brick, and, when he has finished his building, he carries his home about with him.

As the Imp puts the caddis back into the water he sometimes sees a sudden stirring of the mud, as if someone had poked a pencil in and pulled it quickly out again, bringing a puff of fine sediment up into the water. In the place from which the puff came is a water-shrimp, who is far harder to catch than the caddis, for he is one of the nimblest of the little dodging water-folk. It takes the Imp ten minutes and a lot of splashing before, if he is lucky, he can catch one in the hollow of his hand. Then it lies in a little puddle of water in his palm, whirling itself about, and thrashing into ripples the waters of its prison. It is very like a seaside shrimp, only smaller. It is pale, muddy brown, and looks as if it had been made of tiny napkin rings slipped over each other like a little curly telescope, with active legs and busy feelers.

Sometimes as the children paddle up the stream they see a brown cloud in the water, darting up and up before them in swift swimming jerks. "Minnows!" they shout, and "Minnows, Ogre, look!" and watch the shoal of little fishes flashing through the water just out of reach of them. From moment to moment one of them turns half over in the water, with a flash of silver as he turns. And sometimes, when the Imp and the Elf are not paddling, and we are all three of us lying on the bank, we see the shoal swim slowly past us, and watch the minnows fling themselves right out of the water after the tiny flies that play over the surface of the stream. Then it is as if a clever juggler were hidden under the water and were throwing little curved knives up from the bottom of the stream to twist and sparkle in the air, and then fall plosh, plosh, into widening circles of ripples. Minnow after minnow leaps out of the water, turns and falls, and the ripples of the different splashes cross one another and cut the water into a thousand thousand glittering points of light.