Pond and Stream

by Arthur Ransome

Sometimes we hear a bigger splash than is made by a minnow, and looking up the stream we see something swimming strongly through the water, a double trail of ripples flowing out on either side of him. Just the nose of him is above water, and sometimes he goes under altogether. The thing swims to a flat stone in the middle of the stream that makes a kind of island, and suddenly we see it fling itself up out of the water and sit on its hindlegs on the stone, briskly washing its nose with its fore-paws. "Water-rat," whispers the Imp to the Elf, and we do not move so much as a hair, any of us. The brown, blunt-nosed rat sits up on the stone and pulls its paws over its head and throws them back again, like the neat-minded gentleman he is, Presently he thinks he hears a noise, an ominous something, and the paws are suddenly still for a moment, and the round head cocked on one side. His head is so blunt and so near his body that one would scarcely think he had a neck at all if he were not able to look this way and that way and this way again, in the smallest part of second. Ah, he sees us. For another instant he stays dead still, wondering perhaps if we have seen him, and then off he shoots again into the water, swimming now on the bottom of the stream and now once more driving his nose along the surface until suddenly he slips under the bank and we cannot see him at all. When we lean over the bank, just where he disappeared, we find a hole, which is the doorway of his home. Here he lives in the moist bank under the over-hanging ferns, close to the water which is as good as land to him. Here he lives and has a merry time to himself, doing nobody any harm, except the waterplants, from whom he takes his dinners.

A little farther down the stream a broad deep ditch crosses the meadows to join it. The ditch is deep, and the water in it moves so slowly that it is almost still. Weeds and grasses grow from the bottom of the stream, and are only just bent over by the current, and the moist edges of the ditch are full of sunken holes, where the cows have thrust their feet into the mud. The whole of the ground by the side of the ditch is rich with flowers, but so swampy that they are difficult to reach, except at a few places. But very often the Imp and the Elf, when their shoes and stockings are once off, make up their minds to despise mud, and wade through the grasses close to the edges of the ditch to look for sticklebacks. And really, when I think of sticklebacks, I agree with the children that it is worth more than muddy ankles to get a look at them. For the sticklebacks are very fine fellows indeed, the little soldiers of the water-people, tiny fishes, who carry spears set upright on their backs, spears that are strong and well pointed, too, as the Imp found when he took hold of a stickle between his finger and thumb.

The sticklebacks are like the newts of the duck-pond in quite a number of ways. Not to look at, of course, for one has legs while the other has fins; but in several of their habits. In the love-making times, when the he-newts show their gorgeous coats, the stickleback lords put on a brilliant uniform of glittering green and scarlet and gold. Like the he-newts, they battle between themselves, and more than once we have watched a noble skirmish in the deep water under a tussock of grass. We have seen the stickleback lords dash at each other again and again, trying to rip each other up with their sharp spears, and, at the last, we have seen the conqueror sailing proudly away, even more gorgeous than before.

The Imp loves the sticklebacks because they are so bold and jolly and move so quickly and so jerkily that it is hard to follow them. But the Elf loves them for quite another reason. She loves them because they are homely. Most of the water people, like the frogs and newts, take no bother at all about their eggs, but just leave them to themselves without ever caring whether they hatch or no. But the stickleback is as careful as a blackbird, and builds a little nest for the eggs down among the weeds on the bottom of the ditch, and stays there watching and guarding till they hatch out into little stickles. That is why the Elf loves sticklebacks. They do look after their children a little.

Later in the year we see the shoals of little sticklebacks, not so big as pen-nibs, who have left their nests in the ditch, and are swimming away to see the world for themselves. Often we lie on the bank and tell each other stories about them. And all these stories begin: "Once upon a time there was a little stickleback, one of a shoal," and all the stories end: "So the little stickleback drove his enemy away in a fright, and swam back to his nest glowing with colour and pride." For, of course, by the time the story is finished the little stickleback has grown into a big stickleback and has a nest of his own.

Besides the sticklebacks and minnows there are a great many other fishes among the water-folk, but we do not meet them so often, and most of them live in bigger places than the stream or the ditch, or even the duck-pond. Sometimes, though, in the pebbly part of the stream we meet a loach, a little brown speckled fish with a flat head and little suckers like the horns of a snail sticking out all round his mouth. We see him slip along in the water under the shadowy side of a stone. If he does not come out at the other end we know he is resting there, and then if we can make the stone move without muddying the water, we may see him flit from his hiding place, zig-zag among the pebbles, looking for a new stone where he may shelter.

And then, too, when the stream flows nearer to the sea, which is only four miles from our house, you know, we find some other water people who are very pleasant indeed. The sea spreads inland in a broad pale sandy bay, with marshland grown over with sparse reedy grass, and covered with pools of salty water, and channels full of sandy mud. The stream flows out into this bay, and at some times of the year, when we walk up from the bay along its banks, we see stones that look as if they were heads, with a waving mass of black hair flowing from them down the current. When we look closer, we see that the black hair is a mass of tiny eels. Little black wriggling water snakes they look like, though they are nothing of the sort, and we sometimes remind each other of the tale of the Gorgon's Head, with all its snaky crop. Sometimes we have caught a little eel or two, and kept them in a big jar; but they are not such adaptable guests as the tadpoles, and we do not think we make them very comfortable. The Imp loves to watch them, and finds it hard to believe that these are eels, really eels, like the big twisting creatures he sees when he leans over the side of the boat, when we go rowing on the lake. You shall hear about those eels in the next chapter.

But, do you know, I believe our dearest of all the water people, are not really water things at all, but birds? There are two of them, that belong to the stream, and I expect I shall be scolded by the Imp and the Elf for putting them at the end of the chapter. I shall have to explain that I meant it as an honour to them. They are birds; and one of them lives up the stream, where it is a wild little beck, falling from rock to rock in the wood on the moorland side, and the other hops from stone to stone in the shallows of the brook, where it flows more peacefully through the flat green meadows. The one is the dipper, and the other is the water wagtail.