I walk away from that scene with a question. Surely they could have stayed on board and survived? But time is not waiting for could-have-beens. The sea rolls by. The stars burn and roar in their distances. Immortal death, an ending, but the source of all questions and the answer to them, roars on too without reply. Men in their death, or fish, or birds, are the same. They share in universal soundings that no mortal fear escapes. _April Light_ One evening, about nine o’clock, I walk out to listen to the peepers again. Their chorus comes up to the hill from all the watery lows around it, and through a fog-muffled distance I hear the scrambled yelping of herring gulls. It means a run of alewives swimming in to Paine’s Creek from the bay, on an incoming tide, two hours before the turn. The gulls can get at this feast more easily when the fish are crowded and not too far from the surface before complete darkness sets in. When I reach the shore, curls and wisps of fog show up in the headlights of my car. Gulls cry in alarm and fly back over the water. There is hardly any wind. The low, bull-like tones of a foghorn sound in the distance. But the stars shine out overhead. Long semicircular wavelets lap over the wide mouth of the creek where it enters the bay, and where the channel curves inland I can hear the fish slapping in the water as they swim in, making an occasional splash as they rush to the surface. Out in the middle of the stream, some twenty feet wide, I can dimly make out the head of an animal--probably a harbor seal that has been making a foray after fish in the channel--swimming steadily in the direction of the bay. I greet it with a yell as its head slips by and out of sight. A black-crowned night heron starts up with a low harsh “Quok!” where I startle it from its fishing stance along the water’s edge. The stars are brilliant, the sky above the low fog and bold emptiness of the shore is a vast cavern throbbing with light. Cold sea water, high spring night--life around me takes its antediluvian chances. The fish come on with a proud mission, deliberate in its age, secure in its origins.