Orchids
And
Miracles |
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The sparkling clear water in the pond spread in intricate, circular ripples as the slow current moved the small, delicate orchid in the eddy. Slowly it turned, catching the sparse rays from the sun shining through the canopy of green above. Jade green rain forest vines called lianas roped themselves around and through the limbs of gigantic flame trees towering high above the pond; clinging tightly to the limbs, knots, and trunks of ancient trees, orchids of fragile quality and stunning beauty hung in profuse waterfalls of blooms. It was a quiet and peaceful spot, an easy place to dream and smile. A three foot waterfall at the northeastern boundary of the pond sent delicate spirals of waves over the surface toward the reeds at the edge, and drops of moisture dripped almost silently from the leaves and blossoms hanging above.
The waterfall was fed by a stream that wound down through the lava rock and into the rain forest that covered the mountain. The water flowed swiftly in the stream, tumbling over and around the rocks and reeds, being constantly filtered and purified by the action.
The pond was at the edge of the rain forest; it was a secret place of quiet beauty, and as the orchid slowly turned in the sparkling eddy, a miracle was beginning to happen.
Underneath the water, at the edge of the depression made on the bottom by the circling current lay a long-dead tree branch, broken from a limb above in a winter rainstorm over a year ago. Hiding close to the wood, hardly visible in the shadows of the water, swam a small, grayish-tan fish. She was about an inch and a half in length, and her body was light and shiny in color when the rays of the sun struck it through the glimmering water. Metallic scales on her sides bulged from inner pressure, seemingly ready to burst into a shower of rainbows at the least provocation.
Pacing herself easily against the force of the current, hardly moving at all except for the slow, sideways sweeps of her transparent tail and the easy motion of mouth and gills as water for oxygen passed through them, she seemed to strain for a second with her fat, healthy body holding straight and still in the current before she resumed her effortless swimming. As she did so, a vent in her underside opened, and a brownish egg- shaped ball the size of a pinhead popped out and began a slow descent toward the bottom of the pond.
As the friction of the water moved around its outer edges, the egg-shaped ball burst with a jerk, and became in an instant, a tiny baby fish, only about a sixteenth of an inch long and with huge, bright eyes. In fact, the eyes were almost the whole of his head, the mouth and gills still not being entirely shaped correctly because of the indentation left when his tail had so suddenly sprung away from his head as the ball-shape of him had burst.
Within minutes the bones would position themselves, and his head would have the correct fish-shape of its kind. Also, by that time the fast-beating heart which was now exposed and extended in the place where his stomach would normally reside, would be absorbed into his body and protected by the normal assemblage of fish organs around it. Luckily for the baby fish, his mother was oblivious of him as he darted jerkily away and came to rest on a dead grass stem caught in the reeds by the edge of the eddy. His mother's hunger and eating instincts had been naturally dulled by the event of giving birth, and since he was the forty-seventh of his siblings to emerge in an hour or so, she was spent, and uninterested in the tiny morsel of life which jerked away from her. Any other time, when her natural instincts were not dulled by her maternal duty, she would have gobbled him up as impersonally as any other food she might happen across. Slowly, inexorably, as he lay resting on the mossy blade of grass, the tiny fish's ruby-red heart disappeared into his body with the gill-motion of his breathing, and the oxygen in the clean, clear water brought him strength and energy and made him tingle with awareness.
From the instant of his bursting apart from the ball-shape, his keen senses were alert and active. If his mother or another fish had eaten him in the half-second or so when he was still a ball, he would not have known it. But afterward, all the instincts for survival inherent in him from countless ancestors, were razor-sharp, and would continue to be so as long as he lived, until they were dulled by sickness, mishap, or old age. He lay quietly, his only motion being the movement of his mouth and gill-covers as he breathed his first gulps of life in this lovely, still place.
Hunger would not come to him for several hours, as he was slowly absorbing the food-sac just in back of his heart. It was disappearing easily into his body also, but not as quickly as was the heart, which must be protected first. The food-sac was the remainder of the food supply he had received while still an egg inside his mother, and would sustain him, if necessary, for several hours.
As he lay watching, a fresh-water snail slid lazily over the surface of the dead grass blade toward him. It was only a tiny snail, maybe half an inch in length, but it was many times the size of the infant guppy and moved with the slow, questing movement peculiar to its kind. Its mouth was a scraper sort of affair, ratcheting off algae and microscopic plants from the surface of the grass blade; as he watched, he could see the eyes of the snail sticking far out from its head on waving, elastic antennae. Slowly, it approached him, and as the rubbery flesh came close to the fish, the snail slid unobtrusively to the side and passed the little guppy on the very edge of the blade of grass, its soft, pliable foot gripping the sharp edge as easily as it had the flat surface of the blade.
Slowly, silently, the lumbering shell slid past, and the tiny guppy gave a jerking swish of his tail, turning him to the side and giving him a view of the snail as it quietly slid away from him. It passed off the guppy's grass blade onto the upright stem of a reed, and made its tortoise-like way to the surface of the water, taking only a number of seconds to reach there, where it stopped, as if waiting.
While the baby guppy watched, an elastic, hose-like appendage appeared from the shell by the side of the snail's head, and began stretching out and up toward the surface of the water just a fraction of an inch away. When it reached there, it broke the surface and stretched above the water, slightly straining into the moist, fresh air above.
The snail then started moving its head in and out in a slow, bobbing motion, almost as if it were trying to shrug the bulky shell off its shoulders. As it did so, old air was forced out of its lung, and clean fresh air was pulled inside, replenishing the supply of oxygen for the snail's descent under the water, and enabling it to stay submerged on its next foray for as long as forty-five minutes before it would have to resurface and repeat the exact procedure. In this way the snail carried its supply of fresh, life-giving oxygen anywhere it went, not having to depend on gills to extract it from the water as did the baby guppy.
The jerk of his tail that turned his body toward the slowly receding figure of the snail had caused the fry's muscles to respond, and the response repeated itself in another and another flash of energy; as the snail slowly refilled its air lung at the surface of the pond, the guppy's body began to utilize these flashes and manipulate the energy into the muscles which were building strength with each gulp of oxygen-laden water he breathed. By the time the snail was finished, the fry's jerky movement had quieted into a quick, undulating rhythm of his muscles, and the little fish was swimming in place, still on his grass blade, still seven inches below the surface of the pond. He was swimming, and he would continue to swim night and day, tirelessly, every day until life was gone from him and he could swim no more.
Now, when the snail made its way back down the stem and onto the grass blade where the guppy swam, the bubble of air in its shell made it buoyant, and the grass blade shifted and startled the newborn guppy.
Quick as a flash he was off-gone in the blink of an eye, only to come to rest hovering lightly five inches away, close to the surface of the pond, and beside some brown grass covered with algae. Instinctively he cowered there, quivering with fright, breathing rapidly, responding automatically to his inborn fear impulse. Then immediately he became calm, the memory of what had startled him already beginning to recede.
By no means was the tiny fish alone in his quiet world of vibrations and shadowy, cool colors. All around him the water of the pond teemed with the myriad life forms abundant in all such places in temperate climates which are as yet unpolluted by the refuse of human society.
Microscopic plants and animals of the fresh-water plankton in the water were everywhere, darting energetically about, swimming placidly along in graceful loop-the-loops or simply floating on the gentle current. Flat, disk-shaped cyclops skimmed through the water, looking like miniature kayaks without the rowers. Close by, on the opposite side of the clump of grass from where the baby guppy swam, were three of his newborn siblings, two females and one male. Below, on the shallow bottom of the pond, crawfish of several sizes could be seen scavenging here and there, inspecting under rocks or pieces of wood, chewing daintily on some piece of unidentified material, or digging industriously in the mud for snails or lifeless refuse. Indeed, although the infant fish had been born on the edge of the pond where the abundance of fresh-water life was most profuse, the deeper waters toward the center held many sinister dangers also; but this was territory which was seldom invaded by the smaller denizens of this world, the shallows along the edges being the ideal habitat for such unobtrusive species as the guppy.
A mosquito larvae swished by close to the five-minute-old fish, startling him again, the ultrasensitive lateral line of receptors along either side of his body picking up the vibrations of the larvae's movement and sending an instantaneous warning signal to the tiny brain inside his still-soft skull.
Quickly he darted away and stopped in the shadow beside a large grey body several inches away. The mosquito larvae, unconcernedly on its way, came wiggling up a second later and bumped impersonally into the large, grey body of a tadpole, awakening it from its late-afternoon slumber and sending it to the bottom with a mighty heave of its heavy, wedge-shaped tail.
The little guppy was tossed away on the current from the tail of the receding tadpole and quickly flashed off in a panic.
For several minutes after, he hid quietly near the surface in some duckweed, once again becoming calm, and soon forgetting what it was that caused him such terror. Until he was imprinted with the dangers of his habitat-which creatures posed an immediate threat to his existence and which ones did not. His natural skittishness would make him shy away from any moving object, and he instinctively would be drawn toward something stationary for shelter. This was good, for he was prey to many.
The duckweed, though not stationary by any means, was a perfect hideout for the unprotected little fish, being densely interwoven of loosely entwined strands of bright-green vegetation, and containing many open spots of several inches in diameter within its floating mass. He treaded water easily while his body continued the slow absorption of what was left of his food sac. His skull bones were locked into the proper shape by now, and his tiny, fast-beating heart pulsed evenly and strongly in the alert little body.
A floating microscopic organism of plankton caught his attention, and he felt an instinctive quickening of interest. Being just the correct size for a natural bite of food and, in fact, just the proper food indeed for a fledgling guppy, the piece of plankton had sparked the inherent impulse to feed in the small one; although he was feeling no hunger yet, the instinctive act of snatching the moving morsel was automatic.
Once sparked, the inborn impulse would be with him as long as he survived. He felt the organism within his body, and the feeling it gave was one of satisfaction. Although he yet did not need it for sustenance, the piece of plankton nevertheless performed the necessary function of providing a means of energizing his just-awakening feeding mechanisms.
A mysterious happening was taking place in the plankton just to the left of the baby guppy and a few inches toward the deeper water at the center of the pond. As he watched, he could see two snails heading toward one another on a long, slender thread of vegetation, coming closer and closer each second.
Just as they met, one snail which was a deep, red-wine color, slid to the side of its support in the same manner as that of the snail in the earlier incident on the grass blade when it had bypassed the baby fish.
But this time the two snails did not pass. When they came abreast of each other they paused, and the little fish could see a dark, red, spear-shaped object slowly emerge from the red snail's shell, just behind the head. It then penetrated the flesh at the opening of the other snail's shell. Simultaneously, a spear from the second snail enacted the same procedure on the red snail.
The two mollusks stayed speared together for a minute or so; then, slowly disengaging themselves from each other, they ponderously moved forward and away from one another in a completely impersonal and uncaring manner.
The guppy had witnessed the mating procedure of these hermaphroditic freshwater mollusks, though it could have no meaning to him, watching intently as he did.
Each of the two snails possessed both sex organs, but in order to mate successfully, each must be fertilized by the other. In a few days, each snail would lay a mass of gelatinous eggs on a twig or stem, and these eggs and the tiny snails which would eventually emerge would be excellent live food for the guppy, and would provide him with many nutrients necessary for survival.
There would be such an abundance of eggs that some of the offspring would undoubtedly survive to procreate. The population of mature snails being already large in the pond, they were one of the main staples of the many water creatures which flourished there.
The evening sun was sinking behind the tall mountains as the snails ended their extraordinary tryst, sending golden rays of mellow light to refract into the sparkling water of the quiet pond. The baby fish was ten minutes old, and the pulse of vigorous life was surging through his tiny veins. He felt tinglingly alive as the day ended. In the first ten minutes of his life he had witnessed things strange and beautiful. As darkness slowly descended, he felt at peace.
(c) 1993 Carson Clippard