Fertile
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Having quelled his enormous appetite with thirty-three juicy, squirming young caterpillars, the grouchy old relic gave a heave of his gorged body and flopped twice, entering the pond with a quiet splash. A bullfrog had spotted him in the midst of the second flop, just before he hit the water, and had surged off the mossy root-elbow which had been his purchase with a mighty push. His intention was an early lunch after an appetizer of one tiny mouse, but his aim was off, and the great, gulping mouth remained empty of its intended victim.
The fighter glided exquisitely away. A tiny, piercing pain had begun in the thick muscle of his rear body as he had been dining so lavishly on the cool moss, but the soothing water of the pond began to quiet the pulsing of pain, and he was relieved. He swam to his most recent bubble-nest and began to add another layer to the gigantic raft of bubbles floating by the side of a dead limb from the flame tree. His hunger appeased, he felt better, and the tiny pain was relieved. Maybe he could catch some daphnia for dessert. His alert, bright eyes scrutinized the water.
The minute, ink-black leech clung viciously under the bright, shiny scale on the fighting-fish's side where it had slithered and squirmed for a grip while its host had been lying on the moss. It had been waiting for just such an opportunity, although it was not conscious of the urge. It had simply waited there and had shimmied instinctively under the warm scale that had suddenly pressed against it when the fish had plopped atop it.
Now it was snugly attached to the pink flesh under the scale, hanging on with the amazing power in its suction-cup mouth and drawing energy from the warm blood of the fish on which it was preying.
Its single previous meal of blood had been purchased at its mother's expense, it being one of a multitude hanging onto her back after its birth, and drawing greedily on the supply of life blood she was drawing from her host, a snail.
The snail had climbed out of the water and into the moss at the base of the orchid tree, and the miniscule leech had dropped from its mother's back to fall into the jungle of wet moss.
It had landed in a tiny pool of water standing just under the moss in a shallow crevice in the wood, and had been there seven hours. When the scale on the fish's side had pressed down to it once, and then again, it had quickly made a sliding entrance beneath to its first meal. Only the black tip of its shiny, slim tail hung loosely in the water, from under the scale on the old fish's side.
The old warrior had found a baby crab in his quiet search for daphnia and was tormenting it mercilessly, trying to snap off its pincers with his gummy, awkward mouth. The crab scuttled sideways, avoiding the fish, but as it did so, a darting clip of its small pincer plucked the body of a minute leech from under a scale on the fish's blue side. The crab settled into the sludge as it ate the tiny leech.
Beady eyes saw it coming, and as the crab settled, a lightning flash of clamps tightened around its shell. It felt the jab of a needle into the soft, white flesh under its shell, and within minutes, a leech, a crab, and a tadpole were mingled in the fertile soup of health, at the bottom of the belly of a dragon-fly nymph.
As the crab disappeared in a cloud of debris on the bottom, the old fish lost interest and cast his eyes toward the algae at the edge of the water.
(c) 1993 Carson Clippard