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There are today forty million, more or less, North Atlantic fishermen who will corroborate this testimony with personal experience. It may be that the first hook was taken by some other fish, but the cunner got in ahead on the bait. The cunner is not very large. He rarely tips the scales at a pound, but he will eat his own weight in bait in a day and he is numerous and pretty nearly omnipresent.
Carker you will realize that Dickens must have been fishing off the ledges of some English headland when he planned that gentleman and his characteristics. In whatever mood or from whatever side Mr. Carker approaches you it is his teeth which dominate the situation. I am convinced that every time Dickens tried to make him otherwise he found another cunner tugging and drew him up.
Another advantage of this binominal Latin nomenclature consists in preventing the confusion frequently arising from the use of the same name to designate different animals in different parts of the world, as, for instance, the name of Robin, used in America to designate a bird of the Thrush family, entirely different from the Robin of the Old World, or of different names for the same animal, as Perch or Chogset or Burgall for our Cunner.
There, under two green umbrellas, like two fat rajahs in their shaking howdahs upon the backs of two white elephants, the friends would sit in solemn equanimity awaiting the evasive cunner, the vagrant perch or cod or the occasional flirtatious eel. They rarely spoke and when they did the edifice of their conversation their Tower of Babel, so to speak was monosyllabic. Thus: "Huh!
Some people, not financial magnates themselves in all probability, have given this substantial dweller of the under-water plateaus undignified names. They call him pilker, scrod, groper, etc. This is pure envy. When he bites it means business. There is none of the bait-stealing tomfoolery of the cunner, none of the dancing hilarity of the pollock.
I have watched the bird plunge into the waves of the ocean, on the coast of Maine, to bring out a cunner almost too large for her to carry, and I have seen her drop into the placid waters of an Adirondack lake for lake-trout in the same manner. =Blue Heron=
Wherever the salt tides flow, whether it be up the sandy stretches of a clean bottomed cove, along the mud bottom of the creek, or amid the red-brown tangle of kelp on some ledge awash a mile off shore, there comes the cunner, suiting his color chameleon-like to that of the bottom.
He even allowed Dab to pick out a line for him, and to put on the hook and sinker; and Dick Lee showed him how to fix his bait, "so de fust cunner dat rubs agin it won't knock it off. Dem's awful mean fish. Good for nuffin but 'teal bait."
My hostess and I had made our shrewd business agreement on the basis of a simple cold luncheon at noon, and liberal restitution in the matter of hot suppers, to provide for which the lodger might sometimes be seen hurrying down the road, late in the day, with cunner line in hand. It was soon found that this arrangement made large allowance for Mrs.
She would join him in fishing from the rotting pier, but with no certainty which was a cunner and which was a sculpin, when she caught it, and with an equal horror of both the nasty, wriggling things.
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