Dullslid
Ask three people what a dullslid is and you'll get three different fish. Brown trout, somebody'll say. Roach, says the next. A carp, surely, just off-colour, says the third. They'll all be a little bit right and none of them exactly right, because a dullslid doesn't hold one shape long enough to be properly identified.
It sits on silt, the colour of silt, at a depth where the light's given up before it reaches the bottom, and it does not move for it. Weeks, some of the old canal-side regulars reckon, though nobody's tagged one to prove it. What moves is the water round it, very slightly, in a way you'd put down to current if you hadn't just watched the current run the other way.
The danger isn't the bite, though there is one, and it's a bad one. The danger is that a dullslid looks so much like a lump of nothing that most people wade straight over the top of it, and the strike comes from directly underneath, which is not a direction anybody's watching.
What it eats down there in the dark I couldn't tell you with any confidence. Waterfowl chicks, certainly. The odd dog. I'd rather not speculate past that.
Field note: in murky water you can't see the bottom of, walk it, don't wade fast. A dullslid reads a fast-moving shape overhead as a threat and answers accordingly.
| Type | Lurker |
| HP | 3 |
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